Is Sophos any good? Please help

[Amy2005]

Hi

I have just downloaded Sophos 30 trail and i was wondering if it was any good. My computer has been locking up or freezing every day more than once for a week now and i just did a scan and there were 2 corrupt files in AppleWorks and some encripted ones in Office. Could the corrupt files be the reason of my mac locking up and freezing? and do i delete the corrupt ones and leave the encripted ones on there?

Is there a way to uninstall Sophos if i get any other virus software? or is it like norton and really hard to get rid of?

Thank you
Amy

 

[Steven1621]

My college gives Sophos antivirus out to all of its students (both mac and PC). I work at our student helpdesk and have honestly never seen it do anything.

I think most on these boards will agree that you really do not need antivirus on your mac, unless you are dualbooting with windows, of course.

 

[Eraserhead]

My college gives Sophos antivirus out to all of its students (both mac and PC). I work at our student helpdesk and have honestly never seen it do anything.

It also seems to run about as quickly as ClamXaV, which is free, and although slow is pretty decent.

TBH the cause of your crashes is highly unlikely to be a virus on a Mac (as there aren't any for one thing.), especially if you have enabled the firewall (System Preferences ==> Sharing ==>Firewall ==> Start. to do this)

The corrupt files could well be caused by a disk problem which would also cause the crashing, I would backup your data now, you should do this anyway but now seems a good time.

BTW so others can help you more, can you say what Mac model you have, and how much RAM you have in your Mac. (you can find this by going to the Apple Menu and About this Mac if you don't know.)

 

[miniConvert]

To answer the subject of this thread, IMHO Sophos is good, yes. Unlike Norton (and many others) it's very unobtrusive and just takes care of the basics. It gets my vote.

 

[Amy2005]

The corrupt files could well be caused by a disk problem which would also cause the crashing, I would backup your data now, you should do this anyway but now seems a good time.

BTW so others can help you more, can you say what Mac model you have, and how much RAM you have in your Mac. (you can find this by going to the Apple Menu and About this Mac if you don't know.)

Thank you, my mac model is an iMac G5 without iSight, i got in it May 2004 and the 'Memory' on the 'About This Mac' says '768 MB DDR SDRAM'. Please could you tell me how to backup my data? Does it save all my iPhoto and iTunes files too?

Thanks
Amy

 

[Eraserhead]

Thank you, my mac model is an iMac G5 without iSight, i got in it May 2004 and the 'Memory' on the 'About This Mac' says '768 MB DDR SDRAM'. Please could you tell me how to backup my data? Does it save all my iPhoto and iTunes files too?

Thanks
Amy

Well there are two ways, the most simple is if you have an external hard drive (they cost around £100 for 300GB) copy your Applications folder, and home directory to the external drive, that should back up everything (to select the home directory go Macintosh HD and double click on the Users folder and select and copy your user folder to the external drive.) you can also backup to CD's or DVD's but I think you need extra software and it is a lot slower.

iPhoto and iTunes will be backed up. This document has more information.