Home Forums Discussions Problems ALERT, Trend Micro Users!

He guys,
I've been so frazzled I haven't had a chance to do my civic duty and post this warning. There is now a new security update for users of Trend Micro (we have been using Internet Security Pro ourselves) that most of us have just taken with our regular daily updates that is incompatable with AC at least in terms of networking. I kid you not, I just went out and bought a new security package....

I have been literally tearing my hair out for days, since at least last Friday when our networked clients in our P2P set-up would have AC itself, not the whole computer freeze up solid. And usually it was so hard a freeze that task manager could not end the process in either of it's two ways. Laptops, printer that were all confused. Meanwhile I have been messing with my network a bit and so I felt rude call support too much for what even as of Friday they said was probably a network issue, because it was all the laptops that had their paths set back to the main tower and not the main tower itself.

How many times can you reboot your entire network in the proper sequence? Let me tell you, I can now do it in my sleep! So I finally had to call support last Friday because(yeah I know stick with me) I tried to run amazing utilities to try and fix all this freezing and BAM AU froze while running on the main machine! I was scared out of my wits to touch a thing, because what does AU always warn you not to do??? Right, don't touch anything because you will corupt your database, EEEEKKKK!!!!

So eventually the flew my machine and they ended AU and all seems to be ok at least for my data... So I just took delivery of my two new powerful Dells (great deal, tell ya later) and I figured I would try get them up and running and at least perhaps these new strong and clean machines would have better luck. So I couldn't easily put my hands on a back-up copy of 3.6.25 (still offical release for a few days, but not for long...) so I call tech support to make sure what I got from the web would 3.6 so as to not add any confusing and confounding variables to this growing problem....

Well while talking to Jodie about all my freezing and other issues and why I was about to load up my new Dells and hope for the best, she says off handedly, "well you're not running Trend Micro though are you, right?" My heart and my jaw fell to the floor at the same time. Obviously I said, "yeah we are running Trend Micro and so is at least one other good AC user I know, Dr Bert up in Maine is using it too. What are you getting at?" That is when she proceeded to tell me that at least 3 other practices yesterday alone were all freezing up like we were, because of the newest Trend Micro updates.

So the answer is until we hear further is, AC does not like Trend Micro now nor has it liked Norton for quite some time either. So the only two internet security packages that she could definitely recommend were AVG or Macaffee. Well the heck with MCF as it is just about as bloated a pig as Norton is, it too wins the resource hog of the year award. So I just bought and I'm about to install AVG I guess as I need to get this office back up and running.

We have been almost computerless for two days now! As I kept trying to use the one good one to play with firewall setting and checking the router over and over again while playing with all the settings in the laptops too. Everytime I thought I fixed the darn thing and would give the computers back to the girls, no more than a few minutes later one of them would start call; "Paul it's doing it again". I started quoting Daffy Duck from "Duck Season, Wabbitt Season... "Shoot me now, shoot me now, I insist you shoot me now!" So if any of you other trend users are having network and freezing issues in terms of AC please post your stuff here and please call tech support and let them know what you are seeing and experiencing.

In closing this is the kind of stuff I wish there was a AC feedback posting kind of thing, letting folks know about possible issues and "trends" if you catch my drift. I would have stopped this mad go round at least a day ago. Also I know that Jon and AC are sort of at the whimes of these larger vendors just like we all are, but this changing and throwing parts at the thing is the lowest level of repair smarts. What are we all going to do if these last two vendors issue some sort of an update and they mess up AC in some other way? There needs to be a better long term solution to issues like this. My question is what kind of basic rule about Access databases, Windows XP and perhaps all or just p2p networking did trend break here and are users like us able to kind of insist, make them do the right thing and fix these kinds of issues?

Bert really like Trend and we both started using it on our own without talking to one another. I liked it because trend worked with my NetGear Routers and actually showed up in some of the routers screen shots and it showed details about the computers protected with Trend. It was a nice added side benefit. But this just "Sucks" to no end.... Well let me run, miles to go before I sleep my fellow AC'ers....

Paul

We have AVG and I have a love hate relationship with it. It seems to work, but it wants to work when I need to work and it basically shuts me down for an hour. It is supposed to run at midnight, but I usually shut my PC off at night and it then feels the need to run as soon as I turn it on.

I once bought Trend Micro but it wanted to force me to get rid of all competing antivirus softwares on my laptop. No way! I refused to ever use it.

For the past 3 years I've used AVG with good results. I use it together with AdAware to cover for malware.

Most recently I've been amazed by ZoneAlarm's Internet Suite. The latter caught 9 "minor" viruses in my main computer (my Dell laptop) after an AVG scan and when I downloaded files from an office drive that came from a computer that had failed, it picked up a "backdoor" virus which was immediately zapped and killed. I'm impressed. I'm also impressed that for $40 or so I also got the excellent System Mechanic 7 for free AND neither of the 2 softwares are limited by any "product activation". I just can't say anything bad about them... Oh- when it scans, it kills BOTH viruses and spyware.

Another great software is KASPERSKY ANTI-VIRUS 7.0, which also kills both viruses and spyware. You can do a free on-line scan and if it finds a virus, then purchase 3 licenses for $50 on their site, or simply buy one license for $6.50 on eBay. It's won several prizes as one of the top antivirus softwares for 2008.

-- URL for free scan: http://www.kaspersky.com/virusscanner
-- URL for $6.50 ebay deal: http://search.ebay.com/search/searc...title=kaspersky+antivirus&category0=

I dealt with the same kind of thing about 2 years ago with McAfee. We would have all the computers locking up every 30-40 minutes. Finally managed to delete the program off the main computer, but had to get their tech support help to even do that because of all the tendrils it had on that computer. Had to download a special uninstaller. Then tried Norton with similar issues and same problem getting rid of it. Of course, 6 months ago a little screen pops up saying there were new updates for Norton as if the program had never been deleted! Very annoying and a bit disturbing.

On a side note, Paul, I got a great laugh with your Daffy Duck quote. ALways loved that particular cartoon. Unfortunatley, now when I see your screen name pop up, I picture Daffy Duck. Dispicable!

I've been using Zone Alarm as my firewall and Avast! for my antivirus (I used to use AVG). They don't interfere with AC, at least not so far.

Well, I have a copy of Kasperski but the girls at support had not a clue as to what I was talking about. That would be my first try if I knew it worked. I'm not too found of this AVG I didn't like the controls, they were not always obvious (it was really late though, so...) But I couldn't even find the stupid "off" switch so I could install AC on one of the machines and know that the install would go smoothly. All I was able to find was off for the firewall, but not the other stuff. I may just try the Kasperski with the new tower anyway, because it was sent RAID 0 and I really want to redo it in 1, and the lady at Dell last night said that redoing the RAID would mean wiping it out and reloading everything, so at least this way I'll be putting it on a machine I'm just gonna clean anyway.. SO if it sucks or doesn't work with AC, it just a couple of day experiment.

Wayne, what do you think about Zone Alarm? Are the screens friendly, are the controls "there"? This AVG is so not "there". You click on what you think should start taking to what you need to mess with and like "you can't get there from here". I really liked my old Trend in terms of great access to settings, and things you could see and do, all with be kind of understandable...

But don't you guys agree that we need some sort of place to read from AC home base emerging "Trends" so guys like me aren't banging our heads into brick walls for days? Oh the locks of hair I pulled out over the last few days....

Zone Alarm is pretty good firewall. Very popular too (but that doesn't really mean anything). I just use Zone Alarm Pro. Not their full Internet Security package. That's because I'd read how good Avast! was as a anti-viral package.

ZA is easy to install and use. It does spyware scanning too. Every few days my system is scanned and some stuff is taken off.

There is some type of compatibility issue between ZA and Avast, but they will work.

Here's a Trend update. So today I put AVG on three machines so as to get my doctor and our office back up and running. I'm still not thrilled with the AVG, I especially don't like the fact that I have lost my keystroke encription, and in my email in box I have lost the ablity to mark a spam as a spam and just have to go to the spam box to be properly sequestered away some place safe. It even recognized one email as spam but never took it out of my in box.

Anyhow, all is well and happy at Village Medical, so I decided to see what would happen if I turned on a Trend protected laptop... Well it didn't take long for one of the AVG protected laptops, not the Trend one to start having it's AC start freezing up. I got AC to close on that laptop and turned off the one that still had Trend on it and all was well in the world again. We didn't have another frozen AC incident all afternoon. Not one!

What ever is in there it is real bad. What basic rule of databases or XP networking did these guys violate in the first place? I told the Quest tech about this today when he showed up as it relates to Auto Receive. I beleive I told all of you yesterday that Auto Receive the Quest labs download program mess up too. It couldn't get out or establish a connection with it's server to go get us our lab results. Well with the removal of Trend and the install of AVG, AR immediately came back with all our missed lab results. So this tech Brendon is going to report it to his supervisor and hopefully that guy will pass this up the line so that perhaps they will start talking to Trend. I wish that there was a way to have AC give these vendors some insight and some grief about their glitches....

This is one of those topics where ten people will recommend six products.

@DocMartin,

You will get differing opinions on this as well, but your best solution is to keep your PCs on at night. That is when all this housekeeping (backups and virus scans need to work anyway). I have always kept my PCs on, and as far as I know it hasn't caused my PCs to wear out sooner. In fact, some one say turning them off and turning them back on is harder on the drives and other moving parts.

But, if you must turn them off, I would check the settings in AVG. It is probably set to "If unable to run at a given time, run as soon as the PC is back on." I am not sure, but some AV programs have a setting where it turns off your PC anyway. You can also have your computer go into sleep mode at night. I bought this cool, very cheap meter that measures volts, amps and watts and I checked the different between the computers and/or the monitors being on, and there was hardly a difference.

Good luck either way. I use Trend Micro and love it, but AVG is an excellent program.

>>> what do you think about Zone Alarm?

I've really taken the new Zone Alarm Suite through its paces, setting it up on 8 computers. Overall I give it an "A-" (rounds out to 5 stars), because of its ease of use, it's ability to scan for both viruses and malware, and of course, it's firewall capabilities.

The minus comes from 2 problems that I encountered in the past week:

--ZASuite did catch a pesky "Downloader" virus that somehow got onto a computer where I was upgrading a new C: boot hard drive. Unfortunately, even though ZASuite deleted the virus, it failed to prevent the virus from making the new drive unbootable, requiring me to do a lengthy Win XP repair installation with subsequent reinstallation of all SP1 and SP2 WinXP updates.
--On another computer ZASuite was incompatable with the environment softwares, causing the computer to continuously crash every 5 minutes. I had to go back to AVG+AdAware2007.

Thus I'm now using it as the primary firewall and virus/other malware solution for 7/8 computers... not bad at all.

BTW, on one computer hard drive that was also hit by this Downloader virus, the "My Documents" folder was locked and seemed impenetrable. For this I used a software called "FinalData Standard" for the first time. WOW!!! It found and enabled each and every file (about 3000) and allowed me to copy them to a new folder. Impressive. Cost: ~$40. (URL: http://www.windowsmarketplace.com/details.aspx?itemid=3394445 )

Al,
Was this ransomeware, where they lock up your files until you pay a ransome to have the key to be able to access your data again? BTW, your Zone Alarm uses Kaspersky for it's anti-virus part. So I figured I would cut out the middleman and pay the folks who are really making it in the first place.

So far so good with Kaspersky...

On eBay you can buy a license of Kaspersky for $6.50 (no shipping charges)! I didn't know that it was the kernel of ZA's suite, otherwise I wouldn't have bought one. No wonder that they both worked so well!

I bought the FileData software initially to try to resusitate a drive that had been royally nuked- it didn't do too much then and I thought I had wasted my money. Now, though, it worked like a charm and saved my royal-"arse" since I had several dozen charts that I had scanned into PDFs that I wasn't able to save due to a network glitch that I hadn't gotten around to fixing yet. It also got all the less importand documents. None were lost, it seems.

Gosh, I've had 4 computers go down on me in 72 hours:

-- one got hit by a virus (critical office files temporarily lost then recovered as noted above)
-- one laptop refused to turn on (its RAM chips had become loose)
-- I was upgrading my son's computer with more RAM and hard drives when initially the Paragon software that I was using to resize the boot drive disk burped and fried the boot file necessitating a WinXP "repair" installation. When completed, this one also got hit by the same virus as the 1st one. Virus deleted by ZA, but managed to destroy the boot file again, requiring ANOTHER repair WinXP installation. Double bad luck here!
-- one kept turning off due to a software conflict with ZoneAlarm's suite software

I conquered all 4 problems, so I'm rockin' and rollin'!!!!

BUT, I got home tonight and my car port won't open... is this bad luck, or what? My wife designated tomorrow as a fix toilet and change lightbulb day... almost as much fun as installing WinXP (NOT!!!).

I'm writing this note using my son's upgraded computer which now runs SWEET, with the new WD Raptor SATA drive (10000 RPM and 16MG on board ram), 3GB on motherboard RAM, and 3D 500MB Ram video card.

There are some days, weeks even that you just can't get any traction as me and my friends put it. That was last week for me with the Trend Micro thing, sounds like ZA did that to we as well on at least one machine...

Was that Kaspersky a real boxed set??? Was it just the AV or the complete IS package?

Now this week I'm starting to get some traction back although I'm so burnt and possibly sick or allerged out that today was a total waste of a day. I did NADA.

So was it hostage ware or what? Did you get one of those ransom emails I've heard about???

Paul:

The Kaspersky was the unlock code only. One simply downloads the trial and then use it to unlock/activate the trial software. Is that cool or what?

I love eBay!

Al, I finally had to take you up on your power supply advice.
My 300W power supply died when I plugged it into a CyberPowers CP900AVR uninteruptible power supply.
Bert had a spare 350W power supply, that I swapped out the broken one. worked like a charm, the computer is back in action.
It seems to run faster and cleaner too.
Granted, it's not a 600W supply but I'm inclined to buy a bunch of them and install into all my computers at the office.
Thanks for your tips.

Hi Adam:

Great! The HP that I worked on so furiously last month is now my server, and seems to be the fastest, stablest computer on my LAN. I just don't get it why the big name players- HP, Gateway, Dell all use such crappy power supply boxes!

And just giving the system clean stable power makes this much of a difference no less. As an old audio tech I always knew to give things good clean power, but to actually have to help the device itself like that is wild. You're right, why do they use such crappy power supplies? In general I don't buy bottom or mid-level towers, I tend to buy big and fast so I get more life out of them. Heck our old tower is 5 years old, but it was just about top of the line back then. Sure I paid like $2,500 back then, but here it is 5 years later and it us still holding up it's end with a little extra RAM popped in.

But just swapping out the machine's own internal power supply makes such a nice difference... That is simply "Amazing"!

Thanks Al.
I'm thinking of swapping out all of the power supplies in all the computers in my office. They are a mix of Dells and a couple E-machines. What would you suggest as a minimum size power supply?

Hi Adam:

At least 500W. Remember, if you wish to have an inside-compute RAID with 2-4 HD as well as the CD and all the USB power consumption, it's a good thing to get a great power supply. Heck, at ebay you can get a 600w power supply for as little as $30 (shipping included). You can even get fancy and buy a $16 one that glows in the dark (this guy sells 3, so you can save on shipping http://cgi.ebay.com/Power-Supply-60...949QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem ). This one has dual fans, and no lights (lights tend to short)- http://cgi.ebay.com/PowerStar-600w-...949QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem . Here's another multiple-item seller offering good shipping options- http://cgi.ebay.com/Power-Supply-fo...WDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem#ShippingPayment

Al,
My Dell PowerEdge 2900 Server has two power supplies for redundancy, each one is 930W !!!

For my PC though, perhaps I'll buy a bunch of 500W supplies.

Thanks for the tips.

On eBay the PowerEdge 2900 "bare-bone" servers go for about $1100!!! No wonder they maximize everything. The 500W supplies should be more than enough.

Thanks for the tips Al