VIPRE is a completely new, built-from-scratch antivirus and antispyware product. The antivirus engine is Sunbelt's own creation, not licensed from another company. It has been a major undertaking, consuming millions of dollars in R&D costs and thousands of man-hours.

The technology itself is next-generation, incorporating a completely new architecture that combines antispyware, antivirus, antirootkit and other technologies into a seamless, tightly-integrated product.

It's very fast and very tight on resources. One of the reasons we decided to "build our own" was because of the enormous performance penalty of cobbling together an antivirus and antispyware engine together. It is one of the fastest products of its class (probably it's actually the fastest, but we haven't done the final benchmark tests). The definition database structure is also completely different than what we have in the current version of CounterSpy. It is considerably smaller and more efficient.

As a matter of fact, this software is not a "suite" per se and the first release is actually a combined antispyware and antivirus product. However, Sunbelt Software does plan on tightly incorporating our Sunbelt Personal Firewall code into a future release, providing complete firewall, intrusion detection and intrusion prevention capabilities, in addition to antivirus and antispyware.

There will be a new version of CounterSpy as well, which will be a subset of VIPRE (VIPRE is technically a superset of CounterSpy, so you do not need CounterSpy running on your system if you have VIPRE.)

Enterprise versions of CounterSpy and VIPRE will be following several weeks after the release of the consumer products.

Upgrading from Earlier Versions of VIPRE 3
This beta build will upgrade earlier builds of VIPRE 3. If you currently have a version of VIPRE 3 installed, you can either download and run the full setup file listed just above or you can perform an upgrade through VIPRE itself -- just check for updates and follow the prompts when VIPRE detects that a new version of VIPRE is available.

Uninstall CounterSpy First
If a version of CounterSpy is currently installed on your system, you should uninstall it before proceeding with the VIPRE 3 installation. You can uninstall CounterSpy from the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel applet.

Requirements:

· Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher
· At least an IBM Compatible 400MHZ computer with minimum 256MB RAM
· At least 150MB of available free space on your hard drive
· 2x CDROM
· Internet access with at least 56Kbps connection
· Supported Email Applications: Outlook 2000 , Outlook Express 5.0 , Windows Mail on Vista, and SMTP and POP3 (Thunderbird, IncrediMail, Eudora, etc.)

Limitations:

· 30 days trial