We ended up never being able to activate Trend Micro Antivirus to get the “latest protection”, but the scans still seemed to do the job at least, we hope! Trend Micro Smart Scan Now, aside from the Scan Now button, there were also three toggles for detecting web threats, scanning in real-time (which basically means automatically without us having to do a manual scan), along with that protection for our camera and microphone that we signed up for. 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”. Once we opened it back up, we were asked, once again to turn on camera and microphone protection and folder shield, both of which we had already enabled. One slightly annoying thing was the fact that we had to get security updates as soon as we opened Trend Micro for the first time shouldn’t a completely new application be as up to date as possible? And once the updates happened, the app shut down before we even got a chance to do one scan. But before we could dive into these sections, we had a few things to take care of first. 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. How did it work? Using Trend Micro: Our Experience

Then, we were brought to the actual antivirus portion of the app.

Once we installed the app, we immediately got pop-ups for camera and microphone protection and a folder shield, which we checked off. Note: We recommend not having any web browsers open when you’re installing Trend Micro, as you’ll have to shut them down to activate certain services.

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