4.0 beta release date?

I can't guarantee anything at the moment as it is still unreleased but you will probably be able to upgrade from Prevx 3 to Prevx 4 without paying anything extra. Prevx 3 is indeed still fully supported and we will likely have looser licensing during the beta phase for testers of Prevx 4.

 

Thanks for the fast response.

However, it seems at odds with this (March 21):

"Prevx 3.0 users will not be upgraded to Prevx 4.0 for free. The reason for this is because we will still be supporting Prevx 3.0 after 4.0 is released."

There's no equivocation in that!

 

It's possible that we may not offer the entire 4.0 product set for free over 3.0 (as there are more components and features than in 3.0) but based on what we've done in the past (upgrading from Prevx 1 - 2, 2 - 3 for free), I'd assume we would continue but there is not an official answer to this yet so I'm uncertain from where the support technician got their information.

 

So there will not be nothing new to improve the protection in Prevx 4?
All this development time just to change the interface and maybe improve the cloud?

 

No - they are referring to the fact that the Prevx 3 database is being back filled with the data learned from Prevx 4 so users will continue to be protected from new threats. Prevx 4 is 100% rewritten from Prevx 3, both the agent and database, and has massive improvements in protection.

 

Will the license issues with reinstalling Windows, and those different errors seen on the Myprevx page etc be improved with v4 ?

 

Since we are both Comodo users I have to say that I much prefer the Prevx approach of ensuring the quality is acceptable prior to release rather than Comodo's approach of releasing software full of issues. I am prepared to wait as long as it takes.

 

If Webroot have anything to do with it then it may well become bloat

To be fair to them though, they employed a bunch of guys from Threatfire after Symantec took over and fired them. TF was a great product and if they bring across ideas then the hybrid future Prevx could be even better. Something to look forward to.

 

Prevx 4 is currently 540KB (yes, kilobytes) as the complete product with no additional downloads required so I don't think bloat is an issue

 

Yes - we now can track installations past an OS reinstall in most cases so this issue will be significantly lessened.

 

I rather won't go in deep. But i would like to say that, i never had any problems with comodo from v5.0 or v5.1 or v5.3. Before that i used to jump here and there like OA/OA++ (it used to be to and fro). I think they really delievered a very quality product from v5 with good release times.

Absolutely i even don't have much issues with Prevx v3 either, except scanning related, which i would blame myself as i never reported. I just became lazy on that. (the problem is some times the scanning will be stuck at starting and it never finishes. this occurs to me atleast once/twice a week, neverthless i will bother about it if Prevx 4 has)
I am thinking for the time being to install Trusteer Rapport just to replace Prevx SOL. Later on, i would review whether to install Prevx 4 or not. Lets See.

Thanks,
Harsha

 

That is so awesome. Looking forward to testing it!

 

waiting is hard, but it has to be polished in order to be accepted. This is what Prevx is good at. It will be here soon I bet.

 

Maybe Joe will let you know when the release clock starts ticking, like he did with version 3.

 

Although the installer for v3 & v4 is small, there is a folder created in Program Files containing a prevx.exe file of 6.43 megs....
(which is negligible by todays standards of course)

but will that folder significantly increase in size with v4 ?

I believe it`s slightly misleading to say the program is merely kilobytes in size when in fact the installed size is more - just something I noticed and not a complaint

 

Why people do pay that much attention to installer size and RAM usage anyway?

- Installer size is not really a parameter of footprint, in fact one can even argue that because of a smaller installer size Prevx 4 will perform slower. Although that totally depends on how the cloud will exactly change compared to version 3.
- Also, since Prevx 4 will have more offline protection disk space usage will increase anyway, independant of installer size.
- Next to that, promises about lighter RAM usage say nothing about better performance, since on most pc's this is the order of bottlenecks (greatest to smallest): hard disk, CPU, internet connection, RAM.

However, I do agree that installer size can be a parameter of bloat, but I don't think Prevx still has to prove they don't make bloatware.

 

The installed copy of Prevx 3 is indeed much larger than the installer, but that is just because of the decompression of images.

However, Prevx 4, having been rewritten completely, we've reduced the installer to 540KB and the installed file is... 540KB (it literally just copies itself ). That 540KB supports both 64bit and 32bit platforms natively (it includes the appropriate drivers) which makes it about 4x smaller than Prevx 3 even though it has many more features.

Despite requiring fewer resources, Prevx 4 will certainly not perform slower - the cloud is completely rewritten as well and is offered in many more locations across the globe (the completion of which is what is currently holding up the beta) which, along with massive core structure improvements, allows it to perform far faster.

Indeed RAM usage is not completely indicative of the impact on the system but it certainly helps - Prevx 4 has a fraction of the RAM footprint of Prevx 3 and takes up far less than Notepad on my system.

Background disk I/O is also massively reduced and scans are faster even though more files are scanned and scanned deeper. CPU usage is also almost non-existent and the time spent in "hot" code paths (which is the primary reason for slowdown in a security product) has been thoroughly minimized to generally slow down operation by less than one second per million persistent operations (like executing a program).

Network usage is higher than Prevx 3 but not by much. The offline protection doesn't involve downloading massive signature databases but is far more powerful from what we've already seen.

Annoyingly, I still cannot release full details publicly yet but believe me - I am itching to do so. I have full confidence that Prevx 4 will turn a lot of heads very quickly

 

Thanks a lot for letting us know about all the work that have been done behinde the scene for us.

I got a feeling that this will be great indeed!
And since I will be switching to Mac soon, I really hope that the Mac version will be as great as the Windows version sounds to be.

 

That sounds very promising indeed

 

Sounds Great Joe it just makes me drool.

TH

 

yeah sounds great to me to
thanks for letting us know Joe!
you do a great job!

 

Looking forward to testing the new version.

 

Finally some details
now we know whats holding up the beta from being released
will wait for the beta

 

well said

 

how would this be achieved? any changes to the clients hidden hdd sectors?