I took a look at the results of efficacy tests conducted by AV-Test Institute in February 2016. You will need their corporate offering, Sophos Endpoint Protection, for that. This is an option that is, again, unavailable to Sophos Home. Another quick search online taught me this could have been faster if I was given an option to exclude scans of archived folders, which slowed down the engine. Sophos Home took nearly two hours to run an on-demand full system scan on my half-filled 256GB solid state drive. With these inconclusive observations, you may want to try if Sophos Home has an adverse impact on system performance before committing to using it on a system with 2GB of RAM, or less, installed. This is similar to a computer running McAfee, but worse than its competitors Avast that scored 99.3, and AVG that scored 99.8 per cent. PCMark tests conducted by revealed a system with Sophos Home running in the background would perform at 99.1 per cent of the efficiency of one without any antivirus solution installed. This is an observation I would agree with. The memory usage may sound heavy, but a quick search on the Net revealed few users experienced slowdowns even if the numbers seemed high. I cannot confirm whether this phenomenon was specific to my machine, OS X installations or the software in general, since I have just a single computer at my disposal during the period of my tests. Still, it used about 240MB of available memory on my system while idling. Sophos Home runs quietly in the background, scanning for threats in real-time with no noticeable performance impact on my system. The option-light design is ideal for those who do not enjoy tinkering with the system, but surely options like scheduled scanning, and a quarantine function to prevent suspicious files from harming the system would not be too much to ask for. It also includes a parental filter restricts access to categories of pages suspected to host questionable content, such as those with adult material. They allow you to set exceptions for programs and websites when its engine should not be running. It allows you to turn off any of the three protection engines described above, and offers an option to commence a scan.Īll other settings are accessed from the dashboard. Sophos Home has a clean interface that is is very light (too light, even) and straightforward to use. They include its automatic virus protection, potentially unwanted app detection, and Web protection. You can also toggle on and off the three main features on any of the device(s) linked to the account. At a glance, you can see all active alerts, threats neutralised, and when each installed copy last received an update. The management functions found in the online dashboard offered by Sophos Home are not commonly seen in consumer anti-malware programs. After creating an account, you will be brought to its dashboard, which allows you to monitor all installed copies of the software across all devices. Potential users should get the latest (and malware-free) copy of Sophos Home from their website. Installation, Features and Resource Usage Your performance mileage may vary on a Windows machine, but the features covered in this review should not differ significantly between the Mac and Windows variants of the software. But, is their offering so good that you should use it in place of what is already available?īefore we begin, note that I am evaluating this copy of Sophos Home on a mid-2013 MacBook Air running Mac OS X El Capitan 10.11.4. Sophos Home is thus joining a crowded market place, which they intend to use to strengthen its brand awareness for its paid corporate products. You’re probably familiar with the Windows Defender offering by Microsoft, pre-installed on all machines running Windows 8 and above by default. Free Internet security suites incorporating real-time antivirus and anti-malware protection are dime a dozen these days.
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