Our favorite free anti-virus program, Avast, is out in a new version for 2013, and they’ve added more features.
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Our friend Nancy just had a tour of McAfee Anti-Virus hell. She thought she had a virus but she didn’t. Yet the company told her it would cost $180 for the “Concierge Gold” service to fix her computer over the Internet.
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Getting a new computer can be a hassle if you’ve got lots of programs left behind on your old one. You would think that using a drive image program to copy everything from the old drive to DVD or other storage medium would work just fine. Surprise! It works fine, all right, but only to restore your old computer back to a point when everything was working well. It won’t copy the programs of the old computer onto the new one. What about using one of those transfer programs? You know, the ones that advertise they can move everything from your old computer over to the new one. Well, they can move a lot of stuff over, but in our […]
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Hotel and library computers are easy to compromise. In short, they’re generally not safe from hackers wanting to steal your information or your identity. We used a hotel’s “business center” computer a while back at L’Auberge in Del Mar, Cal., a three-star hotel, no less, and within a couple of days started getting scurrilous ads in our email. At the “Conrad” inIndianapolis, one of the Hilton upscale hotels, we noticed the computers in the business center had not been upgraded in more than four years, and did not seem at all well protected. Joy installed the latest Internet Explorer. She shouldn’t have been able to do that. Almost no computer that can be accessed by the public is safe from […]
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Fixing computers that have serious problems has become a big business. If you happen to be the one who created the problem in the first place, you are ideally positioned to fix it. Here’s how it works:
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The Flashback Trojan attacked Mac users recently. We read that it was the first serious attack on Mac users in 28 years, but actually Flashback Trojan was the son of last year’s DevilRobber and its 18 brothers. A free program from Avast.com is a good fix.
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To protect your computer against spyware and viruses, we have often recommended the free versions of Avast, AVG and Anti-Malware. They were good when they were good, but times have gotten tougher. Free programs catch 40 to 60 percent of known viruses, but new ones come out every day. A group of Russian malware writers reportedly is able to split a million dollars a month for putting viruses on your computer. Some steal identities and others spam people with ridiculous product offers. Worst of all, the malware writers send their viruses and spam out from tens of thousands often millions, of so-called “Zombie” computers. Just what is a Zombie computer? Typically, it’s a computer that has a Zombie virus, which […]
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We had just about stopped looking at new security programs. There were so many it was like strapping lead weights around our computer to see if we could sink it to the bottom. However, we continue to be very pleased with Avast and Anti-Malware, both of which come in free versions, and we’re impressed with the new BullGuard Internet Security 10. It’s something different. BullGuard comes with everything but the kitchen sink, and doesn’t slow down our computers. When you first install it, it asks if you want it to run quietly (as in: don’t bug me, just protect me) or whether you want to see what it’s doing at each step. We tried quiet mode on one computer and […]
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Too many security programs cause needless anxiety.
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The web sites that are least likely to have problems like viruses and malware are from the following countries and regions within countries: Japan — .JP; Catalan (spoken in Barcelona, Spain) — .CAT; Croatia — .HR; the Isle of Guernsey (England) — .GG, and Ireland –.IE.
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