StarDestroyer.Net BBS

So I get Sophos for free from school (and I suppose it's free for alumni too). PCMag reviews it at 3/5 stars, which is the same as MSE, except for MSE it has a heap of criticisms and Sophos it just complains about lack of customizability, especially from the network administrator end.

Which should I use?

AV-Comparatives rate Sophos a good deal better in terms of detection rate for basically the same performance load.

Oh wow, there's a name I haven't heard in more than a few years: Sophos.

We used to offer it as a lower-cost alternative to Symantec Endpoint (Symantec Anti-virus back then). They had good deals for educational organizations if said organizations bought them directly.

Are you talking home-use? Sophos was never really designed for that back when we were installing it, but it did offer stand-alone configurations. The strength of SAV and Sophos really came from the ability to prevent (well, slow down at least) them being disabled, even if a user acquired admin rights to their PC (they had their own password for configuration changes and uninstallation).

For the home, I use MSE, adblock and noscript. But Sophos was lighweight and pretty comprehensive when we used it, so if you have it: use it. Maybe back it up with Spybot if you're really paranoid. Just make sure you only have one Anti-Virus scanner/program running at one time. So, if you install Spybot, don't enable the background components like teatimer (I think that's the name).

Yes, Teatimer is the name for the active background component in Spybot and it should never be used. Instead, an actual AV program should be used for the same purpose.

Teatimer is 100% effective protection from all viruses. It will annoy the user until they turn the computer off and go and do something else.

Never heard of Sophos, but I swear by Malwarebytes. It will kill just about any virus dead.

When looking at AV Comparatives, I look at the Retrospective tests, as that's what you're likely to encounter. They tend to vary enormously from test to test, so I generally don't fret much - but Sophos didn't even want their results published.

I generally take it to mean, that if I end up doing something stupid - or one of my customer's does - a decent antivirus provides a ~50% chance of stopping it, and that's about it.