[comp.virus] Comments on SENTRY and VIRUSCAN

A.SIGFUSSON@ABERDEEN.AC.UK (07/11/89)

Hi out there,

I am new on this list, although I have followed the
discussions on the Lancaster Pdsoft archives, and I have
two points which I would like to raise.
After being hit by the Brain virus I decided to get some
protection and after reading both the VIRUS-L and some
reviews on protection software I decided to go for
SENTRY.  It seems to work fine except for the CONFIG.SYS
file.  The manual claims that sentry would pick up if you
added or changed a device driver but it did not when I
tried it.  Another thing about SENTRY is that the manual
does not state clearly enough for the novice PC user that
you have to reinstall SENTRY when you add a new .COM,
EXE or .SYS file to your disk.  If this is not made
clear people who are not aware of this might be led to
think they are safe when they are not.
I also got a copy of VIRUSCAN which has been discussed
here recently.  When I tried it on few diskettes I
noticed that the program told me that they all had
same number of directories and files.  On inspection I
found that this was not the case.  For some reason if you
scan few diskettes, one after another, the program always
thinks it is reading the first one.  Only if you do
something like "A:>DIR" after inserting a new diskette
for scanning does the program do it properly.  I suspect
that if the first disk only contains 1 or 2 files the
remaining disks will not be scanned properly because I
found that my DOS disk, which contains lots of files took
a very short time if scanned following a disk with only 2
files on.
I wanted to point these two things out because lots of PC
users could be given false security by protection
programs if their use and function is not properly
explained.


Best wishes,

Arnor Sigfusson