One of my friends told me he uses AVG free with daily scan which is overkill but allows the luxury of aborting the scan if he is working.  Next is Windows Defender also with a daily scan.  The scans never find anything so I might turn them off soon and just the let the real time protection suffice.

However there are some extra freebies which I keep on my desktop to do deeper/different cleaning:  Adaware, SpyBot Search and Destroy (one searches by file, the other by threat alphabetically!), Windows Live Safety Scan (for its registry cleaner - who better to know what to clean than the guys who built the registry), and TrendMicro Housecall which is a super deep online scan from the guys who discovered VISTA’s fatal flaw hours after it was released.

He previously did Disc Clean-up but have little to clean up now that I tweaked Tools>Internet Options>Advanced to delete Temporary Files when I close window.  So a monthly Defrag (for orderliness) and occasional Disc Check (for errors) rounds out my regimen which keeps our machines whistle clean and lasting ten years now.

WINDOWS ONE CARE saves the day with automatic backup.  Always forgot or didn’t remember if I backup’d at the end of the day and as a result I was biting my fingernails until the next morning that everything was AOK.  Sometimes I would leave home and forget for the second day with all the activity going on around me.  With ONE CARE, I had no care as it was done for me each day.  Great.  Also like the feature of Virus and Spyware along with the tune-up.  Best there is.

Why of you used to be a huge fan of Symantec products ever since the late 90’s? This past year I decided to give up on Norton Internet Security and try something new.  The reason is because Norton takes up so many resources!  What a hog it can be!  I found a great deal at the time through newegg.  I bought Trend Micro Internet Security for 40 bucks but there was a 40 dollar rebate!  I got the rebate back so essentially I got the program for free!

I haven’t had any suspicious software or viruses lurking on my PC!  THe program is light on resources and it has great real-time protection.  Sometimes when I am surfing the net, I may stumble across a hijacking website and Trend Micro warns me right away of the possible spyware/hijacking software that may be embedded in the websites that I come across!  Its a great program and its cheap!  Try it you might like it:)

Antivirus programs are like buying a pair of jeans or shoes that someone else say is the most comfortable thing in the world. True for them but we are all not built the same. The same is true for our computers.

We all use them and demand different things from our systems. Some might like Norton and Mcaffee, other KAV, or AVG, Panda, or even Avast. Take your pick all of these have excellent capabilities. The one factor I love is free for home use! Avast and AVG are tops in my book

I used to be a norton guy until it failed me. I was not happy that I had been spending $20-50 every year for “premium” antivirus software. Then I discovered Avast and have used it for the last 3 years with no problems. But that is just my experience.

You can tweak the software to many idfferent levels of usage, automate download scanning, or skim it back to bare minumum. The choice is up to each.

But unlike a pair of blue jeans there are bench marks to show you which can detect the most viruses.; how good a pair of jeans or shoes are, are subjective test like how many viruses can it detect are facts.

Anti-Virus and Spyware app.’s are all pretty much up to speed on finding latest malware and virus’s and adding them to their definitions catalogs, so that Your computer’s program will detect and block, and/or remove unwanted programs/software or files.

If you DO NOT have active updating to your Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware, it is useless against newer versions of Malware and Virus’s. The question should not which one is the best, but rather which one works best for YOU. They all pretty much operate in the same manner, with access to the same data bases for current Virus’s/Malware.

Some people want performance from their computer, and weightier Prgrams like Kaspersky,Norton, and McAfee can block and/or interupt online gameplay with unwanted notifications and other things that bug GAMERS. Lighter programs using less ram, and taking less space on the Hard Drive may include versions like Avast(free), AVG, or Zone ALarm. It’s all a matter of preference.

I use Mcafee when I can, because of USABILITY and I really don’t care how much hard drive space it takes. With 500Gb on the HD and 4Gb Ram “who care’s?”

I know one thing, I wouldn’t buy Norton. I had a virus on my computer that would pop up saying that my system was corrupted and I should buy some antivirus. I couldnt get rid of it until I did a restore. I contacted Symatec and asked them why it didn’t fix it. They told me I needed to buy the upgrade or add-on. I was thinking, why should I do the same thing the virus was telling me to do. Sounds like Norton can be its own virus

I had the same problem as phxmark123. I believe when we buy software like Norton/Symantec, we should not have to pay for upgrades or add-ons.  It costs enough at purchase time why have to pay that each year thereafter.  Plus, I do believe they have a problem with the viruses maybe even from them……??????

Suzi66 that is a rumor/conspiracy theory that has been floating around for years. it goes that the major antivirus program companies have programmers that set around and make viruses just so that way they can sell their software. it is estimated that 3,000 new viruses are released every day. some are just variants of old viruses.

One of the best buys on the market in my opinion is the Defender Pro 15in1. It includes programs from several companies, including Kaspersky  anti virus. I like a number of the programs and have had very little trouble with them. The anti virus has worked well for me and I have contracted no viruses. It also includes anti-spam, PC Tune-up and a firewall which is also quite effective. It is available at Walmart and a lot of other stores. I don’t know if it’s the best, but at a price of about thirty dollars, it’s pretty good.

try windows live one care i have had it for almost a year it does not slow down my system easy to setup you can set it up to download updates and it never bothers you never had any bugs since or problems

But how good is Kaspersky?? Is it better than AVG? My McAfee subscription will be up in a few months and Im going to want to try something that doesnt hog resources and slow my system down. It also must be able to protect me and give me network info of my home network. Anything like that?
well several reviews i have seen state that kaspersky will spot more viruses even when the signatures are more then 2 months old, and with my own test with my viruse collection it recognized 96.7% nortons and mcafee were under 90%.
the newest version of zonealarm uses kaspersky for its antivirus engine.
if you don’t need a firewall then just get the kaspersky antivirus they just released version 7.
as well kaspersky does hourly updates.

Using AVG FREE for well over 5 years now, you may have 0 problems.  I also use Lavasoft AD-Aware 2007, also FREE and Zone Alarm  .. also FREE - I have a Dell Dimension 2350 so you should know how old my system is and it runs beautifully.

AVG is very light on system resources, you’ll never know it’s running unless a full scan is in progress.

well to answer your question is that software companies pay the hardware companies money to put there software on to your system.

i would suggest that if you haven’t already done so remove mcafee.

i use spy sweeper with antivirus make no mistake its not a replacement for a real antivirus program. live one care its a microsoft product and i really don’t care for it. there are several free antivirus programs that work just as well as the big boys (mcafee, nortons) in catching and removing viruses.

if you need a firewall zonelabs - zonealarm is a good one and its free there is a paid version as well, the paid aka pro version comes with kaspersky antivirus included. if you do buy a new antivirus check out there forums if there’s issues users will post, that’s one good way to know if its truly vista compatible.

We all know that there’s only one John Chow and Darren Rowse. They were pioneers in what they did. They devised strategies and spend money on them and received the returns. To get inspired from them is fair enough. But there has to be some amount of honesty in what you blog about and what you deliver to your readers. Having a blog with no traffic at all and writing about how to boost your traffic in 6 days is like fooling readers.

I mean, come on, we all are looking for the same thing all along. More traffic, more readers, more subscribers, more ads, more link buys, more cash, more Adsense revenues, and more popularity. Not everybody will get everything. Its a fact. So digest it and be honest.

If you want traffic, just do what you know and get the traffic first. If you are writing a blog to make money online, make some money first. Write about how you got it done. Display a scanned picture of the bill on the header of your blog, that’ll makes more sense. Doesn’t it?

Oh no! Not again.

This is the initial reaction when you visit those new blogs with the tag line - Make money online. Ironical isn’t it?

First off, this guy has a brand new blog, he’s only 16, he does not have a credit card, he has no ad spaces on the blog, nobody has ever bought any links/ad space, and….. he hasn’t made any money online yet. Then what the hell is he going to advice others on making money online ?

Weird. Why do people start off with this tag line - make money online? Yea, it may be one of the most searched keywords on the net but, but..but…hasn’t there to be a justification to why you blog ?

As I understand, in their endeavors to make money online, people just manage to create a blog and post along. Good idea but it’s kind of frustrating to see a blog with posts on “how to get more traffic to your blog” and in effect with no or very less traffic. I think being honest can fetch you more readers than trying to boast about something that you are not.

What is surprising about Junit is the religious aspect of it. For example, some comment on a blog a few weeks back had someone spouting shite like ‘well I’m not a zealot or anything, but I would never use code with no unit tests, it works by accident not design’. What’s particularly sickening about this is the fuckfaced disclaimer up front. It puts the whole thing right up there with such gems as ‘Well I’m no racist but those niggers…’ and ‘I’m no bible thumper but YOUR ALL BURNING IN HELL YOU GODDAM ABORTION LOVING BABYKILLERS’ (Note: The typo is deliberate).

Surprisingly, the developer world hobbled along quite successfully before junit. Huge portions of it keep on hobbling that way with astounding success. See, what people seem to have forgotten is that a unit test does not mandate junit. It’s the approach that matters. Coverage reports are there to make things more sexually stimulating, they’re NOT a fundamental part of the approach. You could have plenty of unit tests that are nothing more that main methods in your various implementation classes. That still has its value, and certainly is more useful than no tests at all.

The JUnit fetishists are the freakiest of them all. What’s impressive is that they’ve invented this whole new universe just to justify what a horrifically broken tool they’ve staked their careers on (yes thoughtworks fuckstains, I’m pointing and laughing at you, you dirty chozgobbling rumprangers). Need static initialisation for shared or expensive resources? Not possible in Junit! Therefore, it’s evil! if you need to do it you’re broken!

The same goes for anyone who ever expresses any need for something beyond one method one test. Why the religious zealotry here? We all write code every day that requires more than one method, so why can’t our tests function similarly? Why is it so unthinkable that there might be some element of good unit testing that are not fully captured by JUnit?

The sickest joke in all this is how badly JUnit itself is written. Just read some of the javadocs and inline comments, they make it fairly clear that a fairly liberal amount of drugs had been imbibed in the course of writing it all.

So I ask you, all of you who want nothing more in life than to bend over and have JUnit plug all your orifices, why? What do you get out of it? Why this sickening allegiance to a flawed, old, unmaintained, and dysfunctional tool?

I beg of you all, don’t use JSF, boycott it, avoid it all you can. Do not let it thrive or prosper. We don’t want it improved or tweaked, we want it to die the horrible painful death it so richly deserves. I can see the argument that the platform needs something like it. Taking struts and turning it into a specification is not the answer. The JSF group is in many ways much less constrained that the EJB group by backward compatibility. The few people who have chosen to adopt JSF can be (rightfully) dismissed as lunatics who expect to jump through hoops for every iteration anyway. Mission-critical JSF is practically an oxymoron, and there are many many great ideas in the community that should be leveraged and incorporated. Tainting the J2EE 5.0 spec with something so untested and universally reviled by the hardcore enterprise people, bread and butter webapp folk, and the hobbyist web monkey kids will do the the entire platform a great disservice.

So I beg of you all, don’t use JSF, boycott it, avoid it all you can. Do not let it thrive or prosper. We don’t want it improved or tweaked, we want it to die the horrible painful death it so richly deserves.

I can see the argument that the platform needs something like it. Taking struts and turning it into a specification is not the answer. The JSF group is in many ways much less constrained that the EJB group by backward compatibility. The few people who have chosen to adopt JSF can be (rightfully) dismissed as lunatics who expect to jump through hoops for every iteration anyway. Mission-critical JSF is practically an oxymoron, and there are many many great ideas in the community that should be leveraged and incorporated. Tainting the J2EE 5.0 spec with something so untested and universally reviled by the hardcore enterprise people, bread and butter webapp folk, and the hobbyist web monkey kids will do the the entire platform a great disservice.