Cloud-based antivirus products can provide several benefits: centralized management, simpler PC deployments and less reliance on users. But how well do these products protect your systems? I look at three cloud-based antivirus services and see how they stack up when compared with a traditional antivirus product — as well as with one another. I tested:
We all lead busy lives, and keeping our Windows systems neat and tidy is usually not on the top of our to-do lists. All too often, we don’t get around to cleaning our PCs until they’re a real mess — when users start complaining about websites taking a long time to load and slow startup times.
One solution is a pair of utilities from Sysinternals (now owned by Microsoft, but don’t let that stop you) called Process Explorer and Process Monitor. A review of both can be found here on Techtarget’s site.
After parts of it were in>beta for almost a year, Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 is now available for download here and purchase in a variety of versions. Visual Studio 2010 runs on all versions of Windows since XP with SP3. It contains a long list of innovations and improvements, not the least of which is full support for multiple monitors. The full kit takes up more than seven gigabytes on your hard drive, and installing it is very easy, almost a one-click process as it loads the dozens of supporting tools and interfaces.
With improvements to Windows 7 BitLocker and with USB drives getting bigger and cheaper (you can get a 64GB drive for not much more than $120), now is the time to take a closer look at whole disk encryption products. If you’ve employed whole disk encryption, then even if your laptop or USB drive falls into the wrong hands, no one besides you will be able to read any of the files stored on it; when you try to access these files you need to enter a password, otherwise the data in each file is scrambled.
I look at eight different whole disk encryption products for this article in eSecurityPlanet.com.
One of the problems of using online services such as WordPress blogs, Facebook and Twitter is that you can’t easily save the information you accumulate in the cloud. If you have a WordPress blog, you need to run a regular backup that saves your blog content into an .XML file, for example.
Now a new service from Backupify can help. Using Amazon Web Services and cloud-based storage, Backupify provides backup agents to more than a dozen services, including Google Docs, Blogger and Gmail, Zoho, Delicious, Hotmail and Basecamp.
Many businesses that skipped upgrading to Microsoft Vista are considering moving to Windows 7. While migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7 is no easy task, there are several tools — from Microsoft as well as third-party vendors — that can help.
In this story and accompanying screenshots, I review the options.
If you have to jointly author a spreadsheet with a colleague, what is the first thing that you do? Email it back and forth. This can be painful, particularly as you try to keep track of your partner’s changes and hope the emails transit back and forth across the Internet. Add a third or fourth person, and things get worse. Luckily, there is a better way, and a number of providers have stepped up with tools to make spreadsheet sharing a lot easier than sending attachments.
I take a look at several of these services for an article published in ITworld here.
By now, you probably know that you can choose from more than two dozen different online backup services that take your desktop data and make copies of it in “the cloud.” (I maintain a list of many of them here.) They all work in a similar fashion: a small software agent monitors any new files that you create on your PC and it makes copies of them over an encrypted link to the provider’s Internet data center. With so many similar contenders in the field, how do you know which to choose? Here is an article that I wrote for Internet.com that reviews your options.
If you are looking for in-place migration of XP desktops, you could use Laplink’s PC Mover. But if you want to be able to preserve your XP desktop and switch back to it when you need to run an application that doesn’t work on Windows 7, then you should consider Zinstall’s XP7. It creates an XP virtual machine with all of your old apps and files that is just a mouse click away.
This sounds a bit like what Microsoft supports with its XP mode for Windows 7, but not quite. The problem, as you can see from
this Web page on Microsof’s site is that XP mode is only supported with limited “V-chip” CPUs. You also need to reinstall an entire XP desktop on the virtual machine from scratch.
Zinstall works by taking the “windows-old” directory that the Windows 7 installer creates and uses it to rebuild your original XP desktop. It is a neat trick, and I really wanted it to work. But no matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t get a stable machine from the product, and so I can’t recommend Zinstall until they do some additional quality control.
If you want to experiment, make sure you use a drive imaging tool (I use Acronis or Symantec’s Ghost) to create a backup copy of your XP desktop first. Next, you need to disable your firewalls and uninstall any anti-virus software. Now you install Windows 7, making sure to boot from the install CD and choose the custom in-place install option where it copies the Windows OS and all your applications to that “windows-old” directory.
Once that is done, you can start up Windows 7 and install the Zinstall software. Zinstall actually supports two different migration scenarios: besides the in-place one, the other is to migrate between two different computers. Choose the “only have this PC” and that you are doing an in-place migration and then hit the big GO button as you can see in the screen shot below.
The process will take several minutes to an hour to complete, depending on how large of a hard drive you have. Speaking of which, you want to make sure that you have plenty of extra room to install Windows 7 as well as the working copies of Zinstall’s files too. I would estimate a spare 30 or 40 GB should be enough. You can filter out particular files – like videos and mp3s — that you don’t want to migrate if you are tight on space.
Once this process is done, you can switch back and forth between XP and Windows 7 by clicking on an icon on the taskbar. Booting up your XP desktop will initially take some time – after all, you are loading a new VM here. But once that is done, switching between the OSs takes a second or two. If you have used VMware or something similar this will be very obvious. You leave your existing XP desktop unchanged, with its existing apps (that may not run under Windows 7). Everything on your old XP machine is still preserved, including files and applications. These aren’t migrated to Windows 7 – you have to install new apps now just as you would for any new OS install. This differs from PC Mover, where you give up your older XP machine and migrate it completely over to Win 7. You can even view and access the files on the other OS too, again by clicking on the taskbar icon.
Too bad this wasn’t quite my experience. I began this review trying to migrate the oldest PC that I had in my office, an old XP without any service packs. I couldn’t get the migration to complete without errors, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of my three drive partitions or unused video driver for a card that I no longer had in the PC or some other gremlin. Next I set up my Dell Dimension desktop with a virgin copy of XP with SP2, and got a fresh version of Windows 7 installed on top of it. The Zinstall setup worked just fine until I tried to reboot the PC, and then I somehow trashed the master boot record so all my efforts for the day were lost. After I jiggled my BIOS battery, I was able to get a working drive again and I could start taking complete breaths.
While it’s the frivolous iPhone apps that get the attention (yes, there really are more than 175 apps that can produce rude bodily noises, I checked), there are lots of apps that can also help you do your job as an IT worker. While less notorious, they are worth your time to download and check out.
Let’s look at my top ten IT business-related apps to download and try out. Most of these apps require the v3.0 firmware on either device to work properly. I have also tried to pick those apps that are free or nearly so too. You can read my article and see the screenshots over at Computerworld here.