I am always reminded of this Dilbert cartoon whenever a customer has a large complex problem at work, and some genius suggests “We’ll build a database”. Or frequently, we’ll implement a replacement database because the old database product is 3 versions behind.
It’s 3 versions behind because we’ve not paid for product maintenance.
[...]
Well, if you didn’t receive emails with viruii attached, or surf to “dubious” websites, you wouldn’t get infected. For the rest of us, we would be looking at either Microsoft Security Essentials, or something which costs money.
Or you’re a corporate customer, who has “business” needs, you’ll be needing to spend money.
If for no other reason that most anti-virus prohibit the use of their “free” products in a commercial setting.
The following are the questions I ask myself when I’m looking at an anti-virus product.
Personal use.
- Does it have a history of “false positives”?
False positives are when the anti-virus product detects “good” files as being a virus.
For personal use I wouldn’t buy Symantec, McAfee or CA eTrust products.
Far too many false positives for my taste, which I wrote about here. Heck, McAfee can’t even be bothered to test their product updates against known good Microsoft Windows PCs.
- What choices does the product give me if it finds a virus?
Does it give me the choice to ignore the issue, quarantine the file, or just delete it?
This is an important point for me, after having had McAfee delete some files I wanted to keep.
- Is it from a vendor I trust?
This is a personal choice, but I wouldn’t ever buy McAfee products. Ever.
- Will it slow down my PC if I install it?
You used to pay a performance penalty for running an anti-virus product on your desktop. But not so much now, with computers having gotten faster over the years.
It is useful to be able to exclude programs from anti-virus monitoring, if you know the program is trustworthly.
For home use, I’d recommend Microsoft Security Essentials.
(Click here to continue reading How to select a good anti-virus product)
Fast on the feels of the Acrobat Reader post I wrote, Flash Player decided to start annoying the users with
Arghhhhhhhh!
Adobe has a “new” method to disable auto updates.
Long story short, create a mms.cfg file with the following contents: AutoUpdateDisable=1
and drop it into the %windir%\system32\macromed\flash directory
Much longer Adobe update [...]
Don’t you just hate it when, after you’ve spent quite a few hours on doing something, some smarty pipes up a suggestion which meant you’ve just lost those hours.
So it was with a 150+ page PDF to Microsoft Word conversion. Finished it, and to be honest, it was fairly crappy as the [...]
I’ve been accused of sitting at a computer for far too long. “Get up and go for a walk”, I tell myself. I never do, as I get too wrapped up in the current task I’m working on. That’s why I so like the idea of ErgoMinder.
From a support perspective, I thought [...]
 Desi Dhaba
Authentic Indian restaurant. One of the blokes at work recommends it. Will have to give it a try. 134 Flinders Street, Melbourne.
I’ve tried it, curry was good, but I’ve had hotter. Next time I’ll ask for “Indian Hot”.
Disk2vhd
Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk – Microsoft’s Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online.
Free e-books: Windows 7 troubleshooting tips
Mitch Tulloch, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional and lead author of the just-published Windows 7 Resource Kit has created two free books worth grabbing copies of “What You Can Do Before You Call Tech Support.” & Deploying Windows 7. His website is here.
Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool
The Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool allows you to create a copy of your Windows 7 ISO file on a USB flash drive or a DVD. To create a bootable DVD or USB flash drive, download the ISO file and then run the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool. Once this is done, you can install Windows 7 directly from the USB flash drive or DVD.
Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool Released Under GPLv2
Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool
(Click here to continue reading Semi-regular web-link clearance – November 2009)
With Geocities shutting down, I had to move the CTOS Faq site.
CTOS, my friends, was an kick-ass operating system which was released in 1979, and was supported for 20 years.
It was a big thing in the business community. But Unisys stopped supporting CTOS at the end of 1999. I documented [...]
Enterprise desktop support is a mindset. If you’ve never done it, it’s likely you’ll not understand the issues of how things scale. A solution for 5 PCs may not scale to 4000 PCs.
Today’s support problem is Firefox. And it’s not that I don’t like Firefox, indeed, I use it myself.
But I [...]
is a great little program I use for doing group conversions of graphics files. Things like, jpg –> png format conversion, image watermarking and image cropping.
Image cropping is today’s quick topic.
Let’s take the example where I have screens of two monitors, and only want the left screen.
If I want [...]
ErgoMinder, from a support perspective, had it’s problems. ErgoMinder described itself as:
ErgoMinder is a program with three cartoon characters – called Ergo-Dudes – who remind you in a light-hearted fashion to take micro-breaks from your computer work. Most people know that they need to take breaks from computer work, and that they [...]
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