Has anyone installed Sophos Antivirus onto their MBA 11?

[jace88]

Just wondering if anyone has any thoughts on how MBA 11" performance is affected when running Sophos Antivirus (free) > http://www.sophos.com/products/free-tools/free-mac-anti-virus/

I'm curious to hear about both performance and battery impact.

 

[silverblack]

I have it on my iMacs at work, and it never found anything. So I don't have any antivirus on my MBA. You may want to know that the sopho software comes with a clean installer and uninstaller, and so feel free to try it and remove it without hassle.

 

[newdeal]

....

not really any point in having this on a mac. maybe in the future there will be more viruses but for now its pretty pointless

 

[aldo818]

I ve sophos on my macbook air 13 and i love it. Didn t noticed any change in performance. The reason i installed it is to not transmitting any viruses etc... via USB from one PC to another when doing group work for example. It s more a protection for the PC who gets the data after me as so far never had a Virus on my Mac but sophos detected some on USB which i got from PC's. These wouldn t have harmed my Mac but i would have passed it on to the next one

 

[ZenErik]

Do you need an antivirus for the zero viruses?

 

[Mike84]

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Do you need an antivirus for the zero viruses?

There are viruses out there for macs, they are just rare.

I have Sophia on my MBA 13 and love it.

 

[jace88]

I'm under the impression there are a few Mac viruses out there but none which have hit the headlines. At the end of the day it's inevitable for there to be viruses as Apples have become more popular so I don't want to be one of those people who professed Macs have no viruses only to be the first to get screwed over. That being said I do avoid pirated software/bit torrent so I should be reasonably safe I think.

 

[ZenErik]

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There are viruses out there for macs, they are just rare.

I have Sophia on my MBA 13 and love it.

Name one.

 

[Mike84]

Name one.

Oh, you got me. Surely because I cannot name one there are no mac viruses out there.

 

[gb1631]

I have the free version of Sophos on my MGB, iMac i7 (10.6x) as well as all my other Macs to include two running 10.4x.

 

[ditosou]

hummmm

anti-virus!!!???.... please close this thread, this is mac rumors guys. You should discuss such issues in a windows forum

 

[axu539]

There are no viruses for Macs. There are some trojans, but those require explicit user permission to run. I had Symantec installed a while ago because my school offered it for free. All it did was hog system resources, so I uninstalled it. Computer immediately ran quicker and cooler.

 

[BeyondtheTech]

Actually, the virus definition library and engine also detects Windows viruses. Works nicely if you're copying files for someone and they don't know it's infected, or if you're using Parallels or VMware or some other emulator.

 

[jace88]

Hmm based on the above maybe i'll just stay as is and keep my Avast antivirus on my Boot Camp partition (used in Parallels).

 

[maestrokev]

Actually, the virus definition library and engine also detects Windows viruses. Works nicely if you're copying files for someone and they don't know it's infected, or if you're using Parallels or VMware or some other emulator.

Very good point, Mac users often forget that they share files with Windows users.

 

[deedas]

In the 10 years I've used Macs I've never encounter a virus, trojan, worm, etc.

The only one of which I can remember hearing was a trojan that came in a pirated adobe software installer. IMO, if you're pirating software you deserve getting your computer hacked.

 

[halledise]

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I have Sophia on my MBA 13 and love it.

Sophia is awesome - she is sitting on my air right now …

 

[Insilin1i]

In the 10 years I've used Macs I've never encounter a virus, trojan, worm, etc.

The only one of which I can remember hearing was a trojan that came in a pirated adobe software installer. IMO, if you're pirating software you deserve getting your computer hacked.

If you actually knew where to look and not just use google then you wouldn't get infected.... Bittorrents don't all have viruses people just download them from the dumbest places.

 

[BeyondtheTech]

Sophia is awesome - she is sitting on my air right now …

Considering that the Home Version 7.2 is free and detects both Mac and Windows malware, there's no reason to grab it. At least it frees you from using/buying a subscription for the Windows side.

 

[MikePA]

Considering that the Home Version 7.2 is free and detects both Mac and Windows malware, there's no reason to grab it. At least it frees you from using/buying a subscription for the Windows side.

Microsoft Security Essentials is free so there's no need to buy anything for Windows.

 

[KnightWRX]

Oh, you got me. Surely because I cannot name one there are no mac viruses out there.

You've got that backwards. Here let me help you fix your comment :

Surely because there are no mac viruses out there I cannot name one

There are no Mac viruses. None. Nada. 0.

Trojans aren't viruses. There are Mac Trojans, usually found on the different bittorrent sites. But there are no Mac viruses. Not even one.

Anti-virus software is worthless. Even if you were to get a file with a Windows virus, it would have no impact on your system. None.

 

[GGJstudios]

There are viruses out there for macs, they are just rare.

This is absolutely false. There are zero viruses in the wild that run on current Mac OS X.

I'm under the impression there are a few Mac viruses out there but none which have hit the headlines.

There are exactly zero.

Mac Virus/Malware Info

 

[Rooskibar03]

I've been using Macs going back to the Quadra days and never once I have installed any Anti-Virus software on over a dozen plus different computers I've owned.

Oh, never needed it either.

 

[Appleind]

anti-virus!!!???.... please close this thread, this is mac rumors guys. You should discuss such issues in a windows forum

Good one

 

[GGJstudios]

Microsoft Security Essentials is free so there's no need to buy anything for Windows.

So is AVG and a few other anti-virus apps for Windows. Definitely no need to spend money for AV protection for Windows.