With some anti-virus suites for Windows you can really feel a difference in computer performance, sucking system resources and some even bring them down to a crawl. Once installed and updated, it sits quietly, updating periodically. This lets you know when it is scanning or updating.

Sophos runs in the background, placing an icon in the menu bar. It should only take a few seconds to install. Once downloaded, unlike most Mac apps, this requires installation rather than just copying into your Applications folder – and it needs your admin password. Version 8 supports 10.5 Leopard but will expire in April 2014, ending support for Leopard. The latest version is 9, which supports Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard up to 10.9 Mavericks. Sophos requires an Intel processor, 450 MB RAM, and 450 MB hard drive space.

It is available for free to download here. In this article, I take a look at Sophos Antivirus for Mac Home Edition. Of course, as long as I can remember there have always been Mac anti-virus suites such as Norton, McAfee, ClamXav, and Sophos. Mac viruses and malware been around for a long time, but in the past few years there have been more reports, and thousands of Macs were infected courtesy of the Flashback Trojan back in 2012. More users mean those intent on infecting computers of the world could now see the Mac platform as a viable place to attack.

With the introduction of Mac OS X and the rise in popularity of Apple’s portable devices, the Mac is no longer for the nerdy it is now perceived as ‘cool’ – and with this comes a larger user base. I’ve been a Mac user for 15 years and have enjoyed using a computer without the hassle of finding an anti-virus suite, maintaining and keeping my computer clean.īack then, owning a Mac put you in the minority of computers users, especially in the home. Do we need to think about Mac anti-virus? As Mac popularity grows so does the interest in developing threats for the platform, and while it is far more secure than Windows, it’s not 100% safe.

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