Back in December 2010 GFI ran a competition for 10 people to win a 10 user licence of selected GFI software and they said one of these people would be selected to win an iPad. I entered which was simple enough and to be honest did not expect to win. The email came though and to be honest I almost deleted it thinking it was spam – I must get loads of emails every day telling me I have won this or that.

I was informed anyhow that I had win the 10 user of Vipre Anti Virus but I had been selected out of the ten as the iPad Winner. It took some time for the iPad to arrive as it came from Malta (GFI’s HQ) and it had a UK plug.

Thanks to GFI for a great competition and the rather sexy iPad

Just a heads up really, Firefox finally gets updated to version 3.6, adds Personas (Themes) and many speed improvements. Another one updated of late is is Avast - this is now at version 5, includes new voices and such. Seems the Auto Update fails to grab this new version so you are going to need to download and upgrade.

Recently while on FrugalBruce Ustream channel, he was doing a giveaway of Sunbelt AntiVirus Software, not a company or a product I had heard of and by sheer luck, I managed to Win the 10 User licence version. The original competition was for the server version but as I am a home user with no Server, I was sent the 10 user version of the desktop product instead. Bruce does many software giveaways and is on hand for decent business advice – so feel free to check him out live if you get the chance, he does a show Monday to Friday 1pm-3pm EST (USA).

AntiVirus Review

A New player in Town as they say and you can buy a One year licence for $29.95 (or it seems £29.95 UK), if you have multiple computers, the Home Site Licence is maybe better suited, feel free to browse the site for the proper pricing. On my machine I had installed already Avast Free version and SuperAntiSpyware – once you install the product, it has to download the latest definitions – as in it does not come with any. To enable active protection – it warned me that Avast was running and had to be removed as well as disabling Windows Defender.

I had no issues with either and come to think of it – never ever seen Windows Defender actually catch anything. I found it odd that it found a “newer” version once I updated and the default schedule scan is Deep. My theory on any AntiVirus protection is that once installed, a FULL scan is required to make sure the system is clean and then for the system to carry out Active protection as and when I use the system, why would i need to re-scan every single file every day, do they magically get a virus or maybe it is scanning for virus is previously never knew about?

Key Features

The entire thing about this new suite is that it does not hog your system – a quote from there site:

Tired of that old antivirus program that makes your PC slow down to a crawl? Interrupting what you are doing with slow scan times, causing problems and nagging you? Time for a change to next-generation antivirus + antispyware that IS NOT a resource hog!

Does not slow down your PC

All-new technology: antivirus + antispyware engine

Advanced anti-rootkit technology

Cutting-edge Proactive Protection

Full protection against email-borne threats

Ideal for Netbooks that need malware protection

No automatic credit card charge each year!

So far I agree that even on a full scan, my systems remained usable and half the time I was not even aware it was scanning my system.

Conclusion

As it was a Free product to me, I am trying this across some of my systems, on an initial scan of my drives holding my app’s and games plus various Keygens and No-CD’s – it found a whole load of trojans that the other systems seemed to have missed BUT it also picked up VMWARE program as a trojan – so can it be trusted? It is very hard to know if a system is protecting you fully or not – I know from work that even with AVG, Defender and various other stuff – I still got systems in that were brimming with Virus and Trojan. It might be worth you trying it free for 15 Days – see what it finds and see if you are happy to pay the small cost for the year. 

Microsoft have been busy working on a replacement for there OneCare as in “All in One” AntiVirus + Spyware application which will be Free once it comes out.  A couple of days ago they allowed 75,000 copies into the wild for people to test it out, with versions for XP, Vista/Win7 32bit & 64Bit.

The question is – does it stop Spyware, Does it catch Virus and has it got a low memory / CPU front print and finally, can it detect things quickly or does it take forever to scan your machine.  I watched Scott from Compute Ability test it out via an infected machine – this machine having AntiVirus2009 which is a nasty piece of Malware that overtakes your machine:

The end result of that show as it failed to even spot it was infected. I tested this myself and my findings were as follows:

It took forever to Scan my machine – this remember was a fresh build of Windows with not much installed.  It found Zero (as expected) problems and then I scanned my external Drive which it managed to pick up 4 Virus / Malware in files I had stored (that Avast Seem to miss). The Scan took Many hours – I lost track after 3 hours to be honest. I tested it against a Home page changing code and it let it happen (failed) and finally I was wondering what was eating my CPU up – 50% was been used by the program – so defiantly a CPU hog.

I tried to remove it – it got to the end and said it had failed, half the files were mssing, the service was still running – what a sorry state of affairs. I had to re-install it, kill the service / process and then Uninstall the program – glad to see the back of it.

So Microsoft – you have failed in making a product that actually works, this is not better then the complete useless Windows Defender. The program is out there on Torrents if you want to test this for Microsoft but there is better (and Free) Program out there – such as SuperAntiSpyware for example.