Anti-virus software

By now you are hopefully aware that there are all kinds of different virus, worms, bots, etc... with the sole purpose of hijacking your computer. Hopefully, you are running some sort of virus protection on your computer since there are a few good ones out there available for free.

However, if you still haven't installed anti-virus software because you think it will slow down your computer, you don't believe you need it, or for whatever reason you can't install it, your still in luck. There are online scanners available that allow you to scan your computer through the use of a browser plugin. Two such companies that offer this service are:

Trend Micro
and
McAfee (follow the FreeScan link to run this one)

So if you are running Windows with no anti-virus check out one of the following sites to make sure that your machine is running virus free.

XP Performance

Lately I have been seeing a lot of ads on t.v. to speed up your computer. For a fee these companies can run a scan of your computer and do some voodoo to make your computer faster.

Instead of paying a fee, try doing a few simple tasks already built into XP that can help extend the life and improve the performance of that XP install.

Here is a link to some steps you can take.

Microsoft XP Maintenance

Audacity

I was going through some of my old things last night and ran across a bunch of old cassette tapes that I have. Poking around I realized that I had a lot of old music that I like and am limited to one tape deck, which was disconnected, to play it on.

Thinking I may have just found a new and interesting project, I decided to connect my tape deck to my PC and look for some software to record with. As usual, off to sourceforge I went and it was there that I found Audacity.

Audacity was easy to install, easy to configure, and easy to use. Without really having to know anything about editing audio I was able to record my music from the line in on the sound card, easily remove the dead air from the beginning and end of the songs, and easily export my recorded song to multiple formats.

I see no reason to try any other software package as Audacity does what I want to do. Let's just hope this project stays interesting long enough for me to get through all those old songs so I don't have to keep this tape deck on my desk to enjoy my music.

Phishing Attacks

With the holiday season upon us all of those emails with special offers may sound like an appealing way to save some cash. However, be aware that many emails sent around are from hackers running phishing scams to gain access to your personal information.

One easy way to safeguard against this type of thing is to not follow the links provided in emails. Hackers have gotten sufficticated enough to make these emails have the look and feel of a legitimate email. Instead of clicking the links directly, you can instead go to the website and browse to the special offers that they have available this holiday season.

While not all email is malicious, it's better to be safe than sorry.

The New Efficiency

I ran across this Microsoft site, not sure how new it is.

The New Efficiency

It's full of videos about the new Microsoft products and videos with some of the consumers of these products. There are also some partner videos from companies such as Cisco, HP, Intel, etc...

Poke around, some of the information is sales or fluff, some is informative, and some is just interesting.