Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition

[spike]

Welcome to the online discussion space for users of the Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition release.

If you're not yet a user and would like to be, visit the tool's website.

Because the tool is free and simple to use, there is no technical support other than what you'll find in this community. We've put in some posts to help out with obvious issues, and there'll be more when we see what users encounter or struggle with. Most support, however, will come from peer-to-peer contributions from other community users.

Technical Specifications are as follows:

• Mac with Intel or PowerPC processor
• 256 MB of memory
• 150 MB of available disk space
• Mac with OSX 10.4 (Tiger), 10.5 (Leopard) or 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
• Supports All Apple Mac hardware including iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro and the new MacBook Air

 The set-up process is simple:

1. Visit the website cited above.
2. Click on the download button.
3. Accept the terms of the EULA license during the installation.
4. Your registration will be completed online without you having to tell us anything about yourself.
5. After that is complete, you can use the tool for as long as you like.

For clarification of the terms and conditions of use, please see this post.

If you see something you particularly like or don't like, let us know in this forum. In addition to helping out with your technical issues, this community is intended to gather feedback about the quality of the tools. That includes gathering suggestions for new features.

While this particluar forum is dedicated to Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition, there's a more general forum offering help on Mac tools issues in general.

Regards,

spike

[bk]

Hi Guys,

Could you have a quick look at my post  entitled '7.2.4 (paid) vs Home edition'? I'm looking to see whether I should stay with the paid edition or change to the home edition of Sophos antivirus for mac.

Thanks in advance

bk

[AMC3]

There are too many complaints on this forum regarding extremely slow scan times for Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac . The complaints always include the question, "How it is possible for Sophos to report that it has 6-7 Million files to scan when my hard drive only has less than 1 million files on it?"  A typical 250GB hard drive only holds a maximum of about 1 million files. As a new Sophos user, this is a very confusing and disturbing experience and not the best way to start a relationship with an Anti-Virus company that you want to trust.

I strongly suggest that you include in your basic instructions the warning that IF the user does their initial scan using the while  "Scan Local Drives" option, the scan may take many days to complete IF the computer has backup hard drives attached. 

For example, when I installed Sophos and did my first scan, it said it had over 6 Million files to scan. WHAT? NOT POSSIBLE!  And at the pace it was going, it would have taken 4-5 days to complete. What I did NOT realize was that my two 500 GB backup "clone" hard drives AND my 500GB Time Machine hard drive were attached to my laptop AND were being included in the intial scan. The combination of all these drives amounted to over 6 Million files and the never ending scan process. 

Once I reconfigured Sophos to only scan my laptop hard drive, I think the initial scan took about 4-5 hours and showed it was scanning about 650,000 files - which made sense to me.  Now my scan updates only take about 2.5 hours. 

[christimco]

I am glad you posted this because this is what happening for me.  It takes forever.  And if I have to stop running it

it has to go all over again.  I think Apple has to address this in a big giant way.  

I do not know if my computer is virus free or not.  Because Virus Barrier said it's ok.

And Sophos it's not.

Chris