VIPRE, our new combined antivirus and antispyware product, is now in beta. If you'd like to check it out, follow the instructions below. I talked about some of the philosophy behind VIPRE in a blog post early last year, here: http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/evolving-antimalware-technology- model.html To register for the beta: 1. Navigate to http://beta.sunbeltsoftware.com and register for the beta. 2. After registering, you'll get an email sent to the address you give in the above form, it will contain a link you'll need to follow in order to activate your account 3. Once your account is activated, you can log into the forum and click on Downloads & Updates under the VIPRE 3.0 Antivirus Consumer heading. 4. Please make sure to post any issues you find with the beta on the beta forum itself (not on this list, for example). Remember, this is a beta, and it will invariably have bugs. We want as many people testing it as possible to insure a quality final release. About VIPRE: - VIPRE is a completely new, built-from-scratch antivirus and antispyware product. The antivirus engine is our own creation, not licensed from another company. It has been a major undertaking, consuming millions of dollars in R&D costs and thousands of man-hours. - The technology itself is next-generation, incorporating a completely new architecture that combines antispyware, antivirus, antirootkit and other technologies into an integrated product. - It's designed to be fast and tight on resources. One of the reasons we decided to "build our own" was because of the enormous performance penalty of cobbling an antivirus and antispyware engine together. - VIPRE is not a "suite" per se - the first release is a combined antivirus and antispyware product. Personally, I'm not a big fan of suites, because it seems you get some good, some bad, all thrown together, and what the user gets is an experience that is less than satisfying (system slowdowns, tons of popups, more potential for system instabilities, etc.). However, we do plan on tightly incorporating our Sunbelt Personal Firewall code into a future release, providing complete firewall, intrusion detection and intrusion prevention capabilities, in addition to antivirus and antispyware. - VIPRE is going to be Checkmark certified by West Coast Labs for both Virus Detection and Removal upon release, and will receive additional certifications through other certifying bodies in the coming months. - Enterprise versions of CounterSpy and VIPRE will be following several weeks after the release of the consumer products. There will be a CounterSpy Enterprise 3.1, free to all customers under maintenance. To upgrade to VIPRE, there will be a nominal upgrade fee. Note that the new performance characteristics of VIPRE are identical to what you will see in CounterSpy (since CounterSpy is actually going to be a sub-set of VIPRE). - This version is compatible with Win2K SP4+, Win XP and Vista. Support for 64 bit platforms (Vista, XP) is forthcoming. To register for the beta, go to http://beta.sunbeltsoftware.com <http://beta.sunbeltsoftware.com> and create a user name. After email confirmation, you will be able to go to the forum and download the beta. I recommend that you disable your existing antivirus product while running VIPRE (although it's technically possible to run both VIPRE and another antivirus product at the same time, it does create the real possibility of performance issues). You also do not need CounterSpy with VIPRE running, as VIPRE already includes complete antispyware functionality. Remember, this is for the client version, not the enterprise. We'll have an enterprise beta up in a few weeks. Also, for those of you who have had particularly hard-to-remove malware on a client system, I would be very curious what your results are with the beta of VIPRE. Alex -------------------------- Alex Eckelberry CEO Sunbelt Software --------------------------
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