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Wednesday 21 February 2018

Antivirus review: Sophos

PC Mag's AV review table by Ruebenking, 2017
As you may have read recently, I decided to change my home antivirus software. For many years I have relied on freeware, which has worked well to date. I was changing from AVG (here), and had tried BitDefender (epic fail which you can read more about here). Avast looks like it should be a good option, but as it is now the owner of AVG, and AVG has changed markedly from a "we will leave you alone" strategy to a "we will plague you many times a day with offers to upgrade to one of our paid pieces of kit" strategy, I decided to give Avast! a miss (Reubenking, 2017).

While the top contender appears to be BitDefender (Cox, 2017), as the freeware version (a) doesn't work, and (b) wasn't supported, I came up with two alternatives that looked relatively OK in their freeware versions: Kapersky and Sophos. I downloaded Sophos, and thought I would try it first. Mark Wycislik-Wilson has a good overview of what Sophos does and doesn't do on the TechRadar site. Please note that Sophos doesn't have a banking sandbox, but I have never used one, so wasn't that worried about that aspect. If you are, then Sophos freeware is not for you.

Downloading and installation of the software was trouble-free (here). You need to register first, confirm your email address, then download the software. After installation, all settings are done via the web here. You can have up to ten devices registered, which is very generous for freeware.

I will keep you posted with how this goes.


Sam
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