About a year ago, Sunbelt Software famous for their Counter-Spy product developed a totally new anti-virus engine from scratch - now they have released it under the name VIPRE for public beta. It all began when they realized that they needed an even powerful anti-malware technology. VIPRE is said to employ very powerful heuristic detection engine in addition to Sunbelt’s kernel-level active protection and FirstScan technology.

Since it is still in its beta stages, we wouldn’t be having a very comprehensive review on Sunbelt VIPRE Antivirus + Antispyware Beta. Read on for views on this product.

VIPRE Installation

We downloaded the VIPRE installation file from the Sunbelt Forum - Beta Section (18Mb). Installation went smoothly. After that we were presented with a wizard to configure a couple of settings.

1. Setting the internet proxy
2. Set update settings
3. Set active protection to high/medium/low
4. Set email protection - add scanned by to e-mail
5. Join Threatnet - a Sunbelt community
6. Set scan schedule
7. Integrate windows security center
8. Disable Windows Defender
9. Register
10. Download definitions update

You can change this settings at a later date.

Program User Interface

*This review is for the BETA version of VIPRE, do not take this as a review for the latest version of VIPRE.

The VIPRE program user interface is very easy to navigate around. You won’t see any of the very advanced anti-virus settings you see in other anti-virus programs. Basically we just leave it running in the background unless we opt to do a manual system scan. The simple user interface doesn’t do a well job of portraying the full capabilities of VIPRE - we didn’t feel very secure.

However there are times when the program isn’t responsive - sometimes when we click on the VIPRE tray icon to bring up the program, the program just doesn’t pull up to the desktop. This prevents me from doing any action like scanning. We found out that if the tray icon changes to green, there’s no way to access to the program. We can only access it when it is blue in color. A system restart seems to fix the problem although it is not an ideal solution.

At times also, the VIPRE engine just deactivates and we can’t enable it back. This problem is a major setback.

Features and Performances

Besides the anti-virus features, VIPRE has integrated three useful tools which are Secure File Eraser, History Cleaner and PC Explorer. You basically use Secure File Eraser when you need to delete a certain confidential file - it makes sure that the information will never able to be retrieve by any means. In History Cleaner, it lists out all the programs which its temporary files is able to be cleared. Sadly, Internet Explorer is the only browser it cleans. For the a dedicated cleaner, we recommend using CCleaner. Okay, in PC Explorer, you can view and identify manually if there is any suspicious processes on your system through different areas - Downloaded ActiveX, Internet Applications, Running Processes, Startup Programs and a few other more. But the problem kicks in when we want to scan for a specific process we identify on the list, there wasn’t any button for us to do that. The only way to scan that process it to find it manually and initiate a scan.

The next problem with VIPRE is that you can’t initiate a scan directly to one file. You can only initiate a scan on a folder. therefore the file you intended to scan need to be resided in a folder and if the folder so happen to contain huge number of files, the scanning time would take longer period. And since you want to save time, you try to move it in a completely new folder but what if the file can’t be moved because the system is currently using the file - you just got to lived with a long scan period. A bad idea by Sunbelt.

Regarding the scanning performance, VIPRE clocked at 7.35 minutes for 10358 files (mixture of installation file and text file) which sums up to 4.79Gb. Perhaps the scanning speed is just at an average speed. During the scan, it initially uses 30-60% of CPU resources but later increases to around 80-90%.

Memory wise, VIPRE uses around 38Mb of RAM. It is not so taxing to the system.

However, the thing we were not satisfied is the update definition process. It’s took very long unlike other anti-virus which can be updated under a minute period.

VIPRE has rootkit detection but you have to manually enable it when doing a custom scan. We can’t say much about VIPRE detection engine because we installed VIPRE on a live user system which we try not to make it infested.

Take note that, we do not recommend installing VIPRE Beta version on a live system - this is strictly for testing purposes only.

Sunbelt Software’s Response to this Review

We received an e-mail from Ms. Laurie, Marketing Communication Manager of Sunbelt Software and she would like to clear you guys up on some of the mentioned issues above.

1. Sunbelt VIPRE Anti-virus 3.1.2036 Beta was NOT publicly available for download.
2. Since this was not a publicly available build we cannot say for sure what caused these instability issues. What we can say is that this is not found in the latest beta.
3. We agree that we need a single file scanner. There are plans to include this later.
4. In the newest betas we are not seeing these same cpu resource issues.
5. We are currently doing full database updates in beta. We have not moved to incremental yet so updates are not as optimized as you might expect them to be.

*This review is for the BETA version of VIPRE, do not take this as a review for the latest version of VIPRE.