Another system rebuild, another installation of Trend Internet Security 2009…

This system is not lightning fast, but its not slow either:

Celeron 2.8Ghz, 768Mb RAM, etc

Yet TIS seems to make the PC very sluggish at normal day-to-day tasks.

I found a perfect way to test the effect: playing the game “Winterbells” from Orisinal Games

The Game would be smooth and quick before installing TIS (in fact, the game runs well on an old 600Mhz Pentium 3).

After installing TIS (with no firewall), the game would stutter every second or two.

I tried disabling the TIS “protection against web threats”… but that didn’t help either.

I uninstalled TIS 2009, installed Avira Antivir, plus installed Windows defender and spyware blaster, and Winterbells was playing as smooth as always (even while performing a microsoft update at the same time).

I did notice that TIS seemed to have a small memory footprint, but at this stage, I’d say it looks like TIS 2009 might only work well on dual core CPUs (which are not that widespread yet).

Have you had any bad experiences with Trend / other big-name security software?