![]() All of this led to a rather dismal stability rating. On one occasion, an unexpected reboot occurred. We saw a number of scans crashing out, often with no results to report, and on a number of occasions the app, or even the entire machine got stuck in a hang. Indeed, there were a number of crashes, and the fact that the product has finally made it to a full comparative review may say more about the tenacity of the test engineer tasked with wrangling the product than any great improvement in its stability. At times, the interface seemed reluctant to accept this language adjustment though, switching back to Portuguese on a number of occasions after crashes. The company hails from Brazil, but the product interface – which has a reasonably pleasant appearance and an acceptable set of basic controls – is available in English as well as its native Portuguese. This is the first time BluePex has featured in a full VB100 report – although the product (which incorporates the VIPRE engine from ThreatTrack Security) has been submitted for testing on numerous occasions in the past few years, it has not proved sufficiently stable to produce a usable set of results until now. For the rest of the tests, each product was installed and updated on the day of testing, with fresh installs on fresh systems to ensure that any bugs could be analysed properly and reproduced where possible. The WildList set was based on the ‘4.006’ list released a week or so prior to our deadline.Īs usual, there were a number of products that could not be provided in a form that could be installed and updated offline, so these were given full installs on the deadline day, with updates sucked down in the usual manner and the systems frozen for later use in the proactive tests. Other sets were built along standard lines, with the proactive parts of the RAP set put together in the weeks leading up to the test deadline and the reactive sections put together on the fly as testing proceeded. ![]() We added a bundle of new files to make up for this, and the set size remained reasonably close to that of previous months, with the 900,000 files weighing in at around 200GB. ![]() We had something of a clearout of our test sets, removing from the clean sets several swathes of software from sources which seemed to be including rather large numbers of ‘grey’ items, most of which were contaminated with unwanted ‘free extras’ such as toolbars. As usual, we kept additions to a minimum, installing only a few very basic tools, and locked down our test image on the deadline day with no updates beyond those included in the basic install media. Windows 8.1 is really little more than a service pack for Windows 8, with not much to differentiate it during the install and set-up process, and not much beyond a slightly more usable desktop to distinguish it during testing. As has been pointed out, this divide may not be very useful in our server tests, as few consumers are likely to be running server editions, but we plan to continue with the division of products in our desktop comparatives at least. We asked vendors to specify into which category their products fell at submission time – some managed to do so, while others had to be chased up, and some left it entirely to us to determine what we felt was appropriate. Given the scale of the test, we decided to implement a division of products (which we had been planning for a while), dividing the product set into corporate and consumer-grade solutions. ![]() With a fair sprinkling of new names on the list, we reached a total of 48 products – some way short of a record, but still plenty to keep us busy. This report is rather overdue, and with a lot of products to get through, the preamble will be kept to a minimum – suffice to say, the deadline was set for 25 June, and testing proper got under way in mid-July, giving developers ample time to prepare for the test. Our first look at Windows 8.1 arrives with its successor, Windows 10, not far off.
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