Bradley Chapple, IT Consultant & Owner of Aspen Computer Services, Loveland Colorado

So, here I go… attacking another well-known player in the Antivirus market, and this time it’s a favorite among IT golden-boys everywhere.

Today, I’m going to talk about AVG Free.

AVG is one of those companies you just love to like.

First of all, they offer a decent free product.

Second, they are one of the “underdogs” of the antivirus market (not Norton, McAfee, Trend Micro).

Third, they aren’t Symantec, which immediately gives them a couple of points in my book… I mean, who else but Symantec can make a program so messy that they had to create an uninstaller to aid in the removal of their own product [ aka Norton Removal Tool ]???  I won’t even get into the mess that SEP (Symantic Endpoint Protection) creates, even after you have removed it!

Despite the reasons to like AVG Free, I have a number of complaints with it.  Unfortunately, they are major gripes.

The cons of AVG Free:

• AVG Free isn’t that great at detection and removal
• AVG Free, since it carries the name “Antivirus” gives you a false sense of security
• AVG Free doesn’t update automatically
• AVG Free slows down your system… I’m talking about the new version 8.0 and above

The trouble is… I really want to like AVG Free… I really do!

Many of my own home systems had AVG Free installed until very recently.  Of course, I have other forms of protection in place too, that most people do not have – such as a hardware firewall, OpenDNS Filtering, and a few others… but that’s another story for another time.

The fact is, surfing the web these days is dangerous… not just for your computer, but also for your privacy and possibly your very identity.

Web sites have viruses.

Let me repeat that… WEB SITES HAVE VIRUSES.

ANY web site can harbor a virus… not just pornographic web sites.  Not just the sites you go to get cheat codes, game cracks, key generators, and cutesy little widgets to put on your myspace profile.

Viruses can be hiding in banner ads, or infect a website unbeknown to the web site owner.

A story I tell my clients sometimes is the how thousands of innocent web site visitors were affected by a virus that infected many very high profile web sites, such as the Kelly Blue Book web site.  You can read more about that here, at the Washington Post online:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6746-2004Jun25.html

AVG Free is just NOT good enough for today’s Internet threats.  Period.

In addition to not giving you adequate protection, many users don’t know enough about antivirus and antispyware programs to make well-informed decisions on the matter.  They just see the word antivirus, and they think, “Oh yeah, that’s what I need.”  They download it, install it, and then think they are safe from all harm.

If they think they can save some money and get the same protection, but for FREE… what do you think they are going to do?  Of course… they are going to download the free product.

Before you make the decision on whether or not to go with a FREE product to protect your computer, or a $50 or so per year product, consider your choice wisely.  It helps to look at this another way…

If you HAD to go into a dangerous foreign country, who would you choose to be your body guard?

Would you want the paunchy, out of shape, middle-aged guy, who used to work mall security and has a license to carry a concealed weapon?  He’s a friend of a friend, and he’ll work for free.

Or, would you want the six foot two, ex-navy-seal-turned-mercenary who is an expert in hand to hand combat?

In case you are still deciding, you want the second guy.

Trust me.

You want the guy who’s not going to be playing around.  He’s not going to be your buddy or send you flowers.  He’s going to keep his eyes pealed, his ears to the ground, and his knife sharp.  He will to keep you safe… but, he’s NOT going to do it for free.  It took a lot of blood, sweat, tears  and time to acquire and hone these specialized and valuable skills and he expects to be compensated accordingly.

The same can be said for antivirus applications.

Are you really going to get the top-notch product for free?  Not even close.

No… for free, you are going to get the mall cop, and he won’t be armed with anything but pepper spray and a whistle.

Let’s switch gears here, and talk about performance…

When it comes to your computer’s speed, why sacrifice it when you don’t have to?

AVG Free (and even it’s paid version) will slow down a computer a bit.  There are website that talk about how to disable certain web/surf filters in AVG in order to reclaim some of their computing power… but, why would you want to put yourself at even MORE risk by turning off these filters?

So, please, please, please stay away from AVG Free.

The AVG Professional Version may slow down your computer, but at least you get some great protection!

There are a lot of products out there that won’t cost you an arm and a leg.  If you spread the cost out over the course of a year, you are talking about $0.07 to $0.10 per day.

Kaspersky Antivirus, for example costs $59 for a year, but if you purchase two years in advance, the price drops to $36 per year.  Although I think that Kaspersky Internet Security is a bit bloated and expensive, the Antivirus product is sleek, fast, and is very affordable (it’s what I use on the computer I’m on right now).

Same thing goes with Avast Professional Edition.  Avast charges $57 for a two year license.  That is an investment of less than $29 per year.  Very nice, considering how highly rated this product is.  Not only does it blow the doors off of anything by AVG Free, but it’s cheap too!  Quality protection for about $0.07 per day.

Bradley Chapple, IT Consultant & Owner of Aspen Computer Services, Loveland Colorado

Recently, I have been looking for some ways to help make things more efficient, here in my computer repair business.

Most of our clients know that we have a 3 hour cap on a residential single-computer repair or service jobs.

If this is the first you’ve heard of this “3 Hour Cap”… let me explain: It means, if the computer repair or service is being done on just one PC or laptop in a residential environment, we will only charge for 3 hours of labor… no matter how long it takes to repair the computer, remove the virus, repair XP, or solve whatever other glitch or problem the computer has.

The advantage here is that, in the clients’s eyes, labor will never get out of hand. Some of my clients have told me stories about how other computer repair shops would hand them a bill for $700 when the only thing wrong with the computer was a virus infection. Ouch.

There is just one problem with capping jobs to a 3 hour maximum….

MAKING $2.50 PER HOUR IS AWESOME

What a lot our clients do not know is that some of these jobs can take a LONG time.

A few of the more stubborn jobs have taken an entire 24-hour day of concentrated troubleshooting and numerous failed attempts at a resolution.  My techs can tell you some painful computer repair stories that involve DAYS of beating their heads against a stubborn/elusive problem.

On those longer (but capped) computer repair jobs, we aren’t even making enough money to put food on the table, much less stay in business!

Luckily for us, those jobs are few and far between. Our average job only takes about 1 to 2 hours, actually. A tough virus or spyware infection plus a computer clean-up/tune-up might take 2 to 4 hours, but that’s okay. If it goes over 3 hours, we cap it off at 3 hours labor, the client gets back a computer that runs like new, and everyone’s happy.

But, it’s those really tough (and unprofitable) jobs, combined with the 3 hour cap on labor, that has inspired us to seek out new ways of doing things around here…

GETTING BACK TO BASICS

Instead of running a virus scan from the infected machine, we usually yank the drive out and scan it from one of our shop machines.  This typically renders the virus inactive and allows our virus removal software to actually work.  It also allows us to remove locked files from the drive without the virus attempting to defend itself.

Another thing that we are doing more often is checking for a lot of other lower-level problems, such as visually inspecting the systemboard for bulging or burst capacitors, running Memtest, and running a complete health check on the hard drive with HDD Regenerator. These lower-level checks have saved us a lot of time in the long run… even if the computer problem LOOKS like an operating system issue, or a software glitch.

But, our attempt to make our business more efficient also led us to try Reimage, from http://www.reimage.com. Reimage claims to have the ability to check the operating system files, compare those files with an enormous database of Windows XP system files, and then correct what’s missing or corrupted.

Fair enough. That is sort of like using a “sfc /scannow” at the command prompt. But, it also has the ability to check for registry errors and damaged drivers, and fix those too. Hmmm… NOW we’re talking.

How has Reimage been working out for us so far?

NOT AS GOOD AS A HUMAN… BUT I’M STILL IMPRESSED

For the most part, we have found that the majority of problems that Reimage finds and repairs, we can do a little bit better ourselves. Nothing beats the excellent intuition of an experienced technician. After working on computers almost 20 years, those “gut feelings” have gotten pretty accurate when it comes to troubleshooting computer problems.

Example: I had a client’s computer here at our Loveland shop that was causing all sorts of havoc. It would turn on, boot to XP, start loading the system-tray icons and then crash. It would do the same thing in safe mode. I checked memory, hard drive, etc. Not even a full repair installation wouldn’t fix it. Long story short, the answer was a bad power supply. It seems that when the graphics card kicked into hi-res mode, it was pulling a little too much power for that power supply.

I’m not trying to brag. I’m merely noting that this problem looked like an XP problem, or perhaps a driver issue. Reimage would obviously not have been able to fix this particular issue. Tricky troubleshooting jobs like that one will always require that “fuzzy logic” which humans are better-known for.

With that said, Reimage has shown some amazing promise. We used it on a virus-infected machine what was so badly infected that it would not boot. It was throwing up a nasty BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) on every restart – even safe mode. By creating the XP Boot CD, I was able to boot to a workable interface on the infected machine. From there, I was able to connect to the Internet and run the Reimage utility. The program ran, scanned the system, even ran some basic benchmarking, and then rebooted to a working system. Eureka!

IT SPEEDS UP SLOW COMPUTERS, TOO!

Although I haven’t used Reimage to speed up a slow computer (I can do pretty well on that one), Reimage can supposedly do that too… and without having to make an XP Boot CD.

So, if you are curious as to how Reimage works, go to http://www.reimage.com and check it out.

Doing a free scan will tell you a lot about your system:  How much RAM you have, how much you NEED… your hard drive space, the health of your system overall.  It’s actually very informative.

If you read the Reimage website, you’ll start to think that this software can work miracles, but it won’t. Believe me.

But, with that being said, it’s worth a try… and it has a money-back guarantee (like us!), so there is no risk in trying it. It may just save you from having to receive a visit from one of our techs.

Bradley Chapple, IT Consultant & Owner of Aspen Computer Services, Loveland Colorado

Every day advertisers are finding new ways to get into your e-mail Inbox. Most of them want to sell you something.  When doing this door-to-door, it’s called soliciting.  When doing this via e-mail, without a prior relationship with you (or without your permission), it’s called spam.

Why do they do it?

Why do these advertisers send out all of those messages?

They do it because it works.

If after sending out countless unsolicited e-mails, people didn’t buy anything… spammers would have stopped long ago and we would all be living much happier lives.

If advertisements were the only problem, it wouldn’t be quite as bad (although still very annoying).  But, the truth is that some spam messages can transmit viruses, Trojans, Rootkits, Hijackers or Spyware (collectively known as Malware) on to your computer and cause problems.

HOW TO AVOID SPAM MESSAGES IN THE FIRST PLACE

Although there is no way to completely avoid spam, there a few things that you can do to stay off the major spam lists that are floating around on the web.  The best piece of advice I can give you is NEVER EVER, EVER put your e-mail on a web site that will display your full e-mail address on the site.  Signing up for newsletters, or using it to purchase something is fine… but, posting your e-mail address in a way that it continues to be displayed on the page is not okay.

Here are a few tips to help you avoid getting spam in the first place…

• If you have a web site or home page, DON’T put your e-mail address on it… Instead, have your web programmer design a web form that LINKS to your e-mail.
• If you must put your e-mail on your website, use the Hive Enkoder at http://hivelogic.com/enkoder.  The Hive Enkoder will encrypt your e-mail in JaveScript to protect if from e-mail harvesting web bots.
• Don’t put your e-mail address on any of your social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.
• If you post to forums, don’t put your e-mail into the comment.  Blog comments are okay too, as long as you don’t put your e-mail into the comments box.
• If you already get some spam, don’t try to reply to the message.  Some spammers make their living by sending out to random addresses.  If the spammers actually get a reply, you have just verified that they have a live body at that address.
• Also, don’t hit the “unsubscibe” link in the bottom of spam messages.  It does the same thing that replying does.  It gives the spammers more incentive to e-mail you, and sell your address to others who will overwhelm your Inbox with advertisements.

If you already get a lot of spam, there is not much you can do to stop it.  You can, however, filter it.  Filtering e-mail means that you are categorizing the e-mail, much like you would your own post office mail…

“Bill… Bill… Junk Mail… Letter from Aunt Maggie… Bill… Junk Mail…”

Where does the junk mail go?  In the garbage, of course.  The same will apply for e-mail.  You are going to want to toss that spam and keep your Inbox clean!

The only problem is, spammers can be tricky.  Sometimes spam can look like a legitimate e-mail… and then sometimes, a real e-mail can look like spam.  So, you don’t want a spam filter that is goign to just delete anything that it “thinks” is spam.  You are going to want it set off to the side, in another folder… just in case.

Any good spam filter will do this.  Even the built in Outlook spam filter has a very rudimentary detection system that filters spam into another folder, down below your Inbox.  But, the built in spam filter isn’t very good.  It doesn’t detect and remove nearly enough spam messages to be effective.

And, THAT is the hardest part about picking out a spam filtering application.  Finding one that is accurate, without catching too much legitimate e-mail is very challenging.

There are 4 things to look for when picking out the best spam filter for your computer.

What are these 4 things?

• The best spam filter blocks e-mail that is known to be spam – Many companies have already created a list of known spam.  It is usually updated constantly and rapidly.  A good spam filter will use this information to keep your Inbox safe and clean.
• The best spam filter will block “sporn” – All good programs allow you to block a high percentage of spam pornography – called “sporn”.  Some will also filter out “adult” content e-mails or block adult oriented images. Some even have picture analysis and can detect and delete pornographic pictures before you see them.
• The best spam filter allows you to LABEL what you think is spam or not spam – YOU, and not the spam filter, should be the ultimate judge of what is spam and what is not. When you have absolutely no control over what you see and what gets tossed out, you could be missing a very important e-mail from a friend, family member, or co-worker.
• The best spam filter has a self-learning system - Great spam filters will be able to keep the pace with changes in the shady world of spamming. It will be able to adjust its perception of what spam is and is not, and raise or lower the bar when deemed appropriate.

Now that we know what the best spam filters will have, let’s move on to what we recommend here in our office.

Software Recommendations

Personally, I’ve used a lot spam filters.  I still have my very first Hotmail account, so over the course of 13+ years, I’ve gotton onto a lot of spammers’ lists.  That Hotmail Inbox is so overwhelmed with spam, that I HAVE to have something to help weed out the spam.

Because I’ve used a lot of spam filters, I know the best from the mediocre.  And, when I find a good piece of software that excels at what it does, I don’t hesitate to preach about it to anyone who will listen.  This is what I recommend to anyone who is ready to take back their Inboxes…

SPAMFighter

SPAMFighter is the way to go.

It works by using a very unique principle to reduce spam.  SPAMFighter’s claim is that it will reduce spam by over 90%.  This is actually better than what most spam filters actually rate, without getting a lot of good e-mails getting caught in the wide net.

I’ve been using SPAMFighter for years, and 90% is pretty accurate.  Basically, if you get 10 spam messages per day, you might see 1 slip through… maybe two on an off day.  If you get 100 spam messages per day, you will probably see around 10 or so slip through the cracks.

How does it work?

You see, when you download SPAMFighter, you join an online “community” of other SPAMFighter users. You never see these people. You never talk to them.  You don’t even know who they are. But, they help you identify and flag suspected spam messages.

Here’s an example: Say that Larry, Moe, Curly, and YOU were all using SPAMFighter.

If a spammer sends out roughly the same message to 100,000 people, chances are good that Larry, Moe, Curly and you are among that list of 100,000 people.

Larry might get the message and flag it as spam. Moe gets the message second and flags it as spam. Curly gets the message third and flags it as spam. At that point the SPAMFighter system would kick in and say, “OK. These three users of the Spam Fighter community flagged this message as spam, so it must really be spam.” So, when you open your Inbox, you will never see the message, because the SPAMFighter system blocked it, based on other people’s opinions of what is considered spam.

This simple concept behind SPAMFighter is amazing, and very effective. I love it when programmers can find ways to harness the collective intelligence of millions of internet users and utilize it for the common good.  It’s like letting the millions of Internet uses out there be the spam filter, each person contributing a tiny bit of the computing power.

If you want to give it a shot and see if it works for you, they have a fully functional trial of SPAMfighter Pro available for download.  Although the company provides a completely FREE “standard” version, I recommend the SPAMFighter PRO Edition because it provides better protection and doesn’t attach a SPAMfighter advertisement to your outgoing messages (that’s my only gripe with this program).  Besides, $29 is definitely a small price to pay for a cleaner inbox.

They have a Server Exchange Module, too.  I use this on a few of my clients’ Windows Server 2003 boxes.  I haven’t had a chance to test it on Server 2008 yet, but I probably will just any day.