12 Chestnut Close
Liphook
Hampshire
GU30 7JA
Tel: (01428) 723171
Email:
Most of my work now, is for local groups like the computer group of Liphook U3A . I am retiring from all new work and now only looking after some existing home user customers. This work will cease at the end of March 2013.
A little goodie you might like to read. How, why & when you should not display other peoples email address in your emails.
"When anyone asks me how I can best describe my experience in nearly 40 years at sea, I merely say, uneventful. Of course there have been winter gales, storms, fog and the like, but in all my experience, I have never been in any accident of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea...I never saw a wreck and have never been wrecked, nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort."
-- Captain E. J. Smith, RMS Titanic
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I consider these products "Best of Breed" whether you are a home user or a business user. If you do not protect your system you will get attacked. Millions of users world wide get attacked and the result can be from a little annoying to a complete financial disaster.
Getting protected is not just about putting locks on the doors, you need it to be easy to use and run unobtrusively. If the product brings your system to its knees or is too difficult to update or too intrusive you will be tempted to switch it off, thereby completely exposing your PC to the worst elements of cyberspace. That is the same as leaving the door unlocked with the key in it.
I used to recommend AVG for anti virus but the most recent free version I looked at failed to come up to the mark. The free version has now changed its protection level to below what I consider a minimum standard and the paid for versions have started to become resource hogs and slow the system down too much.
My favorite firewall was Zone Alarm but although it is easy to use it now fails to meet an acceptable level of security. If you are on Windows 7 or Vista then Microsoft’s Security Essentials is a good unobtrusive and free offering but Comodo's Free firewall is hard to beat even by the paid ones
Declaration of interest: Vipre is a product that I potentially get commission on if you click on the link above and then buy the product within a few months. You can download a free trial version to test if it suitable for you. Comodo Firewall is free and I do not get any commission from them although I used to from sales of ZoneAlarm.
Get well protected and keep it up to date.
Useful tips
Spam:-Since I moved to Windows 7 in February 2009 i-Hate Spam, now not sold, ceased to work, so I took other measures to reduce my 200-300 spam messages a day. I did have a number of catch-all domain address emails, so that anything addressed to skylon.co.uk would come into my inbox. Now I only have a few and some of the public facing ones are changed from time to time.
Email signing:- Have you ever thought about digitally signing your emails and letting other people send you encrypted ones. You might find this article from Comodo or this article from Secorio. If you want to learn a little more this white paper from Verisign or this tutorial from them. You can get a free email certificate from Comodo. Remember to renew it each year or get a new one if you change your email address
Another way to get protected if you are still on XP is to stop using Microsoft's Internet Explorer and use Mozilla's Firefox then install the most valuable add-on No-Script. There are many other add-ons but don't get carried away and slow down what is a fast browser, once it has loaded. It is worth getting the British English dictionary if you regularly blog or enter other text information on the web as it will spot your spelling mistakes and offer UK corrections.
If you are on Vista or Windows 7 then IE 9 is fast and much more secure than previous versions.
I expect support to be understandable and knowledgable, the support team at Plus are based in Sheffield, and despite the being "northerners" I never have a problem on either count. You can call them on an 0845 number or a normal geographic number which is useful if your calls are through their "Home Phone Anytime+" as they are included in your monthly tariff. You can also get support via their website which is timely and usually the best way.
Do you need an expensive Microsoft Office Suite for home use? Probably not. There are free alternatives that can work with Microsoft produced documents, spread sheets and presentations. Including the latest 2007/2010 versions or 2008/2011 versions for Mac.
What is the alternative?
An open existing standard ISO26300 Open Document Format(ODF)
An existing product that meets the standard is "OpenOffice" this free and is supported through "Free Community Support" for business and personal users.
Since Oracle took over Sun Microsystem, who were supporting Open Office, the product future direction has probably changed. Many supporting developers who worked on the free product have now broken away to create another free product called Libre Office it is based on the same code which is Open Source but is likely to develop in a slightly different direction. Worth a look, try them both it will cost you time but not hard earned cash.