(Approx. 1,308 words)

Vipre Performance
Written by Ted Wirtz, a member of the Orange County PC Users’ Group, CA
www.orcopug.org
twirtz (at) pacbell.net

This article has been obtained from APCUG with the author’s permission for publication by APCUG member groups; all other uses require the permission of the author (see e-mail address above).

I recently purchased two copies of Sunbelt Software VIPRE malware protection. I use the term “malware” because VIPRE scans for spyware, viruses and root kits all at the same time. I installed one copy on my older Windows XP computer and one on my new Windows Vista computer. 

I needed to make a change because the antivirus provided by my ISP (AT&T) on my WinXP computer was being discontinued. They offered a free upgrade to McAfee Internet protection, but I didn’t want that suite. The security programs I was using were Webroot Spy Sweeper, Computer Associates (CA) for virus detection, and Kerio firewall. CA updates were to be shortly discontinued.

On my Vista computer I had Webroot, Trend Antivirus, and COMODO firewall. I started receiving notices that it was time to renew my Trend subscription. It was time to do “something.”

Since Kerio firewall has been absorbed into Sunbelt Software, I have periodically received advertisements for Sunbelt products. Recently, they have been touting their new product, VIPRE, so I decided to give it a try. According to their literature it has been designed “from the ground up” to be very fast, yet use minimal computer resources in the process.

I am not sure how often signature updates are generated at Sunbelt, but there seems to be a new update applied every time I turn on the computer. I have also seen a new update applied more than once in a day. The default scheduler wants to check for updates every two hours. That’s not to say a new update is created at those intervals, but instead to be sure that if an update for a critical new virus has been created, you will get and apply it in a reasonable period of time. Sunbelt also states that VIPRE is guaranteed to be compatible with Kerio or their current firewall.
windows vista

I removed both Trend and Webroot using the REVO Uninstaller. (I have found that REVO does a good job of cleaning up “leftovers” that often still remain after uninstalling a program using the standard Windows Add/Remove module in the Control Panel.) Then I installed VIPRE, input the Registration key and I was ready to go. I downloaded the most recent update table, and then started a “Deep” scan. VIPRE has two options: “Quick Scan” which scans running processes in memory, the registry, and the file types most likely to become infected. A “Deep Scan” scans all the above but includes every file on the computer, which obviously takes longer than a “quick” scan.

A bit of info about the Vista computer hardware: HP Pavillion Desktop with AMD dual core 5600+ processor (2.8 GHz) . 3GB dual channel DDR2 RAM. 500 GB Seagate SATA II hard drive. Nvidia based 7600 series video card. I am also running COMODO firewall. There seem to be no compatibility issues between VIPRE and COMODO.

After the scan was started, I opened up the Vista Resource Monitor to track what was happening. See Figure 1 below. As can be seen, CPU usage was consistently right at 50%. Looking at the task manager, I could see the load was being shared equally across both cores. I suspect the sharing was controlled by the Vista OS rather than the VIPRE program. 

As expected, disk usage was in bursts. Short files were analyzed quickly, generating another disk request, where larger files took longer to analyze, leaving the disk idle periodically. The drive had been defragmented just two days before the tests, so fragmentation should not have been a factor in file access times. 

There was no network activity since I had no other applications open at the time. VIPRE used 39% of the 3GB memory.

After scanning was complete, VIPRE reported the following in its scan summary:
Files – 154,335
Processes – 75
Registry – 28,937 entries
Cookies – 556 (15 flagged as tracking cookies)
Quarantined – 1 file, an HP uninstall.exe. Suspected as a ZLOB media codec trojan.

I believe this to be a false positive, since the file has been on the computer since its factory install, and was never flagged by the previous antivirus program. I have submitted the file to Sunbelt for further analysis.

Scan time was 86 minutes 30 seconds.
windows xp

As mentioned previously I also installed VIPRE on my older (about 5 years old) Windows XP computer. I first removed Webroot and the the CA antivirus programs. I then ran CCleaner to remove any “telltales” left behind, then installed VIPRE.

Windows XP computer hardware: ASUS A7N8X-E – Deluxe motherboard. AMD Athlon single core at 1.66 GHz core frequency. 1 GB of dual channel DDR2 RAM. Two Seagate 160GB SATA I hard drives in Raid 1 configuration (Mirrored drives). Mirroring on this machine is a combination of hardware and software. Disk is approximately 3 % fragmented.  Nvidia based 7400 series video card. I am also running Kerio firewall.

After running a deep scan, VIPRE reported:
Files – 113,714
Processes – 41
Registry – 31,837 entries
Cookies – 327 (13 flagged as tracking cookies)
No other risks detected.

Scan time was 70 minutes 35 seconds. (As a comparison the last deep scan that I ran using CA antivirus took 2 ½ days!)

Figure 2 from the Windows XP Task Manager shows that CPU usage fluctuated around 37%.

Figure 3 shows that while scanning, CPU usage had little fluctuation. It happened to be just 22 % at the moment I captured this screen, where Figure 2 happened to record 37 % at that moment.

In both systems I was able to perform normal tasks such as Web browsing while scans were running. There was a barely perceptible lag in performance. I also used my word processor on Vista to prepare this document while running a test scan. I could not detect any performance change. On the Vista computer I was able to view video clips with no stuttering or pauses. The videos were not full screen but occupied perhaps 20 to 25 % of the total screen similar to U-Tube clips. I didn’t try videos on the Win XP computer. Sunbelt suggests that scanning should be delayed if computation intensive programs are going to be run.

VIPRE has a feature that I personally have not seen in other anti-virus programs. If you put the computer in SLEEP mode, VIPRE will wake up the computer at the time saved in the scheduler, run a scan, and then optionally turn off the computer after completing the scan. There does not seem to be an option to resume sleep, but I suspect that I can make some setting changes in the screen saver to put the computer to sleep after X minutes of inactivity. I haven’t tried this yet, because often a screen saver looks for mouse or keyboard activity, and seeing none kicks into the screen saver, even though the CPU and hard drive may be churning. 

I have both computers set to scan at 1:00 AM daily. This is the default, and later I may rearrange the schedule to perhaps run only once or twice per week. I will definitely reduce the schedule for the Win XP computer since I don’t use it as much as the Vista machine.

In all, I’m quite satisfied with the program, and would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a combined spyware – antivirus program. I like it much better than any of the others I have used over the years, including Norton and McAfee. It may not be a totally fair comparison, because program versions change over time, but at least that is my opinion.