[Fabian Wosar]

Hi guys,

we just wanted to inform you about the arrival of the a-squared Anti-Malware 5.0 Public Beta. To get access to the newest version of a-squared Anti-Malware please activate the "Beta updates" option in your update configuration.

What is new?
The list of changes is quite extensive as you would expect from a new major release. So please be aware that this list may not be complete but is merely a list of highlights.

New File Guard: Enhanced real time malware scanning
a-squared Anti-Malware 5.0 offers additional real time scanning modes beyond on-execution. While on-execution scanning is extremely resource efficient and provides excellent security people may want to use on-access scanning as it is done by most other security products. While we still recommend our on-execution scan it is now possible to scan files whenever they are created or are changed on your system as well as every time they are accessed.

Support for Windows 7 and x64 architectures
All features available on x86 platforms are now available on x64 platforms as well. There is no longer any difference between those two platforms. That also includes full support of the new Windows 7.

User interface streamlining
The user interface got some major overhauls. While the design has not changed much, we cleaned a lot of areas we felt were cluttered. Just to name a few examples:

• The scanner is no longer a separate application but is integrated into the main application window.
  
• There is a central white list now to exclude processes, files and folders from real time scanning, behavior monitoring and on-demand scanning instead of 3 separate white lists.
  
• The navigation menu is now hidden when using the application and is only displayed on demand.
  
• The software is now Windows 7 aware. Application features are now available via jump lists and progress is reflected in the task bar button as well.
  
• Quite a few other things that weren't mentioned .

More convenience
We added a whole bunch of additional little features people asked for.

• It is now possible to disable all protection temporarily e.g. to avoid alerts during software installations, with a simple click on the guard icon in systray.
  
• You can now put the guard into game mode which essentially suppresses all warnings.
  
• You can now test the application for 3 day without creating a user account to allow cleaning without internet connection. Once you create a user account, your free trial period is extended by 30 more days.
  
• a-squared Anti-Malware can shut down your computer now after finishing a scan - for extensive over night scans.

Known problems
Please be aware that this is beta software. There is still a lot of polish to be done to get it to release. We recommend not to use it on productive system without a recent backup. The following problems are known:

• Due to the on-access scan features a-squared Anti-Malware may no longer be compatible to additional real time anti-virus software on your system.
  
• On Windows 7 with UAC enabled surf protection may not work on Internet Explorer 8 unless you deactivate "protected mode".
  
• On x64 systems it may be impossible to run any 32bit application while the behavior Blocker is active.
  
• Some people reported freezes on x64 systems. We are currently investigating those.
  
• Some behavior detections are disabled currently for testing purposes.

Otherwise we hope you are as excited about the beta as we are. If you encounter any problem don't hesitate to post a bug report here or send it via email to fw@emsisoft.com. Please be aware that we expect a higher mail and ticket traffic due to the beta so we may not have the resources to monitor other external forums as we usually do. To make sure your bug report gets attention even when posted in an outside forum please provide me a link to your bug report via PM or mail or report your bug here as well.

Feel free to discuss the beta release here:
http://support.emsis...eta-discussion/