Major issues with Lion

There are some good threads on here about possible MacBook Pro Lion issues, although I believe those have been fixed prior to version 8.0.6 -- the MacBook Pro does local time machine backups which were having issues with older versions of SAV 7.

Have you tried turning off archive scanning in the on-access scan, and disabling live protection?

No, I didn't try anything other than removing it. While I know and respect the need for it, I cannot deal with the instability that I think it caused and I'm tired of spending hours and hours trying to diagnose the freezes, slow-downs and other wierd behavior.  Since removing Sophos, my MBPro is working just fine, thank you. I think I will leave it that way for now.

Hi, thank you for posting your issue and am glad that you were able to remove sophos.

But I am unable to remove sophos for some reason.  the "sophos updating" simply would not finish.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

act

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AMC3 wrote:

No, I didn't try anything other than removing it. While I know and respect the need for it, I cannot deal with the instability that I think it caused and I'm tired of spending hours and hours trying to diagnose the freezes, slow-downs and other wierd behavior.  Since removing Sophos, my MBPro is working just fine, thank you. I think I will leave it that way for now.

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When I installed Sophos, it installed both the program and the uninstaller utility. However, running the uninstaller only removes the program as far as I could tell. It left a large number of files in various System Library folders. I had to use a search utility to find all of the files with Sophos in the name. Then I had to manually delete each of them.

Did you run the uninstaller from an admin account?  The files that *should* be left behind are settings files and log files (files not originally installed by the installer).

Andrew,

Correct. I ran the uninstaller from an Admin account. The files that were left over were numerous and scattered around in my System Library. I expected the uninstaller to remove all of them. Obviously, it does not do that. Since I was having so many problems with my new Macbook Pro, I wanted ALL Sophos files deleted. It was the one 3rd party program that I felt could be the source of the issues.

Sophos has been off my computer for 2 days now and my computer is running perfectly. Coincidence? I have no way of knowing. But this experience has eroded my confidence in Sophos. I had promoted the use of Sophos to a lot of Mac users in my personal network. Now, I wonder if that was wise.

Andrew,

Since removing Sophos Antivirus from my computer, I have had no issues. I honestly do not know for sure if Sophos was the source the issues. All I know is my laptop is functioning well now without Sophos on it. 

So, I am struggling with this... I would like to have your antivirus protection on my computer, but obviously not if it conflicts with the OS and causes slow-downs and freezes. I would like to know what steps you take to verify that your software does NOT conflict with OS X and does NOT cause excessive CPU consumption. What is your level of confidence that your Antivirus software does NOT cause issues with OS X? 

Mac

MacBook Pro, OS 10.7.4

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AMC3 wrote:

Andrew,

Since removing Sophos Antivirus from my computer, I have had no issues. I honestly do not know for sure if Sophos was the source the issues. All I know is my laptop is functioning well now without Sophos on it. 

So, I am struggling with this... I would like to have your antivirus protection on my computer, but obviously not if it conflicts with the OS and causes slow-downs and freezes. I would like to know what steps you take to verify that your software does NOT conflict with OS X and does NOT cause excessive CPU consumption. What is your level of confidence that your Antivirus software does NOT cause issues with OS X? 

Mac

MacBook Pro, OS 10.7.4

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Hopefully, someone from the product team can give you a good answer as to the QA processes they go through for the product; I do know that they have a large test rig and proper QA processes set up to track software changes for a significant amount of time prior to releasing a product update.

I'm on this forum as an end user, not as a representative of the support forums themselves or of the product team.  I use the product myself both at work and at home.  That said, I have a fairly customized OS configuration and have fine tuned my Sophos configuration, so my experience with the product is likely to be significantly different from yours.

The one area I do have some extra insight into is to the actual malware detection routines.  In the labs we have strict QA procedures on releasing identity updates as well, and do performance tests which, if they fail, will auto-reject any release of the identities.

On OS X, the most likely place for performance degradation from a detection standpoint is Java applications with many small class files and DMG files that are significantly larger than the files they hold.  We are continually working on ways to optimize current detection methods, and have plans to improve both Java and DMG scanning in these areas.

That said, the experience you've had with slowdowns and freezes is not something to be ignored, and will not be.

Thanks, Andrew. I suspected you were one of the "elite" volunteer researchers sanctioned by Sohos to provide support in this forum. Thank you for doing that. 

One more related question... How is Sophos antivirus performing under Mountain Lion? I hear Mtn Lion is generally considered to be a more stable OS compared to early versions of Lion. 

I just experienced the 100% overdrive issue on Mountain Lion when trying to burn a disk.  It didn't matter what app I used: Toast, Simply Burns, whatever.  Nothing would work until I turned off live scanning, which defeats the purpose of an active AV.

Obviously it is an incompatibility issue with Sophos and Lion / ML.  It was solid in SL.  Too bad, as I've been using it for years.  However, it may need to go.  ClamX is not as effective, but that may be my only option considering the other Mac apps out there are horrible (Norton springs to mind as being the cream of horrible, as it killed my system previously).

If Sophos fixes the issue (I've read about it on several other forums and review sites), I'll be grateful.