In a world filled with malicious programs, emails, and Web sites, protecting your system is important. Consequently, many of us yearn for a security suite that provides full protection with little or no input. AVG Internet Security 8.0 comes close, providing a robust, multi-layered defense against virtually all of the digital goons lurking in the shadows.

For a price slightly higher than many competitors, you enjoy protection against incoming and resident viruses, malware, spam, phishing sites, and drive-by downloads, plus a firewall and deep-level system protection against such threats as rootkits.

Installation of AVG 8.0 is easy, with the setup utility explaining its behavior as it goes. It gives you input on important decisions, such as selecting the working environment where you use the PC for example, standalone, network, or mobile. It thoughtfully allows you to select more than one, too; good of you have a notebook you use on the road and at home.

AVG 8.0 also lets you choose a scan schedule, whether or not to report questionable Web pages, and whether or not to install the AVG Security Toolbar. This toolbar, which includes a Yahoo! search interface, installs in your browser. It lets you turn the Active Surf-Shield and Search-Shield on or off: two utilities that examine and rate Web sites and search results for potential threats.

Whether or not you install the AVG Security Toolbar, AVG and the underlying LinkScanner technology will work in the background, examining links online, in emails, bookmarks, documents, and other sources
to see if they are safe.

The AVG interface is comprehensive but filled with large icons that don’t do much except indicate status. It would be nice if users could right-click the icons to enable and disable protection, configure the suite, and perform other tasks. Instead, you’ll find configuration options buried in various menus.

Minor annoyances aside, AVG 8.0 did a good job of getting us up and running quickly, and intrusions are minimal and well-managed. AVG 8.0 alerts you when potentially risky programs access the Internet, you choose between unrestricted or safe site and one-time or permanent access. The antispam filter comes with several configuration features yet did a decent job without any changes.

System requirements (1.2GHz processor, 256MB memory) are reasonable. Tested AVG on several systems, including one that didn’t quite meet system requirements, and it ran on them all. However, the resource drain during some operations is noticeable unless you more than meet requirements. One other minor quibble is that there is no easy way to temporarily disable protection. You must go in and disable components individually.

Several virus labs give AVG 8.0 high marks, and we found its online protection generally to be on target. Overall, this program is a well-rounded, hassle-free choice for novice or busy users with reasonably fast computers. Intermediate users who occasionally want to fly without a net will likely be frustrated. Tech support is minimal with online FAQ and email only.

Click more for details:AVG Internet Security 8.0

What’s worse than Apple not giving its users defragmentation support in OSX?

The support in Windows Vista, clearly the slowest defragmentation application ever. We’re talking since the Winchester hard drive was invented in 1956. It’s as though the sectors are ?rst squeezed through a quantum singularity and then beamed back and reassembled into a contiguous ?le by an angry shop of sector elves two steps away from a strike.

For those of you who are mad as hell and unwilling to take it anymore, there’s Auslogics Disk Defrag. Install this free defragger on your Vista OS and your blood pressure will drop instead of rise every time you defrag. XP users can bene?t too, the app is also much faster than Window XP’s freebie tool.

Download free from www.auslogics.com

More than 100,000 people worldwide have signed a Save XP petition organized by the US magazine Infoworld. The operating system will no longer be available as a shrink-wrapped product after 30 June, though PC builders will be able to pre-install XP until January.

A starter edition of XP will be available until mid-2010 in emerging markets, according to Microsoft, which claims Vista sales are heading for 100 million.

However, most Vista installs are in machines sold to home users. Business have been slow to adopt, not unusual with a new operating system, and some are concerned about hardware and software compatibility and performance, particularly on older machines.

But not everyone responding to thee petition was against Vista. One wrote: I’ve had Vista on my laptop since launch and I haven’t had any major issues with it.

With digital scrapbooking programs and Web sites cluttering the landscape, it can be difficult to pick the one that fits your needs. MemoryMixer is a highly adaptable scrapbooking program flexible enough to suit just about everyone.

Memory Mixer will tax users with older systems, but if you can get past the system requirements, it is quite useful. The installation consumes nearly 700MB of storage on your drive. Install the extras and the installation will be about 3GB. It also needs a reasonably powerful system to run. Recommended is a 1.6GHz Pentium 4 or better processor and 1GB or more of memory, although it will run on less. Running on a system a bit faster than the recommendation, it seemed a little bit sluggish. After installation, Memory Mixer will lead you to its site for registration. You can also join the Memory Mixer family. Joining is not required but will give you access to more creative freebies.

When you open MemoryMixer, two sequential interfaces pop up, prompting you to start or open an album and then to build from scratch or use Quick-Mix. Choose to create a new album from scratch and MemoryMixer will prompt you to name your album and select the orientation (portrait, landscape, or square) and one of dozens of layouts. You can also start with a blank page.

Once you have the basics down, buttons on the left side of the display let you add photo frames, embellishments, titles, shapes, music, or video to your album. Using the Edit Photo button, you can perform basic photo edits (crop, remove red eye, etc.) and more.

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Tags: Application

ACDsee is bucking the trend for combining photo-editing and management tools in one application. Photo Editor 4 does just that, editing. If you want to organize your photo library you’ll have to pay extra for Acdsee 10 Photo Manager. Having said that, Acdsee Photo Editor is around half the price of some of the other applications in this group test and there is a special bundle price for the two applications on the ACDSee website which still comes in well below $50. So the choice is yours and it is good value either way.

So to the Editor which, at first glance, has a bit of a retro look about it. The central image window is surrounded on three sides by a toolbar, image basket and on the right a palette dock containing how-to guidance, adjustment filters and an object palette. Expanding the how-to palette reveals ACDSee’s hidden treasure: a stack of guided projects covering the gamut from basic editing to photo fixing and creative projects.

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Web design falls into one of two camps: the first type designs the entire site, including content and design, in one place, the other designs a select few templates and relies on content management software to put articles in place. Webplus falls firmly in the former camp, but this does not mean that it passes up on the latest design possibilities.

You will be happy that layout uses CSS, not tables. This helps keep the layout of the pages as simple as possible, making them more accessible to mobile browsers and visible to search engines. The formatting information set with CSS is embedded in each page, which is a slight disappointment as using an external style sheet helps keep file sizes down.

Several master pages can be created as templates, helping to keep a consistent look across a site. The site manager tool is also useful for planning, and navigation bars can be created automatically.

The design heritage is clear from the ability to link text boxes together to flow copy from one to the other. There is even an automatic flow tool for creating as many boxes as are required on following pages. There are also plenty of attractive text tools with effects, including flowing text along lines.

There is a blog tool, but it can only be updated from within Webplus and is rather inflexible in design, as is the RSS viewer.

You can also insert HTML code fragments, which will come in handy when using tools that require small snippets of HTML, such as Google Analytics.

Ecommerce is supported for accounts with Paypal, Romancart and Mals, and HTML forms can be inserted for reader feedback. Webplus would suit sites with relatively static content, but if you frequently update or have several contributors, there are better options.

Click for more : Webplus

There are no radical enhancements in the latest version of Sage Instant Accounts, just considered improvements focused around making the package easier to learn and use. Those include a new welcome page giving access to sources of help and support, and a practice mode that lets you experiment without affecting your own live data. Some of the interfaces have also been tidied and tools moved around. All of which is good, although we did still find it a little difficult in places.

The Sage Line software, on which Sage Instant Accounts is based, is popular with accountants and other professionals, but can be baffling for those unfamiliar with things such as control codes and ledger postings. Fortunately, jargon is kept to a minimum in the Instant version although, behind the scenes, you still get a full set of sales, purchase and nominal ledgers. Together these let you generate invoices for products and services, raise purchase orders, keep track of your cash flow, reconcile your bank account and so on, all the things small companies need to run smoothly.

Vat accounting is also provided for, with everything to do with Vat now collected into one area. As you might expect, small-business schemes are well catered for here plus there’s now full support for online reporting to HMRC.

Stock control isn’t included, but there is a Plus version with this as an option. Similarly, it’s possible to pay employees by adding Instant Payroll and to accept payments by credit/debit card by subscribing to Sage card payment services, support for which is now built into the Instant Accounts application.

Installation is straightforward, with an improved wizard to guide you through the process of entering information. You can also import existing customer and product details, although only in CSV format. Alternatively, you can choose to work on your own practice data, either starting afresh or returning to the point at which you left off. There’s no substitute for learning from your own mistakes and it’s reassuring to know you’re not working on live data.

There’s nothing fancy about the user interface, which is good and, for the most part, we found it very easy to follow with clearly defined task options plus links to lots of supporting help and advice. Most of these links are gathered together on the always-available welcome page, giving access to instructional videos and online e-learning workshops together with PDF guides and suggestions for both getting started and performing common tasks.

On the downside, the user-friendly lets help the novice approach isn’t followed across all the tools, and some jargon does creep in. We found the revamped report designer particularly heavy going, which could be an issue as it’s used to customize invoices and other forms as well as design reports. Likewise, we would have preferred to see error correction integrated throughout the application rather than implemented via a separate dedicated module.

The package comes with telephone support for the first 45 days as well as online support and optional health and safety advice for a year. Automatic updates and a Sage newsfeed are among other additions and, despite a few remaining rough edges, Instant Accounts now has just about everything a small company needs to keep on top of its finances.

Click to learn more of Sage Instant Accounts