Product: PC-cillin 2000
Company: Trend Micro Devices
Website: http://www.antivirus.com
Estimated Street Price: $29.95
Review By: Julien JAY

First Start

The first thing you have to know about PC-cillin is that it’s the first antivirus software to be claimed by Microsoft as ‘Windows 2000 Certified’.  This Microsoft certification ensures the software can run reliably and consistently under the recently released Microsoft top-notch operating system. Obviously PC-cillin 2000 runs perfectly under Windows 95 and Windows 98. After installing PC-cillin 2000 (that corresponds in fact to the version 7.51 of the software), you’ll notice the presence of a new nice capsule icon in the Windows tray notification area. This icon is your shortcut to show the PC-cillin Real-Time Scan application and to other information, such as the full path of the latest scanned file. Indeed once PC-cillin is setup on your system each risky file related activity such as open/save/etc will be tracked in order to analyze the files to ensure they don’t contain any viruses. The real time scanner only scans the files that are the most susceptible to contain a virus: EXE, ZIP, ARJ, SYS, COM, DRV, OVL, SCR, BIN , Microsoft Access/Excel and Word files. So you’re sure to be protected all the time against virus treats including the macro viruses that can affect Microsoft Office documents. From the RealTime Scan Control panel you can also enable the Internet scanning features as well as launching PC-cillin 2000. The Internet scanning features consist to scan all the incoming files from HTTP or FTP sites including the contents of compressed ZIP files as well as the email file attachments you may receive. Usually scanning in the background consumes a lot of system resources and slows down the whole computer: however the PC-cillin 2000 Real Time background scanners hasn’t got dramatic influence on the computer’s performance so you can really let it run in the background without worrying of the performance waste it can represent.

GUI

When you open PC-cillin 2000 from the Windows quick launch bar (as the setup automatically puts a shortcut in it) you’ll discover a Microsoft Outlook like interface that is separated in two panes. The first pane contains shortcuts to all the current features of PC-cillin while the second pane shows the features options in details. If the graphical user interface of PC-cillin is really efficient as it goes directly to the essential it’s a pity to see that it’s so sober. Comparing to Norton Antivirus or McAfee VirusScan interface, Trend should make again some progress to give the software a more user-friendly appearance. Indeed the actual one even though it’s now brightened up by some nice PC-cillin logos can disgust novice users. 

Features

PC-cillin 2000 features a new scan wizard that’ll guide you step by step to elaborate the new scanning you want to run.  The Scanning wizard will offer you several options to create a custom drives/directories based scan, an individual file scan, a macro based scan that’ll check your documents to ensure they don’t contain any macro viruses, a floppy boot sector scan (to check those nasty floppies known to carry the most often viruses), Internet related files (it’ll check ZIP, CAB, ARJ files) and an Outlook attached files in local folder scan. The file/directories scanning wizard will allow you to choose the attitude to have when a virus is found, but you can select the drives you want to check from hard drives to DVD drives. Then a push on the scan button will display the new scanning box that is the first to feature a ‘PAUSE’ button that can halt the current virus scan and keep memory of the already scanned files in order to continue the scan later without having to rescan the files that were previously checked. The scanning engine is a real 32 Bit one so the scanning is fast and the duration for huge hard drives is more than acceptable (30mins to scan our 30Gb HD). Have you already heard about those nasty email attachments viruses such as ‘I Love You’, ‘Happy99’, etc? The answer is obvious: yes! So the Outlook attachment-scanning wizard will scan on demand the contents of your Microsoft Outlook inbox to make sure the files attachments you received are viruses free. Attention the scanning of a big Outlook personal data file can take a while and you’ll be amazed to discover the incredible amount of files you’ve received by email! PC-cillin 2000 contains a scan manager to program in advance viruses checking tasks that will be performed at the day and time of your convenience or when you want by the simple push of a button. Obviously PC-cillin 2000 is provided with some pre-made scan tasks to check Floppy disk, Word docs/Excel docs, etc. PC-cillin includes an interesting security related feature that allows you to make a backup of infected files before cleaning them in case the cleaning process alters the content of the original file. PC-cillin is really integrated with Windows: indeed when you open the properties of a file in the Windows Explorer a new ‘Virus Property’ tab appears. If you click on this tab you’ll discover a nice PC-cillin 2000 logo and a reporting feature that tells you the selected file was scanned and that (most of the times!) no viruses were found. This windows integration way is quite better than the traditional ‘Antivirus’ item in the right click contextual menus. As every modern antivirus software, PC-cillin 2000 includes a complete and easy accessible LOG feature that keep track of all the viruses that were found with their name, date & time, name of the infected file, as well as the action that were executed to eradicate the virus. But that’s not all! PC-cillin also allows you to export the log to a CSV of Text file and you can delete logged event to your convenience. Every update you apply to the software are logged in the Update corner of the software and a ‘Note’ feature allows you to read what changed in the new virus definitions files. Finally all the websites that were blocked by the Web filtering feature are listed in the Web Filter log tab. Trend Micro claims that its software comes with service: it’s really true as they even include in plus of the quarantine virus submission feature a support wizard that else connect you to the online Trend technical support site or that send an email  to the tech support.