This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

Disable Sophos' Anti-Virus' memory resident in Mac OS X?

Hello.


I just downloaded and installed savosx_he_r.zip, from www.sophos.com/.../sophos-antivirus-for-mac-home-edition-legacy.aspx, into an updated Mac OS X v10.8.5 machine. I like it so far, but is there a way to disable its memory resident? I only want to use it for manually updating, scanning, and cleaning.

Thank you in advance. :)



This thread was automatically locked due to age.
  • Hello Christian,

    Your comparison with a burglar-alarm makes me smile. Indeed, if I would have an alarm, I would switch it on occasionally only: for those moments, when I am not at home, have no control whats going on inside. It should be better than a dog that gets nervous with every visitor. My desired use of Sophos AV is not to have it running around permanently like a nervous dog - but to be there if I like.

    With macOS my computer permanently runs a built-in firewall and AV – not perfect but more than nothing. Sophos AV appears not to respect this colleague. I do understand your concept for Sophos AV in general as a stand-alone software. But for Sophos' mac edition I don't see the need of this permanent RAM requirement in switched-off states. Seems you want to convince me of the need of antivirus:

    > (...) when a process (a user) attempts to open a file the open is intercepted, the file is scanned (real-time scanning), and depending on the results the open allowed to continue or blocked. 

    An idea which I don't like. I don't mistrust myself that much.

    > Won't help much if you start an on-demand scan after you have noticed that "somethings going on".

    Hm, in my perspective it would, not perfect but more than nothing. I don't wear a bicycle-helmet, I go now and then at red across the street, I don't lock my appartment when I look for paper mail and I open every letter without precautions. I must be dead already. And one day I will, even with precautions 24/7.

     

    For now: I just want to get RAM back from Sophos AV when I don't let it work. Do I have to kill it from my computer for this?

    thomas

  • Hello Thomas,

    [:D] I'm not trying to sell you real-time protection and I don't demand that you mistrust yourself. Just tried to explain the how and why.

    I just want to get RAM back
    side note: Any indication of actual shortage caused by this RAM consumption? I'd assume (I haven't investigated) that most of the memory used by the daemons is nevertheless pageable and as it isn't active would be paged out in can of a shortage of physical RAM. Thus it shouldn't cause a constant penalty.

    Christian