Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition 7.3.8 User Reviews

• 4.0 stars

  "Excellent for a free product, but could be even better"

  March 2, 2012  |   By griswolf

  Version: Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition 7.3.8

  Pros

  Easy install (but see Con for an issue)
  Reasonably "Mac-ish" interface
  Reasonably unobtrusive
  Actually reported a virus that it found, so I know it is at least doing something

  Cons

  Won't work until you restart your Mac (at least, I tried that and it did begin working), but nothing in the starting instructions mentions it
  
  In fact, there's not much in the way of help at all, and some of the interface was written be people who are more technical than I. A better interface would go a long way toward making help files less important.
  
  Poor interface when scanning files: It appears to pause for a long time from time to time when it encounters a large zip or jar file. They know they should fix this, but so far, you have to notice that the progress bar is "shimmering" to know it is working

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• 5.0 stars

  "Very effective antivirus software"

  February 24, 2012  |   By victorh2007

  Version: Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition 7.3.8

  Pros

  - Very light on memory and system resources;
  - Very effective on detecting threats developed for both Mac OS System and Windows;
  - Auto-update its database every hour silently

  Cons

  - Full scanning process takes time;
  - GUI could be better designed

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• 4.0 stars

  "Seems to work fairly well"

  February 16, 2012  |   By Galeyook43

  Version: Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition 7.3.8

  Pros

  It's free; Doesn't seem to be a memory hog; Sophos seems to be a fairly on-the-ball security company based on their Facebook posts.

  Cons

  It kept falsely-identifying files from my Compaq Presario's Windows XP recovery partition (which I had backed up to my Mac) as viruses. Once I moved that to another computer, no worries. I get bugged that it restarts quite soon after I close it (if I'm running a memory/CPU-intensive program such as Toast 11, for example, that I want to use all resources for); I need to check if I can change that in the settings.

  Summary

  Seems pretty good, reputable, and you can't beat free as long as it seems fairly adequate.

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