Vipre Antivirus Antispyware (beta)

It takes guts to introduce a brand-new antivirus solution in a crowded market, but Sunbelt Software, known best for its award-winning , is doing just that by creating its own antivirus engine from the ground up. Arriving late has advantages, however. Traditional antivirus engines have been slow to adapt to emerging threats.To bridge the best of traditional antivirus with new cutting-edge thinking, Sunbelt Software hired veteran antivirus expert Joe Wells for about one year to help design a "hybrid" antivirus antispyware engine. While we await the first test results of the final product, Sunbelt has released a public beta. Here's a first look.

Features

What we like is that Vipre packs a lot of extras, extras that other antivirus products should have but often do not.

In addition to understanding antivirus and antispyware, there are useful tools such as a secure file eraser that writes 1s and 0s over deleted files, a history cleaner that goes beyond just what's in your Internet browser cache, and something called PC Explorer, which reveals processes and services running that might be suspect or known to be malicious. Many of these tools are also featured within Sunbelt Software's standalone antispyware product, CounterSpy v2.

Performance

Short of final code and formal testing, we cannot say how Vipre performs relative to other antivirus products on the market. But in informal testing, the product feels fast, uses few system resources, and didn't try to convince us that benign Internet cookies were a threat.