ESET Smart Security

Independent test labs consistently rank ESET’s Nod32 antivirus program as one of the top performers, so how has company gone about improving its product? For starters, the Smart Security suite builds on Nod32’s core by stuffing a personal firewall, antispyware module, web access protection, and spam controls into a tidy 22MB package. But that’s just the beginning.

From first click to finish, you’ll be up and running in less than a minute with no reboot required. The default settings will have you ready to romp around the web, but should you decide to dive into the interface’s advanced section, you’ll find a truckload of options at your disposal in plain English.

In addition to scouring your local drives, the real-time file protection homes in on removable media and network drives too. And when it comes to safeguarding your email, if you’re not using Outlook, simply expand the POP3 tree and put a checkmark next to your email client of choice, or click the Add button if you don’t see it listed. It doesn’t get any easier than this.

Parental units and IT admins alike will appreciate the ability to block specific web addresses, and support for wildcard entries save you the time of inputting every subdomain. Once you have everything configured, export your settings to an XML file for effortless configuration of your entire home or work network.

Given the bevy of options and stellar track record, we were determined to uncover an Achilles’ heel, but we just couldn’t find one. ESET’s Smart Security thwarted our attempts to download infected files, making the scant 7 minutes and 54 seconds it took to scan our system feel as though we were just going through the motions.

Only the lack of identity protection and the inability to create a rescue disk prevent this from being the perfect package. As it stands, it will have to settle for near-perfect.

Verdict: 9
www.eset.com
$59 1 yr ($89 2 yrs)

Norton Internet Security 2009

Could this be the luxury sedan of antivirus suites?

For the latest version of its AV suite, Symantec went back to the drawing board and completely rewritten the program from the ground up with a focus on speed. Even the installer has been revamped; in an attempt to reduce setup time to less than a minute (we clocked it at 55 seconds), Symantec coded its own proprietary installer instead of using Microsoft’s, as it has
in the past.

This year’s release adds a smart scheduler that monitors task utilization in real time and queues up its task if the system is busy. This means if you’re lining up a headshot in your favorite shooter, NIS will take a backseat until system resources are freed. But if a task qualifies as critical, it will run regardless of what you’re doing, so you can continue to crunch

Folding@Home without being a sitting target. And to keep itself honest, Symantec integrates a system monitor showing what percentage of CPU cycles NIS is consuming—nifty!

Live Update has been rewritten too, and in addition to regular updates, Symantec sends out micro updates. These pulse updates ensure that when a new threat is discovered in the wild, you’ll have the necessary signature definition within minutes instead of waiting up to 24 hours for the next refresh.

The program swept through our test system in less than 10 minutes, and subsequent scans completed in less than two minutes! NIS accomplishes this by discerning between trusted and untrusted files and by default won’t rescan files that haven’t changed.

NIS 2009 leaves virtually no security stone unturned. Our biggest knock is that not all features work under Vista x64, such as right-click scanning. Still, if security suites were cars, consider NIS 2009 a decked-out Lexus.

Verdict: 9
www.symantec.com
$70 (3 PCs)

AVG Internet Security 8.0

An old favorite gets a new look

Now in version 8.0, AVG’s latest release appears to have taken a page or three from Vista. A redesigned interface sports high-resolution icons and a more colorful palette, and even the system tray icon feels borrowed from Microsoft’s newest OS; turn off one of the security modules and the icon turns red, alerting you of impending doom, even if you’ve only disabled the spam filter. That’s just wacky. Thankfully, you can turn off the ominous notification.

No other AV application we tested consumed more RAM, and our performance benchmarks took the biggest hit with AVG installed. During a system scan (which, while not the slowest, dragged along at the tail end of all the suites), CPU utilization averaged 25 percent with sporadic spikes reaching as high as 84 percent. We didn’t know if AVG was scanning or having a seizure.

AVG provides one of the more feature-rich packages of the bunch. In addition to the new scanning engine, you’ll find spam and spyware protection, a firewall, safeguards against drive-by downloads, immunity against IM-bound attacks (IQC and MSN only), a customizable scheduler, and a rootkit scanner. Tying it all together is a back end brimming with options to satiate even the most demanding security connoisseur.

We especially like the concept behind AVG’s web protection; we just wish it worked better. The Active Surf-Shield component scans visited web pages for malicious code and the Search Shield checks Google, MSN, and Yahoo search results for active threats, but enabling them slows down web surfing. And at the time of this writing, Search Shield was not working with Firefox 3.0.

AVG’s detection rate dips below that of the best-performing AV apps during Virus Bulletin’s extensive testing but still earned a VB100 award, meaning it caught all of VB’s in-the-wild viruses with no false positives. ANG also excelled in our own tests. Just make sure you have a modern system to run it on.

Verdict: 7
www.grisoft.com
$55 (2 yrs)

Kaspersky Internet Security 2009

Why pay more when you can get the same or better for less?

At $80 for a one-year subscription, Kaspersky charges more than any other suite we tested. If you buy the downloadable version instead of a retail boxed copy, the license is good for up to three users—that’s little consolation to single-PC
households.

Kaspersky also holds the undesirable record for longest install time. What started off as a pokey two-minute install ballooned into an agonizing eight minutes composed of a tediously long update and no less than two reboots.

Once we were finally up and running, Kaspersky began to atone for its pricing and installation sins. Like Norton’s package, Kaspersky significantly shortens subsequent system scans by skipping files already determined to be clean. During an initial run-through, Kaspersky’s iChecker algorithm makes note of certain files’ digital signatures and saves them in a special table. If the signature matches the next time a scan takes place, the file will be skipped over. The result is that a 12-minute system scan was reduced to a blazing one minute and 14 seconds, finally setting a record Kaspersky could be proud of.

Like the other full-featured suites, Kaspersky crams a multitude of tools into a neatly organized package and manages to set itself apart in some areas. Rather than limit email scanning to Outlook and POP3, Kaspersky also analyzes IMAP traffic. It boasts a banner-ad blocker and, through parental controls, the ability to limit how much time children can roam the web. Finally, road warriors will appreciate the option to automatically disable scheduled scans when running on battery power.

Kaspersky provided a formidable wall of defense against both viruses and spyware, keeping our test bed protected against Trojans, dialers, and other Internet-bound ills. But so did some of the less-expensive suites.

Verdict: 6
http://usa.kaspersky.com
$80 (3 PCs)

McAfee Total Protection 2009

A mishmash of features leaves us with mixed feelings

Most enthusiasts view McAfee as just another resource hog often found in OEM systems alongside performance-pillaging bloatware. Fair assessment or not, this is the perception McAfee’s up against in trying to win over the PC elite. It helps that the company isn’t blissfully unaware of the importance placed on performance; its latest edition promises to raise the bar with a more efficient engine that won’t drag your system down.

In our testing, McAfee fell in the middle of the pack instead of leading the charge. RAM consumption crept above what we’d consider lean, and while scanning for malware, CPU utilization often hovered around 40 percent. That in itself isn’t criminal, but we felt swindled when all it bought us was the second-slowest scan time of the bunch—although, remarkably, we didn’t see much of a drop in gaming or day-to-day computing performance.

McAfee’s list of features ranges in practicality from the beneficial to the unlikely to ever be used. Occupying the former camp are spyware protection, a highly configurable firewall, email and IM guards, basic parental controls, and a file shredder. But we just can’t get stoked about the virus map, which displays global viral hot spots, or the HackerWatch module, which looks for patterns of attack around the world to report to ISPs. And still other features, like Active Protection for real-time safeguards, will be made available only through future updates—boo!

Living up to its name, McAfee Total Protection 2009 proved a formidable adversary against all types of malware and stopped malicious websites from loading. We also dig McAfee’s SiteAdvisor tool, which not only identifies questionable search results but also gives a detailed report on why the URL is suspect. But no matter how good it protects, we’re not willing to endure slow scanning performance or wait for features that should have been available at release.

Verdict: 6
www.mcafee.com
$70 (3 PCs)

Access Gmail via IMAP

While most email providers offer only one-way POP downloads of your messages, Gmail offers the more sophisticated, two-way sync protocol, IMAP. With IMAP, you can access your Gmail on multiple computers and mobile devices, and changes you make on one device are immediately reflected everywhere else. IMAP syncs the read and unread status of all your Gmail messages in all your labels (represented as traditional folders in your IMAP client of choice). To enable IMAP in Gmail’s Settings, click the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab. You’ll have to configure your email program using Gmail’s secure IMAP settings; click the “Configuration instructions” link to get the details for your email software.

Mute a Chatty Email Thread

When an email conversation is stuck in a never-ending “reply all” cycle and you wish you weren’t on the recipient list, open the conversation and choose Mute from Gmail’s More Actions menu. This will silence the thread, meaning that any new replies to it will skip your inbox and be archived automatically. You can still search for and find muted messages; you just won’t get notifications of new replies while it’s going on. To find conversations you’ve muted, enter is:muted into Gmail’s search box.

Master Gmails Keyboard Shortcuts

If you receive a lot of email, Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts are essential, and should be committed to muscle memory as soon as possible. To enable keyboard shortcuts in Gmail’s settings, go to the General tab, and select the “Keyboard shortcuts on” radio button. Now you can move forward and back between your messages using the J and K keys, tap R to reply to a message, C to compose a new message, and the / key to move your cursor to Gmail’s search box. Some keys even perform multiple actions. For example, if you’re done reading a message, press ] to archive it and move to the next message. To see all the available keyboards shortcuts ClickHere

Catch Embarrassing Email Mistakes Before You Send

Just sent an email you wish you could take back? Told someone the file was attached and sent the message before you actually attached it? Gmail Labs, Gmail’s “testing ground for experimental features,” offers two tools that can help. The Undo Send feature gives you a few minutes to click an undo link after you’ve sent a message you immediately regret. The Forgotten Attachment Detector checks to see if you mentioned the words “attachment” or “attached” in your message but did not attach a file. If it suspects you’ve made a mistake, it prompts you with a dialog box that asks if you forgot your attachment—all before it sends the email. To enable Gmail Labs and get these and other Labs features mentioned on this page, click the Labs tab.

Send Repetitive Replies Faster with Canned Responses

When you receive a lot of email that requires the same response, you need not suffer the indignity of same-replying from scratch every time. Gmail’s Canned Responses feature (another tweak from Gmail Labs) lets you set up email scripts that you can choose from a drop-down to send as a reply to a message. For example, you could have a Canned Response called “thanks” associated with the message, “Thanks for letting us know, we’re working on it!” With Gmail Labs and Canned Responses enabled, open a new email, compose your canned response, and from the Canned Responses drop-down under Save, choose “New Canned Response” and enter a name for it. Then, any time you want to use the response when replying to an email, click the Canned Responses link, and choose its name from the Insert section. Canned Responses also work in filters. For example, you could say that any email from certain addresses should automatically get a particular canned response.

Send and Receive Mail from Other Accounts in Gmail

Switching to Gmail sounds tempting, but what if you don’t want to change your email addresses? You don’t have to. Gmail comes with a built-in POP fetcher, which can retrieve messages from up to five existing email accounts and drop them in your Gmail inbox. You can also set up multiple “From:” addresses that match your existing accounts. This way, when you send an email in Gmail, you can have it originate from your Gmail account, or from your alternate “From:” addresses. To start using other email addresses within Gmail, go to Settings and enter your other account details in the Accounts tab.

Add an Email to Your Task List

Gmail’s built-in to-do list application, Tasks, makes it easy to turn messages into to-dos. You can manage your tasks, subtasks, task descriptions, and due dates just by clicking the Tasks link in the Gmail sidebar. And if you’ve got an email message that contains a to-do item in it, choose “Add to Tasks” from the More Actions menu to add it to your list with a link to the message.

- MaximumPC Article

It all started with Nexus in 1991, the first worldwide web interface. That year marked the beginning of the browser war. Just type in ‘list of browsers’ in Google and you can find at least 50 web browsers to choose from. This ‘storm’ of applications just to access the ‘cloud’ is mind boggling but one doesn’t have to find out which three browsers fight for the throne every month or so with there newer versions, add-ons, better UIs and what not. You can just keep switching from one to the other every week just for the fun of it.

Google’s Chrome has finally beaten Apple’s hyped up Safari which was, honestly, good for nothing. It demanded more memory, wasn’t much of a fast browser and the add-ons made the browser more difficult to handle instead of tweaking it up.

There are 3 main aspects through which one can judge, which browser is the one for them; security, privacy and performance. The Big three, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome will be discussed under these factors.

Security

It is a very basic but important issue. You wouldn’t want be shopping online without proper security of course. There are two main kinds of threats that need to be attended to by any web browser; Phishing and Malware.

Phishing refers to high – tech security threats referring to websites that trick the users into providing personal, financial and password information. Phishing sites cannot be easily detected as they look the same as the usually trusted websites like banks and mortgage companies.

Malware are a kind of virus that infiltrate computers without the user’s consent and can retrieve vital information from it.

The Big 3 have latest security technology for tackling these issues. IE is equipped with ‘Phishing Filter’ and ‘Malware Protection’ and Firefox is equipped with their equivalents.

Saving the best for last, Chrome uses ‘sandboxing’ technology which actually is quite genius. The term ‘sandbox’ is used by developers which means running operations in isolation. Chrome uses this technique by limiting access of the browser operations within, meaning nothing can infiltrate the user’s computer as the browser treats itself in a completely isolated environment.

Privacy

This one is a tie. ‘InPrivate’ for IE, ‘Private’ for Firefox and ‘Incognito’ for Chrome let you use the browser without saving anything on the hard drive let it be passwords, history, cookies or cache. The only difference here is the fancy names they use. These features can be activated quite easily and can be found often under the ‘Tools’ menu.

Performance

The humorous ‘legendary’ claims made by Microsoft in their infamous ‘browser comparison chart’ [can be found on their website] comparing the Big 3 are quite bogus but one has to admit what they said in the performance section, ‘knowing the top speed of a car doesn’t tell you how fast you can drive in rush hour’, is sadly true. The Big 3 are almost the same in performance if u test them through YouTube and time them until they load a video.

So, the answer to the question, ‘which browser is the best?’ depends on you! If you like the user interface to be customized to your favorite rock band or your dream car, Chrome is the one for you, or if you like seeing the boring ‘E’ icon in blue all the time, go for IE. For tech savvies who want everything to be the way they want it to be, the Firefox add-ons do it for them.

- By Nathan Black

Every time your computer opens a webpage, it requests to retrieve pictures, images, and other data from a website to your computer. This process can take some time, especially on heavily loaded websites or if you’re using a slow Internet connection like dial-up. To save time and be more efficient, your computer saves many of the files that download from each website to your harddrive. This makes several things possible:

* When you revisit a site you have already been to, your computer needs only to search for new information or changes to the website, and load all of the identical features (like images, logos, and layouts that don’t change) from your computer.

* Sites you visit frequently will load because it does not need to re-download the entire site, every time you visit.

* When you click the “back”, “forward”, and “refresh” buttons on your browser toolbar, you can quickly reload pages you are currently visiting.

* Features like “History” used temporary Internet files to keep track of sites you visited recently, in case you want to go back to something you visited earlier that day or up to several weeks ago.

* You can view entire “stored” websites on your browser when you are not on the Internet. They may not have the most up-to-date information, but you will still be able to view information and use features that were loaded from a previous online visit.

* Some websites that have browser-based flash games can be played offline, because the temporary Internet files have saved this content to your computer. This means you can play some of your favorite games for hours without using online time on your Internet service.

Temporary Internet files are not always a good thing. It’s nice to save the information from websites you visit frequently, but eventually, your computer will be full of saved files from hundreds of websites you only visited once and may not visit again. There is no need to keep this information.

Many times a technician will direct you to your Internet Options and have you delete all your temporary Internet files and cookies in order to free your browser of the clutter of all this unnecessary saved information from visited sites over time. This sometimes helps browsers run faster, and aviod error messages like “This page cannot be displayed”, etc.

This can be a quick fix that you can do if you are having problems with your browser. It may not solve your problem, but it never hurts to try-plus, cleaning out your browser is a good thing to do-especially if you do a lot of surfing.

First, click Tools at the top of your browser.

Then click “Internet Options” (or maybe “Options” if you are not using Internet Explorer)

Then look for “Browsing History” or Temporary Internet Files”. Click the Delete or Delete Files button.

If you click Delete, you will see a list of different types of stored information on your computer. You can select which you prefer to delete from here.

If you are using a browser other than Internet Explorer, the options will look slightly different. If you cannot find what you are looking for, you will find step by step instructions for most browsers on websites like wikihow.com/Clear-Your-Browser’s-Cache. Also, there are many downloadable tools that clean your computer of Internet files and cookies regularly that are stored deep in your computer that will still remain behind after a manual delete described above. This is usually not necessary unless you need to make sure no one ever knows what websites you have visited.

Many browsers now offer the ability to surf the Internet without saving any information to your computer in the first place. Internet Explorer 8′s “In-Private Browsing”, Firefox’s “Private Browsing”, Chrome’s “Incognito Mode”, are all the same concept-surf the Internet without leaving a trace on your computer. This is one of the best ways to surf privately and not allow anyone to retrieve the information later.

This client knew they should not do that but it was a habit hard to break. You can never be sure of the original source of an email even if sent from a friend. Why, because if they have a email spam bot on their computer it could forward and send out spam and phishing emails with malicious links just waiting for you to click and go to a website serving up the latest malware and trojan horses.

Here is what to do when you receive an email with links. Try to decipher what the link is about such as some news blurb, a joke, a product or something else. Next, use your favorite search engine and use the key words to search and find the same information.

Be extremely cautious about emails claiming to be from your financial institution. Never click on links in these even if you are sure it is legitimate. Instead, type the financial institutions web address into the Internet Browser to reach their web-site. Be sure to type the web-site exactly and if you are prone to typing errors consider first using the search engine to get the correct link or create a Favorite / Bookmark in the Internet Browser. This way you are much less likely to end up at a phishing site just waiting for you to enter your email, password and account information.

So, next time you see a link in an email, DO NOT click on it!