:: TechBlog ::

I used to consider TrendMicro’s online antivirus scanner as one of the best in the bunch, if not the best. For those not familiar, i am referring to HouseCall Antivirus located conveniently at housecall.antivirus.com. I usually refer anyone looking to scan their pc to this free service, as opposed to installing some no-name “free” antivirus software on your machine locally. It was fast, it often found stuff that Norton hadn’t, and most importantly: it is pretty much the only good free web-based virus scanner out there i know of.

But this morning, something had changed. i go to the TrendMicro site as usual to scan a client’s pc and the whole system seems to have been revamped. The first thing i noticed was that i had been forwarded from the main trendmicro.com domain to trendmicro-europe.com. Odd, but i didn’t think much of it. However, i immediately didn’t like the extra legal jargon, info page, and other nonsense put directly in the path between me and the free antivirus tool.

i got a warning regarding an out of date version of java, yet this didn’t matter since i could still use the activeX version. so far everything seemed more bloated and confusing.. and i’d been to the site many, many times before. i’d hate to think of someone who’s showing up there for the first time. anyway, i made my choice and proceeded to begin the scan.

Then, everything seemed much slower than usual. i later realized that nothing seemed to be happening at all. it seems this new version is completely broken. first it did nothing. then it crashed all my crappy IE browser windows, then i got an awesome server message direct from their servers.

check this out:

not exactly a good message for TrendMicro to be getting from apache at this point in the game.
more disturbingly, why am i (the user) getting this? something’s just not right here.

is anybody out there testing these things before they go live? let me know when it’s working again because i’m tired of checking back every 15 minutes.