Sophos gives free bicycles to fish
We Mac users like to smugly think we need anti-virus software like a fish needs a bicycle, and we’re right. However, I can’t pass up free stuff, whether I need it or not. My infamously large collection of promotional Frisbees and bank pens stands as a testament to that. Well, security software company Sophos today decided to generously fill a void we didn’t really know we had by offering its new Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition for FREE. As you can imagine, I have already downloaded and installed it on three computers already. Surprisingly it did not find any viruses, but still, it’s well made, unobtrusive, and most importantly, it’s FREE. So go get it.
My fish need to get into shape, so I grabbed a copy.
I figured 1) it’s free, so what the hell? and 2) if it picks off the occasional email message with a WIndows trojan as well as ClamXav, but without the crippling processor load of the weekly system scan, I’ll switch! And it always seems to kick the scan off in the middle of watching the latest episode of Hannah Mon- uh, I mean The Event.
Is that a U2 reference I detect?
uuhhh… installation needs about 182MB… :-/
autoupdate: about 90mb
the program itself: abput 88mb
the remover: 156K
librakies: 2,3MB
i decline …
(clamxav needs about 20MB..)
@CyberTeddy,
My MacBook Pro has a bunch of crap on it, but STILL has 384 GB available. I think being scared of a 200 MB application is old school thinking…
– The Doc
I downloaded the app and installed on my new 17MBP (2.66 i7, 4GB RAM) and it brought my machine to a grinding halt! Tried a reboot and the machine never came back up. I was finally able to uninstall once my mac booted into safe mode. This is apparently a problem that needs to be addressed. There are several other persons in the support forums for Sophos who are having similar issues.
Too bad, guess its back to ClamXav for me.
For the record, my wife is a sys admin at the U of Washington and they switched some of their systems to Sophos recently. She does mostly the Linux systems but still she uses a Mac laptop and installed Sophos on there.
Later on, she found it was causing the wireless on her Macbook Pro to start dropping the connection. I suggested removing Sophos and the second she did, the wireless connection stopped dropping.
I would not recommend this mainly based on how it affects the stability of your system and right now viruses are not an issue for any *NIX based architecture.
@Xeno…not to flame you, but one person having an issue with one laptop doesn’t mean you sound the anti Sophos sirens. As a matter of fact…I work for a school district IT department and we have 4000+ computers all running Sophos, and have been for at least the past 5 years. We haven’t had a problem with Sophos running on Windows or the Mac OS.
@ Dr. Macenstein…read the EULA…especially about the part (towards the end) about how they record and use the information from your computer…oh, and how you allow them to sell the information. I do have to say that I installed it a few days ago and have not seen any type of network traffic from the app…at least not yet.