Application Install Guide

Symantec Norton 360

This is a true all-in-one security suite, which is both good and bad. The good part is that it comes with nearly everything you need to fend off threats, including antivirus, antispyware, antirootkit, and antiphishing tools; a firewall; and even a backup utility. The antivirus protection is excellent, and the suite also comes with a hard drive cleanup tool. The bad part is that enabling all those features results in a noticeable performance hit in terms of boot times and overall system s...

Steganos Privacy Suite

As the name suggests, this suite focuses on privacy instead of threat management, and it is loaded with features. You can create as many virtual drives as you wish, then lock them down with real-time, 256-bit AES encryption. Another tool puts all of your email contacts, calendar data, and other information on the secure drive. You can configure any of these secure drives to open as soon as Windows boots, provided that you supply the proper passphrase, making them easy to work with t...

Bento

The Numbers application in iWorks rattled the spreadsheet universe. Now Bento, from Apple subsidiary FileMaker, succeeds in shaking up another world. But this inexpensive personal database lacks a few major features, and some of its powers require OS X Leopard, which excludes a lot of users. Sometimes, too, Bento's zeal for simplicity introduces confusion, does the word database so terrorize users that we have to substitute the murkier library? Since creating libraries doesn't take mu...

Comodo Firewall Pro 3.0

With its well-thought-out set of protection levels, Comodo Personal Firewall (CPF) Pro 3.0 can conform to the needs of any user, from novice to super-geek. It also has a sleek new interface and uses significantly less memory than its predecessor. Best of all, it is free, not just for noncommercial use but for any use, and the company assures us that it will remain so indefinitely. CPF handles all basic firewall functions. It protects the system against hack attack, controls which programs get...

Uniblue ProcessScanner

The premise is fairly straightforward: Uniblue ProcessScanner scans your computer and lists all the various processes that are running. The software is a free download from www.processlibrary.com and installs with just a few clicks through a simple setup wizard. When you launched the program, it will automatically ask you if I wanted to scan for processes. The scan itself took less than 30 seconds. The ProcessScanner will inform you the file name, whether the process was a security threat, an...

NTI Shadow 3

Most backup programs are fairly similar: You set up a backup routine by designating the files to be backed up, a destination for the backup, and a time to automatically run the backup job. NTI Shadow lets you do these sorts of "conventional" backups, too, but it has some unique and innovative backup methods that are probably more like what most people want in a backup: complete "set-it-and-forget-it" file mirroring. Though not completely got free, the NTI Shadow 3 to work smoothly and at a barga...