Trend Titanium Maximum Security review

Although it's one of the most expensive security suites available, Trend Titanium Maximum Security does give you a lot of features, including online storage plus protection for Android devices and Macs.

The installation was quite quick, but then the product needs activating with an online account. We have no problem with this, but many of the program's features have to be tediously downloaded and/or activated separately using this account.

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Apart from this annoyance, the program has an attractive and simple interface with quick access to settings and reports. Explanatory text within the program is clear and generally jargon-free, but the online help is fairly sparse. There are few advanced settings to get confused with which will appeal to less experienced users.

The program uses the Windows Firewall, with an optional Booster that gives added (but unspecified) protection. It includes two free Windows 8 apps, one of which shows protection status while the other is a secure Modern-style web browser. The main programs are standard desktop apps.

A unique and helpful feature is Facebook protection. As well as highlighting malicious links in posts, it can also scan your Facebook settings for privacy problems. We tried it and found some previously unknown deeply-buried settings that were enabled.

Parental controls are fairly standard, allowing scheduled web access and blocking of age-related content categories and programs. However, the Online Guardian for Families tool is also included (which normally costs £30 per year). This is an enhanced parental controls system that can be installed on any PC and includes social network monitoring and private data protection. A lot of the features overlap, but Online Guardian can be installed separately from the other components if you wish.

Other features include a password-protected folder for storing sensitive files which may be of interest to laptop users. Safesync is a cloud-based file storage service with PC, Android and iOS apps - 5GB is provided for free. There's also a password manager app for the same devices.

While we can't fault the useful features on offer, the modular nature of the program makes getting everything up and running unnecessarily long-winded.