August 27th, 2009 at 04:36pm
Under General
In spite of its older brother Spyware Doctor’s fame, PC Tools Internet Security is an interesting product. The reality is that it is a rarely sought after product. This is surprising. PC Tools Antivirus is built with the same foundational technology as that which gives us Spyware Doctor and PC Tools Antivirus! Additionally, this product has spamdefense in the offering as well.
I began to wonder if it might be cost that is keeping it from wide spread adoption. After checking on pricing, $59.95 (as of 9/26/08) is a reasonable cost. The only bad thing I found in reviews was its lack of heuristic scanning.
Heuristic scanning: “A heuristic probe is used to discover new, unknown viruses in your systems that have not yet been identified. Only some antiviruses can do this type of probe, the majority are only able to discover known viruses.” This doesn’t seem to be the reason either.
I will chalk it up to a lack of marketing. The reason I say this is because I see heuristic search capability incorporated in the latest release. Most importantly, I found out that most customers and potential customers are still looking for their antivirus and firewall as separate offerings.
Bob Metcalfe, the person attributed as the Inventor of the Internet exemplifies what choosing what is not so popular….”And I turned around to look at these 10, 12 AT&T suits, and they were all laughing. And it was in that moment that AT&T became my bte noire, because I realized in that moment that these SOBs were rooting against me. To this day, I still cringe at the mention of AT&T. That’s why my cell phone is a T-Mobile. The rest of my family uses AT&T, but I refuse .”
Granted, choosing PC Tools Internet Security will not be that dramatic but it could prove to be a good internet security application for your computer.
By writer
August 16th, 2009 at 11:54am
Under General
Many computer users seem to have some big misunderstandings about how important PC maintenance is to insure its proper performance. Possibly the most overlooked and neglected maintenance take is registry cleaning.
The average homeowner knows that they will have to keep up with routine home repairs and property maintenance if they want it to last a lifetime. Just like car owners understand perfectly that they will need to do routine oil changes, tune-ups, tire rotations and such if they expect their vehicles to keep running.
However, when it comes to computers — many people mistakenly assume that buying a computer is the beginning and the end of their investment in the machine, other than the occasional feature upgrade, one-off purchase, or accessory. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
One of the most important aspects of computer maintenance is registry cleaning. The registry can be thought of as the brains of the computer since its what controls nearly every aspect of the PCs functionality as well as any additional applications that are running.
Over months and years of use, or just with a lot of adding and removing of programs, your computer’s registry begins to fill up with outdated information, it stores entries that actually hold errant information, and the entire size of your registry just becomes too large to handle efficiently.
When these things occur, you’ll start to notice that your PC slows down, certain applications may hang, freeze, or crash; you’ll see error messages popping up, or you’ll even experience intermittent rebooting of your PC — without your input.
While computer slowdowns can be attributed to a few different things — running out of disk space, inadequate memory, a heavily fragmented hard drive, or even a hard-drive failure waiting to happen — applications freezing, error messages, and rebooting with no input are symptoms of an unhealthy registry.
You will have to use a registry repair software to get rid of registry entries that are causing problems and threatening your computers stability. While it is very rare, some registry related problems may require that you reinstall the Windows operating system. A registry that performs poorly can quickly degrade your computers efficiency and cause problems with different applications that you try to run.
Fortunately, registry cleaning and repair is relatively easy — most professional registry repair utilities are very user friendly; no matter what your experience level, chances are that you can easily operate a registry cleaner. Cleaning your registry is a quick, and simple, way to help ensure the stability of your computer, and to protect your investment for years to come.
By writer