Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
Tips For Virus And Spyware Removal
If you’ve ever experienced a virus or spyware on your computer, you know how painful it can be. Your computer slows to a crawl. Random advertisements pop-up on your screen. Weird things happen, and as time goes by, the problems only grow worse.
Here are a few simple steps that will help you get your computer back under control.
1) Restart your computer in Safe Mode with Networking. Tap F8 when you first turn on your computer for the Advanced Startup Menu. More in-depth instructions can be found here. This special mode allows you to access the internet, but also prevents most viruses and spyware from being able to run, making it a lot easier to remove them.
2) To remove a virus, download Malwarebytes, install and update, and then run a full scan. It’s important to run a second scan with SUPERAntiSpyware to remove any remaining traces of the virus and/or spyware.
For future protection, if you don’t already have a commercial antivirus, consider installing the free version of Avast Free Antivirus. It’s easy to use, provides excellent protection, and is free for non-commercial use!
Avast 5, Free Anti-Virus Released
A new version of my favorite free Anti-Virus, Avast Home Edition, was released last week. Improvements include a simpler interface, easier registration, and a new, faster, scanning engine.
For the highest level of protection, and for business use, I recommend Norton or Kaspersky, but Avast is a fantastic money-saving alternative that’s worth a look.
Note: Before installing Avast, you’ll want to uninstall any other real-time Anti-Virus software you may have installed to prevent a conflict.
Optimize Performance by Automatically Defragging on Idle
Hard drive speed is one of the biggest performance bottlenecks for computers today. File fragmentation slows things further if left unchecked.
Until recently, I rarely recommended defragging because the difficulty and time required for running manual scans, but now I recommend Smart Defrag. It’ll automatically defragment your hard drive when it’s idle. And if you’re going to be away from your computer for a few hours, running a ‘Fast Optimize’ will help as well.
So, what is defragging anyway? If you’ve ever read a Choose Your Own Adventure book, you know that at the end of each page you are presented with a couple of choices, and you continue reading by flipping to the page for that choice. Likewise, when files are fragmented, your hard drive has to skip forward and backward to finish reading a file, which slows down performance. Defragging fixes this problem by moving files so that they can be read sequentially. It also optimizes performance by placing the most frequently used files first on the hard drive.
Optimizing performance with CCleaner
CCleaner is a free, nifty program that I frequently use for computer tune-ups. I use it primarily for its registry cleaner, which you can see in the screenshot below.
Cleaning the registry is especially helpful for computers that have had Windows installed a while. As programs are installed and uninstalled, unnecessary junk builds up over time, slowing performance, occasionally causing other problems.
To run the registry cleaner, start CCleaner, click on the registry icon on the left, click on ‘Scan for Issues’, and finally click ‘Fix selected issues’.
Thunderbird: Firefox’s Sidekick For Email
If you like Firefox, and aren’t using Thunderbird, read on.
Mozilla Thunderbird, like Firefox, is community built, free, and has won many awards. It’s an email client that’s fast, secure, and offers add-ons. When I first started using it, the speed difference was pretty noticeable compared with Windows Live Mail, which is Microsoft’s new name for Outlook Express.
Even if you like using webmail, it’s probably worth installing Thunderbird so that your email is backed up on your computer, and accessible even when you’re offline. Thunderbird works well with most webmail providers. Usually you can find simple instructions on how to configure your account with a quick search on Google, such as “thunderbird gmail”.
If you’re like me, and work best with a calendar and/or a task list, there’s an excellent add-on called Lightening. To install it, download it to your desktop, go to Tools -> Add-Ons, click Install… and select it from your desktop. After restarting Thunderbird, Lightening will be installed.
Another excellent add-on, Zindus, helped me add all of my contacts from Gmail.
Enjoy!
What’s the scoop on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari?
The internet has grown dramatically in the last ten years. More likely than not, you weren’t even online in 1999, in the days of Netscape Navigator 4, and Internet Exploder Explorer 5.
As the Internet has grown in significance to our daily lives, the battle for the dominant browser has intensified greatly, and rightly so.
The three most notable browsers that I believe will continue to be on the front lines are: Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple’s Safari.
Firefox provides the most add-on functionality at the expense of being slightly slower. The benefit of the add-ons makes this my browser choice for my desktop. Some of my favorite add-ons for Firefox include: Adblock Plus, IE Tab, TwitterFox, WOT (Web Of Trust), and NoScript.
Chrome 2 was just released yesterday, increasing the speed and stability of an already lightweight and fast browser. I use Chrome on my Netbook because of it’s performance, and its minimalistic approach to layout allows me to see more web content on my small 10″ screen.
Safari is extremely fast, has superior out-of-the-box functionality, follows web standards well, and is arguably the best looking, especially if you ask an Apple fan. =D
Having a good browser and knowing how to use it increases your security and efficiency online, and is becoming an increasingly important skill set for everyone.
Two quick tips for protecting your critical data
Benjamin Franklin once said that “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” In a world where hard drives crash, files corrupt, and viruses wreck havoc, we need safeguards for protecting critical data. Here are two quick and easy tips.
1) Work on the web as much as you can so that backups are handled without even needing to think about it. An example would be using webmail, such as GMail, so that your emails are stored somewhere other than just your local hard drive. Using the web has the additional benefit of being able to access your data wherever you are, and on whatever computer happens to be convenient.
2) If you have a lot of documents, pictures, and music, you’re probably going to need to come up with a backup plan for those things. You’ll need a second hard drive where you’ll be copying your data. FBackup is a free application for handling backups and is easy to use. Once you set up a schedule for it, it’ll run your backups in the background automatically.
Can I recover my file?!
If you’ve used a computer very long at all, you’ve probably lost data. Maybe you lost a paper you were working on, deleted an email too fast, or worst of all, your hard drive crashed!
Losing data is always a painful thing, but here are some tips that will help you know whether or not your file might be recoverable. My next article will explain some steps you can take to avoid data loss in the future.
Let me compare your hard drive to a book. Just like a book has a table of contents, a hard drive has a Master File Table (MFT). The MFT stores information like the names and locations of files on the disk.
When you delete a file, it’s usually still there, and has simply been removed from the MFT. It’s like having a book with a chapter that’s not listed in the table of contents. Files like that are easy to recover as long as they haven’t been overwritten by another file, so you’ll want to recover sooner rather than later if possible.
If you deleted your file a while back, it might be difficult to recover, because once a file is removed from the MFT a new file can be written on top of where the old one was. Similarly, if you save an old or bad version of a file that has the same name as a file you’ve been working on, you overwrite the file with bad data. In many programs, you can undo changes by clicking Undo (File->Undo), but once you close the file this option will probably be unavailable.
If your drive isn’t showing up in My Computer, you’ll want to make sure that everything is plugged in properly, and then check Disk Management (Go to the Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management) to see if it’s showing up there. You should also check and see if it shows up in your system BIOS (Usually you get there by pressing f2 or del on your keyboard during start up, but it varies). If it’s not showing up, your drive is probably dead.
If you have a drive that has suddenly stopped showing files that used to be there, they may have been deleted or possibly the MFT has simply become corrupt. Data recovery software can usually help in these sorts of situations.
Even without spending any money you can run free file recovery software, such as the free version of Handy Recovery I linked to above, which can recover data in most basic scenarios. If the free version won’t cut it, you can download a trial for the full fledged version to see if you’ll be able to recover the data you’ve lost. If the files are there, you can recover them by buying a license for $49. If you have a Mac, one option for data recovery software I’ve used with good success is Data Rescue.
What software do you use every day?
Some of the best things in life are free. Let me tell you about seven of the finest free gems in the software world.
1) Mozilla Firefox is a superior browser. It’s open source, and its add-ons deliver incredible flexibility. My favorite addon is Adblock Plus. It blocks almost all advertisements you’d normally see on the web.
2) WordWeb has become one of my regular friends over the last several years. With a simple Ctrl + Alt + W (the hotkeys can be customized if desired) a box pops up instantly that allows me to look up the definition or spelling of a word. If I really want to be fancy, I can double click on a word, which highlights it, and then press the hotkeys and it instantly looks up that word. This has been a really helpful tool for me in expanding my vocabulary and improving spelling. Some people have told me that they think Google is just as good for doing this, but once you get used to WordWeb, you’ll never go back.
3) Google Picasa is a superb free program for photo management and basic editing. It’s comparable to Adobe LightRoom, which retails for $299.
4) Foxit PDF Reader is an extremely lightweight and fast PDF reader. If you work with a lot of PDFs or work on an older computer, you’ll notice significantly faster performance.
5) iTunes: It took me a while to finally come to the conclusion that I like iTunes– even though there are still things that really tweak me about it. It runs a few too many unnecessary processes in the background, and I don’t like the Apple Software Updater very much, but I’ve found iTunes to be very stable and easy-to-use for managing music.
6) AVG Free Antivirus protection is a must for most computers. Instead of going out and buying Norton Antivirus every year, home users can save some money by using AVG Free. The free version offers a very decent level of all-around protection, and it’s always done a good job for me. AVG also offers more comprehensive packages as well if you want to guard against rootkits and broader protection on the web.
7) Open Office is an excellent alternative to Microsoft Office for those who are hesitant to plunk down a couple hundred dollars to edit documents. There are a few things to keep in mind. While I’ve almost never had a problem opening a file with Open Office, there have been a couple of times when I’ve forgotten to save the file in a format that other Microsoft Office users can open– which is a frustrating experience for everyone involved. It is possible to save files in the Microsoft format, so if you’re planning on sharing a document with others, simply save the file in a Microsoft format right from the start.