But about 10 minutes later, which felt like forever, we finally got the signal that our computer was good to go and that nothing malicious was found in over 4,000 files. We wish Trend Micro could keep everything in one window like Avast does, as you can read about in our Avast antivirus review. Another pop-up appeared that said Smart Scan and scanned our computer for malware (although it didn’t scan every file to do that, we would’ve had to use Full Scan, which we describe more below Trend Micro did not make that clear, initially). Updates aside, we started testing Trend Micro in the Overview section by clicking on the button that said Scan Now. We’re not sure why this process was so clunky, but it’s something that Trend Micro definitely needs to work on. During this process, we had to enter our computer keychain multiple times, at least three times in the first hour even after installing the app. Once we clicked on Activate, we got a new window that said “unable to contact Trend Micro” due to a lost Internet connection, it claimed, although the Internet was working fine for us on Chrome and iMessage. Clicking through those windows, we got yet another signal to activate Trend Micro Antivirus to get the “latest protection.” Deja vu? No, just a poorly streamlined app. Remember, we already had those features turned on, but we didn’t have any other choice. That being said, we didn’t appreciate that we had to restart our device after the updates finished, and that once we opened the app back up, we were asked once again to turn on camera and microphone protection. At least we’re starting off knowing that Trend Micro can protect us from the latest malware. You see, antivirus apps need updated virus definition databases in order to protect us from the latest malware sometimes, in fact, updates happen every hour. While it might be unusual for a freshly installed app to immediately ask for updates, that’s a process we welcome with antivirus software.

But before we could dive into these sections, we had a few things to take care of first.Īs soon as we opened the app, it prompted us to get security updates.

Once we opened the Trend Micro app, which we downloaded onto our 2011 Macbook Pro with the operating system High Sierra 10.13.6 (we had to download the 2019 version of Trend Micro, not the 2020 version), we noticed that it divided into five main sections: Overview, Web, Scans, Folder Shield and Logs.

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