Anti Viruses

Hello, these couple of weeks' posts will be about your computer's security. To get a good comparative on the Anti Viruses Performance, go here: http://www.av-comparatives.org/ and look at the February and the May reports. If you want a free anti virus i would recommend one of these: Avira AntiVir, or Active Virus Shield. Avast and AVG don't have as good as detection rates as these two. Don't let the name AOL scare you, Active Virus Shield is powered by Kaspersky, one of the best Anti Viruses so, in the website, Active Virus Shield would get the same results as Kaspersky. It updates alot as well, it can update as much as 15 times a day! When i had Avast, I wanted to try out AntiVir, when i ran a scan with AntiVir, it found a rootkit and 3 trojans that Avast missed. Anti Vir is the lightest one on computer recourses, which means that it will slow your computer down the least. The biggest con about the free version of AntiVir, is probably that it will display a big ad about upgrading to a paid version, every time you update it. I tried AVG on a computer that i knew for sure had viruses. It found 11 and could only remove 7 of them. If you are willing to pay for an Anti Virus, I would recommend Kaspersky. You can get a free 30 day trial from here.

Cleaning up your computer even more

There are a lot of good programs for cleaning up your computer even more than what the programs that come with windows provide. Two free ones that i think are good are CCleaner (AKA Crap Cleaner) and Advanced WindowsCare V2 Personal if you know any other good one, free or not, comment and tell everyone! Both CCleaner and WindowsCare have a clean up feature like Disk Cleanup, a registry cleaner, and a Start Up manager to manage programs that run at start up. Be careful with the registry cleaner though, because if you don't know how to use it well it could cause more harm to your computer than good. CCleaner also has an uninstall feature, which is quicker and provides a more thourogh list than Add or Remove Programs. WindowsCare provides a spyware scan (not a very good one though), a Security Defense that prevents spyware from getting on your computer, a system optimization, which changes settings on your computer to make it faster, a privacy sweep that deletes your internet history, etc., and a memory cleaner to free up ram on your computer, you shouldn't do this unless you have barley any RAM left, because it could end up slowing down your system! To get CCleaner click here. To get Advanced WindowsCare V2 Personal click here.

Better Defragmentation

The defragmentation that the windows defragmenter provides is very slow and some times doesn't defragment every thing. There are better defragmenters that you can get for free. Two that are good are: Iobit SmartDefrag, and AusLogics Disk Defrag. I like the user interface of the Auslogics Disk defrag more than SmartDefrag, yet SmartDefrag has a feature that will continuisly defragment, your hard drive, so that it won't get fragmented as quickly. Remember to never do anything while defragmenting, or closing the program in a middle of a defrag, because this could lead to file loss. To download them go here:
Iobit SmartDefrag
AusLogics Disk Defrag

Basic PC Clean Up

The 3 most basic ways of keeping your computer in good shape come with your PC.

To free up space on your computer follow these instructions:

1. Go to Start, then Programs or All Programs (depending on your computer), then Accecories, then System Tools, then click on Disk Clean Up.
2. Check Temporary Internet Files, and Temporary Files As far as the other things go, read the discription, if you are not sure to check one of the options or not, just don't check it. It may cause undesired results. As far as the 3 that I told you, they will just delete unnessesary files on your computer.
3. Click OK.

To uninstall programs from your computer, follow these instructions:

1. Go to Start, Control Panel (this will be under settings if you have a Windows Operating System older than XP)
2. Now click on add or remove programs
3. Select the file you want to uninstall
4. Click remove
5. Follow the instructions to uninstall the program

To rearrange files on your hard disk to make your computer run faster follow these instructions:

1. Go to System Tools (check step 1 for Disk Clean Up if you forgot where it is) and click on disk defragmenter
2. Click on your main hard disk (this will usually be disk C)
3. Click Defragment
4. This can take several hours, so just leave your computer on and do something else (not on the computer), make sure to not exit it while defragmenting because this can lead to file loss
   

These are the 3 most basic ways to keep your computer in good condition. Disc Clean Up should be used once a week and Disk Defragmenter should be preformed at least once every two weeks, Add or Remove programs you can use whenever you need to uninstall programs from your computer.