Antivirus on my Mac???

[qwerf123]

When I bought my MBA from Best Buy thursday they gave me a free 6 month subscription for Trend Micro-Smart Surfing.

I haven't installed it yet, so is it worth installing for those 6 months cause its free anyways or should I not even bother with it?

LOL, Don't ask that here!
Your just asking for loads of people to ramble and get annoyed! 🙂

From what others have put, not really worth it unless your really adamant for the extra protection

 

[GGJstudios]

When I bought my MBA from Best Buy thursday they gave me a free 6 month subscription for Trend Micro-Smart Surfing.

I haven't installed it yet, so is it worth installing for those 6 months cause its free anyways or should I not even bother with it?

Don't bother.

 

[Queen6]

This is good pragmatic advice.

You may also opt to manually on-demand scan items as opposed to using the "Sentry" to conserve some system resources between items being scanned.

ClamXav is very customizable, I limit the "Sentry" on demand scan to a very few specific folders; Downloads, Documents, Dropbox & Desktop, unless there is any change in the files the "Sentry" will not consume any significant resource. Same folders are set up for an automated scan daily in the small hours. My older machine is a MacBook Pro 4.1 (2.4Ghz) the impact of ClamXav is negligible at best.

If you are going to be receiving mail/data/documents and forwarding on ClamXav offers an elegant solution that costs you nothing. Once I am happy with Lion & the apps my new Air will pickup the workflow and ClamXav will be on board, in the professional environment passing data with a malicious payload does you no favors; be it corporate or freelance 😉

 

[munkery]

My older machine is a MacBook Pro 4.1 (2.4Ghz) the impact of ClamXav is negligible at best.

ClamXav is very light weight. But, the "clamd" process does have a bad habit of holding onto RAM even after it is done using it. That memory will be released if it is needed.

If you are going to be receiving mail/data/documents and forwarding on ClamXav offers an elegant solution that costs you nothing.

If the volume of data you transmit is high, then the "Sentry" is a great solution. Much more efficient than manually scanning each item.

 

[joelseph7]

Don't bother.

Alright, Thanks.

 

[beeman07]

This may have been said before, but there are only three good reasons to run anti-virus software on a Mac:

1. Your workplace requires all computers on their network to run it.

2. You want to find old virii and trojans in the Windows files that you should have deleted when you left the dark ages by buying a Mac.

3. To remind yourself what running old hardware feels like. (Removing anti-virus software after running it for a while will make your Mac feel like a new machine!)

 

[mentaluproar]

Best Buy = ignore everything they tell you.

If you really need an antivirus, sophos is free and won't slow yow you down unless you allow on demand scanning of ZIP files, which makes it downright painful.

 

[GGJstudios]

If you really need an antivirus, sophos is free and won't slow yow you down unless you allow on demand scanning of ZIP files, which makes it downright painful.

As has already been explained several times in this thread, Sophos is not recommended, as it can increase your Mac's vulnerabilities. For free antivirus, ClamXav is a safer choice.