VIPRE Virus and Malware Protection

As many of you know, I worked as a System/Network Administrator for 15 years before my health caught up with me, and in that time I've made an observation or two about people.  No matter what I did to protect the workstations, someone always found a way around it eventually.  And of course, because I listened to my users, I found out what the objection was - performance hit.  Any antivirus solution I deployed, caused serious performance degradation on the older boxes of the day.

It's to be expected then that with malware, machines, and malware protection all scaling up at roughly the same rate, that today's protection software would make about a similar percentage hit on performance of today's machines.  To a great extent, this is sort of true.  Modern virus and malware protection software causes a bit less of a slowdown, but every software I've tried still made a significant difference to the machines I tried them on.

Sunbelt Software have hired me to say a few words about their Antivirus Software named VIPRE. Being a conscientious type, I downloaded and installed the free 15 day trial of the software, and being a bit less than conscientious %) I then went to sleep and let it download the definitions and perform the first scan.  That would be because I was doing this around 3AM my time and fell asleep at the desk.  Therefore, I can't tell you if there was any thrashing the first time it ran - but I can tell you that I didn't notice it in the following few days, where every other A/V program I've ever known has caused unpredictable lagging and slowdowns.

Aside from the definition files, VIPRE can also run suspect programs in a virtual environment so it can't do any harm, helping VIPRE to identify and isolate malware.  And while I don't personally use Outlook, VIPRE integrates with Outlook to catch email-borne malware as well.

Sunbelt Software have 15 day trial software available, I haven't uninstalled mine yet because, quite frankly, I'm thinking I might upgrade it to the full version.  If I'd had something like this back when I was working, I'm pretty sure I'd have been able to convince users to not try and unload their A/V software...

As a further incentive, Sunbelt are also offering a price reduction (50%!) on their personal firewall product if you buy VIPRE.  Sunbelt Personal Firewall is ranked quite highly by other writers, and if you were looking to protect your machine on multiple levels then you probably couldn't go far wrong if you took advantage of that offer.  Even on a home computer or a machine already behind a home router firewall or office firewall, putting a personal one on your PC is still a good idea.