Antivirus: Sophos vs MSE

[Phantasee]

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?

[Vendetta]

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

[TheFeniX]

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).

[Edi]

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.

[Vendetta]

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.

[General Zod]

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

[Ariphaos]

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.