Sunbelt Software’s VIPRE Antivirus + Antispyware does Windows Vista — not just Vista home, not just Vista 32-bit. VIPRE does Vista!

According to the VIPRE requirements page, it supports the following operating systems:
# Windows 2000 SP4 RollUp 1
# Windows Server 2003
# Windows Server 2008
# Windows XP SP1, SP2, SP3 (Home, Pro, Media Center, Tablet) 32 and 64-bit
# Windows Vista+ (All flavors) 32 and 64-bit

Read my review of VIPRE or click here for more information

I recently updated from NOD32 version 2.7 to the latest NOD32 version 3.0. I found that Eset has dramatically simplified the structure of the NOD32 controls. They had been criticized in the past as creating a great product for advanced PC users.

The new version has a simplified “Standard Mode” that is much easier to use.

The Advanced Mode is still there — a simple click on the “Display: Standard mode” in the bottom left-hand corner will let you toggle into Advanced mode to enable control of many more options.

Upgrading from a previous version was easy. I uninstalled the older version, rebooted, and installed the new version. Many anti-virus programs work this way, since some of their components are installed during early parts of the Windows boot process — and not changeable without a reboot.

Then, installing was straight forward.

Once NOD32 is running, the first screen displayed is the Protection Status screen. If all is well, you see a display with a green monitor labelled Maximum Protection. If any features have been turned off or disabled, you’ll see

Continue reading NOD32 Antivirus Version 3.0 Review

On February 5, 2007, Sunbelt Software released CounterSpy version 2, the latest version of their award-winning CounterSpy anti-spyware / anti-adware program. Once piece of great news — CounterSpy v2 works with Windows Vista, in addition to Windows XP and Windows 2000 Professional.

I’d been waiting on the new version to upgrade. I had decided that I didn’t want to run the beta version on my notebook, so I just waited… and I’m happy with the finished product.

First, one of the issues that Sunbelt was targeting with CounterSpy 2 was to reduce the memory requirements of CounterSpy. I see the difference, too. Version 1.5 could take drastically different amounts of memory — I saw a low of 22MB to a high of almost 200MB. I suspect that CounterSpy had its spyware/adware signatures both significantly compressed and encrypted on the hard drive.

However, to try to speed up the constant processing, I also suspect that it had uncompressed the signatures in memory for faster checking. They were probably still encrypted so that other antispyware applications and antivirus applications

All this is simply my speculation of how it could have used that much memory.

Version 2, though, seems much more efficient. A quick Control-Alt-Delete pulls up the Windows Task Manager so I can click on the Processes tab. I see two files, SBCSSvc.exe and SBCSTray.exe.

Read more in CounterSpy 2.0 Released - First Look or download the free full-function 15-day CounterSpy v2 trial now.