Install Microsoft Security Essentials.

Windows 7 comes equipped with some solid security tools, including a robust firewall and the spyware-blocking Windows Defender. On top of that, you will need a good antivirus program, one that works quietly in the background and won’t bog down your system.

Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection against viruses and other kinds of malware, and it’s impact on your performance pc is negligible.

It could be a great alternative to paying an annual fee for virus protection, and whether you use XP, VIsta or 7 you should think about giving it a go and may even find it speeds up your pc.

Install Web Of Trust.

The seemingly innocent act of clicking a link – even one that’s at the top of a Google search-results page – can result in ‘drive-by downloads’ infecting your PC. Scary, right? But how do you know whether a link is safe to click?

Try Web of Trust, a browser add-on that will warn you of unsafe sites.

Specifically, the plug-in adds colour-coded icons to each link that your search engine produces: green for safe, yellow for risky and red for dangerous.

You can also right-click any link, such as one that appears in an online forum, and choose View WOT scorecard to perform a manual safety check.

WOT is free, and available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Although its rating icons add a little clutter to some web pages, we recommend it very highly for anyone concerned about security and looking for a quick and easy way to check for ‘dodgy’ pages.
 

Apple Owns the Mobile App Market

I think everyone knows a programmer within their circle of friends or aquaintances, so what are you waiting for? Get out there and get something developed, promote it and  grab some opportunity  with both hands in these times of ‘recession’.

Amazing! Even though there is a new serious security hole in IE8, we are still being advised to upgrade asap.

No wonder really. If you sold someone a kettle 10 years ago (Windows times) and they kept coming back asking you to fix it again and again, wouldn’t you also try and persuade them to get the latest model?

Microsoft issued a warning telling people to upgrade their internet browser, after the zero-day exploit that was used to attack companies such as Google.

According to Microsoft’s security advisory: "the vulnerability exists as an invalid pointer reference within Internet Explorer. It is possible under certain conditions for the invalid pointer to be accessed after an object is deleted. In a specially-crafted attack, in attempting to access a freed object, Internet Explorer can be caused to allow remote code execution."

In other words, a nasty net person could get remote control of your computer. If you’re anything like me, you wonder how the hell that can happen in reality – But, believe me. I’ve seen it done and it’s scary stuff

The same issue exists also in IE7, so regardless of what version you have you should make sure you have the latest updates and patches. Simply go to Microsoft’s homepage and get them as soon as you can.

Further advice from Microsoft is to run the browser in Protected Mode and ensure users aren’t running with administrator privileges.

My advice would be to ditch IE (if you haven’t already, where have you been these last 5 years??) and switch to Firefox. It’s FREE, much more user friendly and you can get hundreds of different official (safe) add-ons to make it do almost anything you want.  As soon as I get it to make me a cup of tea three times a day as well, I’ll let you all know.

Cheers

Microsoft has shipped a security advisory with an urgent message for Windows XP users:  Update your Flash Player immediately!

Here’s the warning:

So, even if you recently updated or installed Flash it would be wise to go to Adobe’s site and get the very latest version now. You can also de-select the ‘Free McAfee Security Scan’ if you don’t want it installed on your pc.

I’ve just checked out this new (for me anyway)  Twitter tool . If you’re into Twitter and Social Media stuff and would like to have a quick and easy way to setup targeted tweets, then you should check this out.

It allows you to automatically follow and get followers based on your selected keywords, so can give you a good idea of who is tweeting within your chosen area. Another cool feature is you can set it to ‘unfollow’ people who don’t follow you back, and this is also done automatically based on your own settings.

Here’s a quick sample from their site – "Choose a keyword or phrase, select how many people to follow each day, choose when to drop lame friends, and you’re done. A week from now you will have hundreds if not thousands of new followers – and it never has to stop."

Imagine if you have a site on a particular subject and you want to get visitors to your site. You can use the normal methods of trying to get the Google’s of this world to push people to your site, but that is a serious amount of work. I reckon it would be great if you could setup connections with people based on your common themes (from the keywords) and you would surely get a good percentage of those visiting your site.

I’ve just joined up to give it a  good trial  so will let you know in a week or so how it’s going, but so far it looks pretty good here. http://www.evertweet.com/

Cheers

Paul

Microsoft Loses $290 Million Court Judgement.

Due to the way that Word was built using a special XML editing technology, the company that owns the legal rights to that technology won a court judgement that means Microsoft has to be extremely careful to make sure that other patents haven’t been infringed. 

What this means in the real world is that it’s highly probable that Word, and also possibly it’s mother product Office, will need to be revamped or rebuilt. To those individuals who use Microsoft Office, this could potentially mean having to pay a higher price for the software.

I  personally haven’t used Office (or Word, Excel etc) for some time now on my personal computers but instead I use OpenOffice which is Free and built by Sun Microsystems companies, so is very stable and reliable. It has a massive developer community behind it so is kept well up to date and can be used to open all those old Word or Excel documents that you have from before.

The latest version (3.2) is also just about to be released with the most recent version (3.0) having been downloaded over 100 Million times in a little over twelve months. Surely, that says something good about this product.

Anyway, give it a go if you haven’t already and you will be surprised at the performance pc users would tell you was not previously possible. You can get it here directly from OpenOffice.org.

Enjoy

Paul

Save Time And Have More Fun With Your Twittering!

There’s a great new application called TweetGlide which I have just tried out and found that it makes my tweeting a lot simpler and much more fun.  It’s free and you can customize it exactly the way you want it.

It also allows you to display an advert to all users so can be used as a great way to go viral and grow your traffic to your profile. You can also earn money with it, which is even better.

What’s more, there is an iPhone compatible version coming soon and I am really looking forward to being able to do this on my phone and my pc.

You can download it here and give it a go. 

Cheers

TweetGlide – A Quick Review

4th column of twitterglide is the direct messages you send or other have sent to you. Tweetglide has innumerable features including a paid membership with added benefits. Read more…

What hardware should I buy to speed up PC games?

Being a PC gamer myself , several of my friends and fellow gamers have sometimes mentioned that they recently noticed that their games are slowing down and lagging, and they wanted to know what hardware would be best to buy to speed up those games. 

My initial comment is always "Before buying any hardware you might want to do some basic cleanup". It’s amzing how many regular gamers almost never clean up their machines and have games on their hard drives which haven’t been played for months or even years.

In My Computer, right-click on C: and select Properties. Then select Disk Cleanup. I also uncheck the Disk compression option, but you can leave the other options checked.

Then on the Tools tab, click Error-checking — Check now and Defragmentation — Defragment now.

In terms of hardware upgrades, adding RAM is usually the best bang for the buck. If you are talking about graphics intensive games, obviously a more powerful video card helps. Faster processor or upgrade to dual or quad core processor speeds things up.

I also recommend downloading the free utility CCleaner. Install it and run the registry check. Select Fix all errors and always take the option to create a registry backup when it is offered. Then set it to clean your machine and it will remove all old temporary files and any old data that hasn’t been used for a long time. The list of options may look quite scary the first time you run it, but once you have set it up it will make a huge difference in keeping your machine clean. A great side benefit of this is that if you run it also after every time you have been online in the internet, it will also clean your surfing history.