Sophos Home Edition version 9.5 Preview

The engineering team for Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac is happy to announce the availability of a preview of our next significant release for Home Edition. You can download this installer directly from our site using this link:

http://www.sophos.com/Pages/DownloadRedirect.aspx?downloadKey={8579BC43-753D-48D0-8C74-60593FEB7097}

Follow that link, accept the EULA, run the installer. It will automatically upgrade an existing 9.4 installation to version 9.5 if required. Your existing settings will be preserved during the upgrade.

This update improves stability and performance. No new features, but it addresses issues reported here in the forum and from our business customers.

NOTE: this version requires Mac OS X 10.8 or newer. It will not install and will not run on Mac OS X 10.6 or 10.7.

Now for the FAQ:

• Is this the same as Sophos Home? No this is the "classic" Home Edition. The team working on Sophos Home will be incorporating this new version into their product in the coming months.

• What does Preview mean? We aren't yet releasing this to all users. We want to get your feedback first, from willing volunteers. Once we are satified this release is good enough for everyone we'll automatically upgrade to this version.

• Should I reboot after installation? Not required immediately but doing so will purge the old kernel drivers from memory.

• Any new features? Not really. This release contains a full rewrite of the on-access scanning subsystem to improve system stability and reduce overall memory usage. This release also runs the content scanner as an unpriviliged user, same as the web scanner in the past, as security best-practice. You may notice scheduled scans or scanning from the Finder is snappier though.

• Is it safe to run? You've tested it, right? Yes this release has passed our internal quality assurance process. We have been running this version internally for a while now, it has proven quite stable.

Please post any issues you have, we definitely want to hear about your experience as soon as possible. Thank you!