|
NEWSLETTER
March / April 2014
|
|
Click any underline and go the suggested website
|
|
Virus Report
 Here are the results of the latest evaluation of (paid) Anti-Virus products in order of overall performance:
Kaspersky internet security ($60 per year on up to 3 PCs) is the top rated Anti-Virus - Security suite. Norton and Mcafee ($80/yr 3 PCs), Trend Micro Titanium Maximum ($45/yr 3PCs), Webroot Security Anywhere ($52/yr 5 PCs) and Avast Internet Security ($40yr/ 1PC) all made second place. Finally, Eset Smart Security ($60yr/ 1PC), F-Secure Internet Security ($80/ 7years 1PC) and AVG Internet Security ($55/yr 1PC) came in last. Vipre Internet Security rated below the cut, or "fair" as opposed to those above that fell into the respective categories of "Superior, Very Good and Good".
I consistently remove viruses from clients' computers being protected by (one of) all of these products. They fair no better at protecting client computers from viruses, trojans, malware and spyware than the free products. All of these products provide a variety of "protection"; In addition to Anti-virus, these additions, in my opinion, are superfluous and sometimes redundant. All of this extra protection comes at the expense of the computer's performance. Uninstall any paid product and install Microsoft Security Essentials (free) and your risk of getting a virus will not increase and the response time of your computer is likely to treble.
On that note: I treated a virus just this past Friday and removed it successfully. What I could not do was make the client's word and Excel documents readable. The virus had either corrupted or encrypted every document on the computer. Just another reason to make regular backups of your data to a flash drive, an external hard drive or the cloud. Ransomware cybercriminals are extorting over $5 million a year from victims. Read more here.
|
Tablets are not only for grownups anymore.
It's no secret that we are pushing our kids into technology at an ever increasing rate. My sons, high school sophomores as of this writing, are two of the few who at present have no facebook account, nor are they twitter-able. They are though far better at obtaining information on their smartphones then I will ever be. Here's a report on tablets for kids:
Samsung Galaxy Tab3 is sturdy and has almost 10 hours of battery life. Parents have a goodly amount of control over the child's access to applications and games, but a smart youngster might just run around that control. $230 and top rated.
Vtech InnoTab3S cost about $80. While it responds slowly to webpage requests, it's still a great bargain. Lots of math, reading and science games as well as safe texting.
LeapFrog LeapPad Ultra has great parental controls and it's super tough. It's delivered with 11 apps pre-installed and there are about 800 more that are extremely reasonably priced. $149.
Fuhu Nabi 2 has the most powerful processor and great battery life. $180.
Toys R Us Tabeo e2 has a fully standard processor, better than you would find in some standardized tablets. $130.
|
Keep The NSA Out!
 Annoyed by the revelation that the NSA has access to all your phone calls, emails and texts? Try Silent Circle. This company will encrypt voice, data, text and video for you for a nominal monthly fee of $10. Both sides have to be using Silent Circle for the process to work.
Text Secure will encrypt your text for free (Android Phones) available at the Google Playstore. As with Silent Circle, both parties need to use Text Secure to take advantage of this private messaging service. The system is not available for IOS (Iphone).
BTW, the NSA, according to Snowden, has intercepted and stored millions of webcam user images. A good portion of these images were gleaned from Yahoo webcam chats. Over 1.8 million accounts were collected "including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications".
|
Buying or Leasing a New Car?
 Don't pay sticker for any car. For those of you not in the know, car retailers get an invoice for each car, which is referred to as the "tissue price". You should never pay more than invoice. Why? Because all auto manufacturers "hold back" money from the dealer, usually, in the thousands, which they pay them upon the sale of a car. In fact there's even more money that's paid upon the sale of a car that goes beyond this "hold back". Add to this equation the fact that dealerships need to borrow money from the bank to pay for this "inventory" and for which they continue to pay interest until the car is sold and you are really in the "drivers seat".
The dealership should be willing to show you the invoice, but if you want to be prepared try Consumer Reports, where for a nominal fee ($14 1st car pricing, $12 for additional cars) you can get a print out of the dealer invoice for the car you want to buy and the dealer's cost of any options. Be specific about your model to reduce the need to purchase several reports.
A lease is based upon the agreed purchase price of the vehicle less an expected retained value at the end of the lease period. Effectively you are taking a loan on that portion of the vehicle. Not different than the loan you take to buy a car, just less money. So first negotiate for the price of the vehicle and then decide how to finance it. It's therefore prudent, not to talk lease versus buy until you've agreed upon a price.
|
|
Watching your Cable Channels Anywhere on any Device, Finally!
 If you're with Optimum then you might know that you can watch the stations you pay for on a variety of devices. You can "authorize" up to 5 devices to enable them to watch in your living room while connected to your home wi-fi network, in the street using either your cell data plan or the multitude of Optimum wi-fi hotspots. In fact anywhere that you can get an internet connection, you can watch Optimum. If you have purchased an up-speed internet package from cable, then you get 10 devices. But, with a family of technology equipped users, those 10 and certainly those 5 devices might not be enough.
Moving forward, say goodbye to your cable company's limit on the number of devices you can use to access their programming and to offer some continuity from device to device. There is the realization that we might want to watch something in the morning on our home TV or desktop and then pick up the show and finish watching it on the train on the way to work. Those of you in Somers, hello Heritage Hills, should be the first to be able to take advantage. Read here.
|
Download IE11 from Microsoft for Windows 7, it's faster than IE10 and substantially improved so as to reduce that frozen and recovery issue we were all getting with 10. Microsoft is claiming ( here) a performance boost over Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Here's the Link to the browser download. (Windows Vista, 7 and 8).
Last minute Salon appointments via Vagaro. Presently, 7000 salons across the US and expanding rapidly and daily.
Doctors (and wellness professional) appointments are available from another application Zocdoc. For your desktop, Android and IOS. Samsung's Milk music streaming service is free, has no ads. For Android. |
 |
|
HP Chrome book 11 has been removed from store shelves because of overheating issues.
It's about time! The international Electrotechnical Commission will meet to standardize the chargers we use for laptops to make them all the same. Read about it here. Hard drives do not last forever. Backblaze, a cloud backup entity, decided to maintain all of that backup data on "over the counter" hard drives. 25,000 drives comprising 6 petabytes (6,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of available storage. The number of drives allowed the company to analyze hard drive failure rate like it had never been done before. The drives had a median run time of 6 years before failure. Not all the drives failed in those 6 years, but 20% did fail in the first 4 years and better than 5% failed in the first year. In fact there were drives that failed in the first few days of use. Have you tried these Windows shortcuts? Windows plus the tab key to see all the open windows (does not work in XP). Double click the top left hand corner of any window to close it. Pressing ALT and F4 together will also close all open windows one at a time. If there are no open windows, you will be prompted to shut down your PC. HP printer not printing right? Try taking the print head out, removing the print cartridges first of course, then cleaning it thoroughly with Isopropyl alcohol and a combination of saturated paper towel, cotton swabs and Q-tips. Apple has patched a hole in the Operating System that would let hackers tap into private encrypted connections and steal information such as credit card data. This same hole exists in the Iphone, Ipad and Ipod, which Apple has also patched. Get your devices patched ASAP.
|
I make DVD, BluRay, Chromecast and Roku connections for that Netflix account or to watch web content on your TV.
I also connect your Homelink and your garage door.
|
|
|
|
