[Parky]

There is a new version of Virex (7.5) out today.

It's free for .Mac users as well, it can be found in your iDisk.

Looks good, loads of new features.

Now scans in the Background, Checks local discs and emails.

Ian

[Millennium]

Does it still cause conflicts with Fink?

[Parky]

No idea sorry, as I don't use Fink.

I know it found some viruses that I had not been aware of.
They were not a problem for OSX, but they did exist in emails I had deleted, it came up with them automatically.

Ian

[typoon]

Thanks Parky I just dl'd it now.

[TETENAL]

Originally posted by Millennium:
Does it still cause conflicts with Fink?

That was fixed with the previous version already. I don't have 7.5 installed, but I don't think they reintroduced that problem again.

[Buck_W]

I just installed Virex 7.5 on my eMac running OS 10.3.5

When Virex opens, it tries to download the virus definition files, but all the application is doing is rapidly flashing between the Green Start button and the Red Cancel button. The Scan & Clean option is unavailable. I tried chatting with a representative online, but he recommended I contact someone on the corporate end of things...

Anybody else having problems? Any suggestions as to how to remedy this one?

[Stradlater]

Question: why do people bother with this program?

[typoon]

Originally posted by Stradlater:
Question: why do people bother with this program?

Because even though we wish we didn't have to some of us still have to send and receive files from Windows folks and do not wish to send out any viruses that we may be carrying from said Windows folks.

[Synotic]

Originally posted by typoon:
Because even though we wish we didn't have to some of us still have to send and receive files from Windows folks and do not wish to send out any viruses that we may be carrying from said Windows folks.

Don't you have to manually forward the e-mails... with .pif and .exe attachments?... Or am I missing something?

[JKT]

Originally posted by Synotic:
Don't you have to manually forward the e-mails... with .pif and .exe attachments?... Or am I missing something?

Or .doc or .xls or .ppt files. Sorry, but it isn't always that obvious when a file has a virus (e.g. when it is a word macro virus).

[JKT]

Originally posted by Buck_W:
I just installed Virex 7.5 on my eMac running OS 10.3.5

When Virex opens, it tries to download the virus definition files, but all the application is doing is rapidly flashing between the Green Start button and the Red Cancel button. The Scan & Clean option is unavailable. I tried chatting with a representative online, but he recommended I contact someone on the corporate end of things...

Anybody else having problems? Any suggestions as to how to remedy this one?

I had the same problem but simply quitting and re-launching it solved it for me. A look at the virex console log showed that it wasn't able to access the .Mac account.

[TETENAL]

Originally posted by Synotic:
Don't you have to manually forward the e-mails... with .pif and .exe attachments?... Or am I missing something?

Yes, you have to manually forward those e-mails with the attachment. It's sort of unlikely that you do that with spam. Anti-virus software is not really needed on OS X except for Office macro viruses maybe.

[Buck_W]

Originally posted by JKT:
I had the same problem but simply quitting and re-launching it solved it for me. A look at the virex console log showed that it wasn't able to access the .Mac account.

I've quit and restarted my computer several times hoping it would take care of it, but it is still getting stuck trying to download the virus updates

[Synotic]

Originally posted by JKT:
Or .doc or .xls or .ppt files. Sorry, but it isn't always that obvious when a file has a virus (e.g. when it is a word macro virus).

Good point, my point on identifying the virus by file extension is now irrelevant. Even then however, I can't imagine forwarding a "check this out" type e-mail to someone else. I don't think it'd even occur to me to forward an e-mail to another person unless I specifically wanted them to get a message I had received. And even then if I wanted them to see my spam for some reason then I would open the document myself to check it out. But apparently Mac Office is susceptible to these macro viruses?

I really don't get many spam e-mails and I never gotten one with an attachment, so it's not something I'm familiar with.

[voodoo]

does it work with http proxies now?

[Buck_W]

Originally posted by Buck_W:
I've quit and restarted my computer several times hoping it would take care of it, but it is still getting stuck trying to download the virus updates

I just discovered a workaround. Even though I had just been logged on to my .mac account to download and install Virex 7.5, I had to open System Preferences > .Mac and enter my name and password there. Maybe this will help someone else.

[alphasubzero949]

Nice to see that the automagic background feature is a resource hog. On my Al 15" PB with 1.25 G RAM it eats up 40-50% of the CPU.

[gorickey]

Originally posted by alphasubzero949:
Nice to see that the automagic background feature is a resource hog. On my Al 15" PB with 1.25 G RAM it eats up 40-50% of the CPU.

Yikes.

[Parky]

Originally posted by alphasubzero949:
Nice to see that the automagic background feature is a resource hog. On my Al 15" PB with 1.25 G RAM it eats up 40-50% of the CPU.

I just checked on my iMac and there is no indication of Virex software taking anything like that amount of CPU.

I have Background and Active checking on.

Ian

[wataru]

Originally posted by Buck_W:
I just discovered a workaround. Even though I had just been logged on to my .mac account to download and install Virex 7.5, I had to open System Preferences > .Mac and enter my name and password there. Maybe this will help someone else.

Duh. All of the .Mac apps require you to have your username and password there. How would they know what you did or didn't do in your web browser? And what if you had a friend download it for you? They're not stupid.

[jasong]

Nice to see that the automagic background feature is a resource hog. On my Al 15" PB with 1.25 G RAM it eats up 40-50% of the CPU.

Nothing like that on my Tibook.

--Jason

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Stradlater:
Question: why do people bother with this program?

Because even though we're better than the competition, to believe that we're invincible is naive and foolish. The bit about carrying viruses even though we can't become infected is a nice bonus. Here's yet another: we may not be able to catch e-mail viruses, but if we detect them then we can warn the person who sent them.

I admit that I have not used Virex in some time. My initial experiences scared me off; Virex was wonderful on OS9, but early OSX versions were a complete joke. No, they were worse than a joke; they were outright awful. Has the product improved into something even remotely worthwhile yet?

[BuonRotto]

Millenium: 7.5 is the first "real" version worth using given its feature set. 7.2 was capable but very limited in terms of practical use since it just did a bulk scan of the hard drive on startup, nothing on the fly, no on-demand scanning per file or folder, no email scanning, no real scheduler, etc. Don't be surprised if these CPU use issues happen with this verison, it's practically a whole version higher really, and will have performance and UI bugs. Hopefully a 7.6 update will come along and likely make Virex a nice app again in most respects.

I also had the problem with getting the virus definition updates this morning, but I didn't have time to get into it, so I cancelled the process. I should have my .Mac name and password already set in the system prefs, but I'll try re-entering them if it comes up when I get home.

[Meövv]

Originally posted by jasong:
Nothing like that on my Tibook.

--Jason

Activity monitor will show a number of Virex processes (none called "Virex"). The most cpu-hogging one is VShield and on my 12" PB G4 (1 GHz) it constantly eats 4-10% of the processor capacity. Turnign off the Active virus detection in the Preferences will bring it down to 0%.

[Randman]

Read elsewhere that 7.5 has some bugs.

If Virex 7.5 finds, for example, a MyDoom virus in one of your mailboxes, it actually doesn't delete the virus or the mail message - it deletes the 'file', i.e. the .mbox file, i.e. the whole mailbox.

That's from another website. Just to be safe, I deleted it and went back to the previous version until more is known.

[Jonesy]

I have also been watching my CPU usage with Background checking on. It did go us as high as 50%+ even on a 1.5 GHz PB. I had noticed my fan was coming on more than before. I thought it was due to the 10.3.5 update. I will wait and see whether switching it off helps at all.

As far as the checking of Mailboxes is concerned if you look in the preferences you can choose not to check mailboxes and you can tell the application to notify rather than to simply delete files so this should not happen.

I had the same problem with checking for the latest update on first launch as well. I found that it fixed itself after I checked "customise eUpdate server settings" in preferences and then unchecked it. It then seemed to find the server OK and got on with it.

[Mr. Blur]

interesting - Virex 7.5 is now gone from .mac and v7.2.1 is back.....