Friday, April 3, 2009

Defraggler

Piriform (http://www.piriform.com/) is the name of the company that has brought us CCleaner, an amazing free product that I hope all of you are using weekly. I just ran my weekly CCleaner and it took 30 seconds or less. That's all it takes if you do it regularly.

Piriform also has some other free utility programs, and I had heard recently about their Defraggler program. Also free, it is a program that just does one thing: defragments a hard drive. I downloaded it yesterday and installed it (amazingly fast install of about 15 seconds). I then proceeded to defrag my 250GB main hard drive and was NOT impressed. It was not faster than Microsoft's built-in disk defragmenter, although for the time I could stand to do so, it was more fun to watch!

After running it I ran the Analyze portion of the XP built-in defragment program and it found 15 fragmented files. Hmmmm. I guess we need a better definition of what a fragmented file is.

In any case, I do not recommend Defraggler but if you want to try it yourself, it can be quickly and easily downloaded and run. The reason that I am not recommending it for now is that it buys you nothing when compared to what you already have, and why add yet another program to your system if it gains you nothing?

Which reminds me: have you defragmented your hard drive lately? You should do this at least once a quarter.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

No reason to rush your upgrade to IE 8

This is a good article for the techies amongst you who may have an interest in the latest release of Internet Explorer (IE) from Microsoft.

As for me, I don't recommend the upgrade, and I don't even recommend IE at all, but prefer Firefox.

No reason to rush your upgrade to IE 8

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

AVG Anti-Virus Free Version 8.5

I downloaded and installed AVG Anti-Virus Free Version 8.5 tonight on 2 machines. Note it is still FREE! It went in quite easily, replacing the Version 8.0 I already had. I was glad to see that the Link Scanner is an option. This feature is the one that gives you green checkmarks next to okay web sites when you do a Google search, for example, and view the search results. Opting out of the Link Scanner  as I did (it was integrated in Version 8.0 and not optional) should make Google searches faster. I never really even saw anything but green checkmarks anyway all the time I had Version 8.0 installed.

This new version is a 60MB file to be downloaded, so may take a while for you dial-up and DSL users.

You can get it here if you want to try it out, however, I would recommend waiting a month or more until all the kinks are ironed out. Click on the Download Now green icon here:

AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 8.5.285 

While I have your attention, ………………

The hit count on this blog - down at the bottom of this page - shows that you received my e-mail and have visited here to check out the post just below this one, so, while I have your attention, let me make a few other suggestions.

Today, the day before CONFICKER is rumored to cause some widespread mayhem, would be a great day to take some other precautions. It's a good time to do a full system scan using Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware, SuperAntispyware, and Spybot, and while you are at it, a full system scan with your anti-virus program, in my case AVG Free.

Before you start the full scans, be sure to update each one to ensure that it has the latest definitions. Become very familiar and comfortable with each of these programs so that on any given day you can run a manual scan.

If you have not received my e-mail re. Conficker, and wish to be on my mailing list, please contact me using the "Contact the PC Doc" link just to the right of this post and ask to be added to my list.