Comments for What Really Slows Windows Down

Heck, I've been away from Norton and all those fancy brands. I've never paid for Antivirus. I had AVG for a long time but last year it threw me for a loop so I said, Good-Bye! I tried other non famous brands but wasn't too happy. Until now, I found my free PC Tools Anti-Virus. It is excellent and very, very light. I've yet to see it fail or any monsters on my PC for the last 8 months. Just know, that if you keep your Automatic update button on XP, and CCleaner, SpywareBlaster, and all Updated frequently, you should have no problems at all! I recently also got AdvanceSystemCare, which is marvelous and a great fixerupper! ALSO FREE!

Don't forget to keep all of your third party products patched as well. The best way to minimize the chance of something getting past your AV is to close the hole it would use anyway. I find PC Tools Spyware Doctor to be very highly recommended and I've had success on several cleanups for clients, but their AntiVirus doesn't have enough of a track record for me, and Dr. Phil isn't exactly the guy I would listen to for IT security advice. (He's featured on their web site!)

For the same reason that I'm waiting for more pioneers and guinea pigs to take a chance on Viper, I'll wait on this one too. I prefer to base my selections on proven, tested products with long track records on the VB100 and high scores for efficiency on http://www.av-comparatives.org/. Other certifications, such as ICSA and West Coast Labs only require that the product meet a very basic minimum standard, not worth much.

Secunia's Personal Software Inspector monitors 130 apps installed on my system and alerts me whenever there is a newer patched version available. This includes zip utilities, flash players, pdf readers, media players, browsers, security & utility products, java, and all of the Microsoft Windows and Office products.

Secunia (and Belarc Advisor) have even alerted me to broken patches in MS products, which were missed by MS Update, although there were some obvious false positives during the beta phase. E.g., one message told me that I needed to upgrade to v11.6.7158, but I was already running v11.8.9432.

Now that the final release is available for FREE, there is no reason everyone shouldn't be running it. Get it here:
http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/

Heck, I've been away from Norton and all those fancy brands. I've never paid for Antivirus. I had AVG for a long time but last year it threw me for a loop so I said, Good-Bye! I tried other non famous brands but wasn't too happy. Until now, I found my free PC Tools Anti-Virus. It is excellent and very, very light. I've yet to see it fail or any monsters on my PC for the last 8 months. Just know, that if you keep your Automatic update button on XP, and CCleaner, SpywareBlaster, and all Updated frequently, you should have no problems at all! I recently also got AdvanceSystemCare, which is marvelous and a great fixerupper! ALSO FREE!