If you back up your data, lock your master software disks, and get a good virus-protection program, you don’t need to fear sometimes-harmful computer viruses. But running a full-featured virus-detection utility on your Mac is a trade-off. You pay the price in reduced performance when booting your Mac and launching applications, as well as every time you pop a floppy disk into the drive.
Datawatch’s Virex 5.0 will seek out Macintosh viruses and Trojan horses and can even be configured to look for evidence of unknown virus strains. It also has a new feature, SpeedScan, that’s designed to deal headon with the slowdown that virus-protection software causes.
Virex 5.0 comes with a start-up disk in both 8OOK and highdensity (1.4MB) versions. The disks include a ScanStaller application that scans and disinfects your mounted drives before it installs Virex.
The Virex control panel sets basic functions such as the type of protection, whether to scan floppy disks, and the kind of warning to give if a virus is detected. You can password-protect the Virex control panel, which prevents changes in preference settings, and even lock it, so no one can remove it from the System Folder (as long as extensions are not disabled).
The Virex application provides a Record/Scan feature, which makes a log of your software. Each time Virex scans your files, it reports any changes in code resources since the log was made. In theory, this function helps you locate programs that may have been modified by a virus. But some normal system operations (such as switching preferences) may change a program, and you’re apt to get more false alarms than real ones.
Virex’s protection options include an attempt to repair virus-infected files, but there’s no guarantee that a repaired file will work as well as an uninfected one.
Datawatch claims (and my own tests with other commercial virus software largely confirm) that the new version of Virex can scan a disk up to 25 times faster than other programs due to its SpeedScan feature. The first time SpeedScan inspects a disk for viruses, it creates a setup file called Virex SpeedScan on your disk. Although the initial setup can take a couple of minutes, subsequent scans, even of a large hard drive, are a matter of seconds. Scanning several large hard drive partitions, ranging from 203MB to 235MB and with 2000 to 3000 files, took anywhere from 9 to 40 seconds each. By comparison, Symantec’s SAM 3.5.9 took from 5 to 12 minutes to scan the same drives.
In normal use, Virex’s SpeedScan feature is quite unobtrusive. I noticed little if any delay in booting my Mac or in launching applications. SpeedScan doesn’t benefit floppy disk scans very much, but floppy disk inspection is also noticeably zippier than with SAM.
More important, SpeedScan doesn’t seem to affect the ability of Virex 5.0 to seek out virus strains. I tried a couple of old virusinfected disks on it, and it caught every one. The only feature that appears to be missing is the ability to detect the presence of a virus in a compressed archive.
As new viruses are discovered, Datawatch will release new search strings and post them on various online services. But if you want to repair the new virus strains, you’ve got to subscribe to Datawatch’s update service, at $75 per year. This entitles you to disks containing the new search and repair routines, plus any needed bug-fixes. When you buy the program, you receive one update for free.
In a product category where most of the software provides comparable protection, the new SpeedScan feature in Virex 5.0 puts it ahead of the pack. (At press time, Datawatch announced a 5.1 upgrade with nenvork features.) Virex’s extremely speedy, trouble-free performance makes the task of guarding against computer viruses almost painless.
Steinberg, Gene. (May 1994). Virex 5.0. Macworld. (pg. 68).
DataWatch
Applications
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2020-09-15 / 
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Virex_5.06.img
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
