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Useful Links:
Note: Please keep in mind that all of these links are to web sites
that we do not have any control of, so we cannot be responsible for
anything they say or do. Things on the Web change quickly,
so it is entirely possible that any of these sites could say or do
something with which we disagree entirely, before we become aware of
it and take them off this page.
Software
- Anti-Spyware
-
In our opinion, there are 3 best anti-spyware products.
2 are free for personal, home use:
AVG Free Anti-Spyware
from Grisoft,
and Ad-Aware from Lavasoft.
The third is the best of the lot, but costs (the perfectly
reasonably price of) $30: SpySweeper from
Webroot.
The other two cost about the same, for business use.
We recommend using at least two different
anti-spyware products.
- Anti-Virus
-
Here, the field is much less crowded. The best-known
products (which we won't name here because we don't want to
be sued) all have very serious technical issues, which lead
to all sorts of problems when people use them.
Our favorite is AVG
anti-virus, which is available in both
a free version for
personal, home use, and a
paid version
for business use. The paid version is about half the
cost of the better-known ones, and it works much better, in
our experience. Try it; you'll like it.
Note: generally, using more than one (1) anti-virus
program on your PC is a very bad idea, and causes all sorts
of problems. Since they are much more effective than
anti-spyware programs, you should only need one, if it is
a good one.
- Firewall
-
-
The most effective and least impactful (it doesn't make a
mess) firewall we've seen is Zone Alarm. You can
buy it or download a free copy for home use from
here. They
have several other products designed to keep your PC safe
when you use the Internet, but our favorite is their
original Zone Alarm product. Note: If you
use the free product, expect that it will pop up and ask you
when each package you have tries to access the Internet.
Soon, it gets "smarter" and stops asking.
If that makes you nuts, they you should probably pay for
Zone Alarm Pro, which you can tell to allow "recommended"
programs to access the Internet automatically, which the
free version can't do.
- General
-
Usually, we shy away from blanket recommendations, since
so few companies do more than one thing especially well,
but if you're looking to download something, a good place
to look first is
Download.com.
You will have to carefully read the description of what you
are getting, but you can at least be sure of not getting
spyware or viruses, and you can read the C/Net Editors'
reviews, and those of other users (you can even write your
own), and compares users' ratings before you download.
- Web Browsing
-
We don't recommend that anyone should ever use Internet
Explorer unless there is a web site that (shame on them)
does not work right with other browsers. Partly
because it is used for 85% of all web browsing, and partly
because of sloppy programming, the vast majority of
viruses, spyware, phishing and all sorts of malware
are spread by exploiting flaws in (or "features"
of) Internet Explorer. To add insult to injury, all
of the alternative browsers are nicer to use, besides.
Our favorites:
Firefox
(more compatible) and
Opera (faster).
They are both completely free, for personal or
business use, and overall nicer and much safer
than IE.
- Email
-
We recommend against using Outlook and Outlook Express,
for exactly the same reason as Internet Explorer (above).
We recommend using
Thunderbird
(by the same people who make Firefox, above) which is
completely free, for personal or business use.
Online Resources:
- PC Pitstop
- Find out all kinds of things about your PC. Takes about 5 minutes.
- House Call
- Does a virus and/or spyware check from your browser.
- Windows Updates
- Check here for updates to Windows™. Only works with Internet Explorer.
- Office Updates
- Check here for updates to Microsoft Office™. Only works well with Internet Explorer; click the link near the top-right, then do it again.
- Check your Internet Bandwidth
- Are you getting the speed you're paying for? Click
Here
or Here
or Here
to see.
-
-
-
Articles:
- Buying an HP printer?
- This articles suggests you should think twice.
And three times.
- How Bad are Internet Threats?
- Even the terrorists are worried about it!
- Browser Wars: Origin
-
This is an article from 1998 taking Microsoft and Netscape
(since bought by AOL) to task for failing to make their
browsers really work according to the W3C standard for HTML
(the language that makes the web work). This is why
some web sites work better with one browser than another.
Remember: this article is from '98! If anything,
the problem is worse today than it was then.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
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