Question: Sonny says, "My CA Antivirus expired, so Microsoft Security Essentials installed, and then I got AVG Free. My computer is still running very slowly. Do you know why?"
Answer: Good question, Sonny. It's not a bad idea to have more than one antimalware product available because none of them are entirely foolproof. All the different, legitimate, antimalware products will stop something that the others won't, or will be stopped by something that wouldn't stop the others. One thing to consider, if you do get an infection, it already has most likely compromised whatever you were using, making its usage somewhat less useful than it could be otherwise. The one thing you don't want to do is to have more than one program that's constantly scanning every program you run. Let your antivirus be that program. Uninstall, or disable the constant scanning feature for any others. Yes, that makes you more vulnerable to attack, but it's a pretty fair compromise between safety and usability. You could put something inside a steel cube with 2-inch thick walls and no one could steal those contents, but legitimate users couldn't get at those contents either. So, there's always a trade-off. If you have all three of those programs installed, I'd recommend uninstalling everything that has expired to free up computing power. You might even want to consider something like Revo Uninstaller to help with the uninstallation.
Cool Site: CollegePackingList: Well, maybe it's because we're moving Telyssa from Lubbock to Amarillo this week, but makeuseof showed me a website that looks extremely helpful as folks get ready to move their kids off to college. It's collegepackinglist.com, and is an online list. You log into it with your Facebook account, and the site is free to use. Items you can add to your list are classified by category. The categories are Dorm, Kitchen, Classroom, Bathroom, Clothing, and Miscellaneous. Most of what you'll need to get moved to the campus is already listed, but if you have specific requirements, the site allows you to add these into the predefined categories. This way, you can make sure you've packed everything you need to take with you. But what if you don't already own everything you need to take? What if you have stuff still to buy? Well, collegepackinglist includes a shopping list, too. Both lists can be saved, shared with friends and family, and printed for offline use.
Cool Gadget: FarStone Total Recovery: When Windows won't boot, it locks away many of the important data files you need to get at.
Eddie: Like that college project you've been working on for 6 weeks?
David: Exactly, and this is where Farstone's TotalRecovery flash drive comes in. It's a bootable USB Flash Drive that includes Windows-based backup software. Because it's Windows-based, you can connect an external drive of any kind, or a network device, CD/DVD, whatever. The only real requirement is that your computer's BIOS be able to boot from USB. For computers that are 3-5 years old or newer, that's not a problem. Computers that are older than that, maybe. Several things are great about this particular $42 goodie. First is that it's totally portable: it'll boot any computer that can boot to USB drives. Second is that it includes a restore program that can restore your backup to dissimilar hardware. In other words, you don't necessarily have to restore your backup to the same computer. That way, if your project is on a computer that won't boot, you can use this to make a backup that you can restore to a computer with different processors, memory, video, etc. Cool!
It's All "Geek" To Me: Clean Room: Have you ever seen pictures of where processor chips are made? That's this week's term: Clean Room. You see, processor chips and hard drives are easily destroyed by dust. So that's why they are put together in rooms that have as little of it as they can. Some clean rooms only allow for 1000 particles of dust per cubic foot of air. But the cleanest only allow 100 particles of dust per cubic foot. Clean rooms used for chip production are refilled with filtered air every 6 seconds and require workers to wear special suits, called bunny suits; that keep the rooms from becoming contaminated with all those nasty skin cells and hairs that people leave everywhere. Now, I'm goofing a little, but I'm serious: one hair inside a hard drive and it will fail early.
