Posted 01/01/2009 at 10:01:16pm

I was just reading and commenting on the antivirus artical that I would like an alternitive set of utilities one of which was a defrager, how ever as stated many times by other posters, your artical is a bit lacking

lacking in that it used a limited amount of defragers, and only 1 host environment, and a host environment that is pretty much junk to say the least and has a life expectancy of about 1 year.... tisk... tisk....

if it were I doing the test, firstly I would run it on a win2k and a winXP system, IMHO these are the 2 primary OS's in the market today, (excludeing Linux and Mac flavors).

scondly I would compair it to the native defragers built into windows, and one of the oldest defrag utilities with a continuiing lifespan, Nortons Speeddisk, which has been around for quite a few years and quite a few OS changes, sadly like all of Nortons products after about 2004 even it began to slip in the desireability levels, but regardless it should have been one of the above mentioned contenders.

also start up and shut down times being what they are, they are  always a source of contention, but as also mentioned so is the normal hour by hour and minuit by minuit open and closeing of app after app after utility after music, after game, after.... well.... after what ever.... if the the normal opperation of your system you don't notice a differance, maybe it's not working and time to try something else, or if after running a defrager you can't boot.... well.... been there done that.

regardless of what you use, I think in addition to start and stop times, during the day performance needs to be considered as well as data integrity which wasn't even addressed... an oops? or in this day of redundancy an unneeded consideration?

well off to scower the web and MaxPC for utility reviews.

gl all and Happy New Year

Posted 01/01/2009 at 09:20:23pm

as previously stated, I've used norton products since the 3.1 days, but also as previously stated they lost their kinghood from around 2004 to the present, and in that vein, I would like to ask for a little suggestive help.

listed above in this artical are some choices for Antivirus protection, in the comments a suggestion or 2 for fire walls, which is also good.

what I would like now is either links to articals/reviews for firewalls, and utility suites, namely defrag and registry fixing utilities, things that work as well as the Norton Systemworks  suites used to work, or maybe better?

have there been any suit reviews on MaxPC? if so what are the links please.

thanks, this is an awsome mag'

Posted 12/30/2008 at 10:38:34pm

I personally have been a Norton user for over 15 years, ever since windows 3.1, I have for the most part up untill the last couple of years been very happy with them, however over the last couple of years, as previously griped by others, it has become a resource hog with configuration issues, one of the biggest gripes I have had with Norton AV is the ability to tell it weither to ignore a file on the auto protect warning, it used to have an option that if a virus was found to ask the user what to do, but over the past couple of years that option for the auto protect feature was gone, and I lost several files that I knew were good and legit to the auto delete, has that option been returned?

I have been looking for alternitives to norton for sometime, the bad thing is you never know how good your av is untill you get nailed, and by that time it's to late, and by the same token you assume it's working if you get no flags.

McAfee has been a major gripe of mine for ages, I once had to un install it from a system for a client, it trashed the system to the point I had to completely redo the system, this was around 99 or 2k, seems the scanner created a kind of "gateway" to everything, in order to install or even run a program this gateway had to be there, even in safemode I was not able to even get into the registry to fix it, what a nightmare.

another popular program is bitdefender, it has been rated pretty good, but I didn't see it here either, although I tried it's online scanner a while back and thanks to a virtualization program survived that experiance, it deleted and lot of stuff with out even asking, and some of it was innocent stuff includeing 2 batch files froma batch file training program I had from DOS days, I had the distinction in my school of being the only guy to write a 4k byte batch file, and all it was was a self growing batch file used to demmonstrate what a worm would do.

anyway to make a long story short, I was very happy to have found this article, and am going to put some of it to good use.

is there a simular artical on firewalls and utility suites? not to happy with Norton speed disk any more, and the 2007 firewall  wasn't to thrilling either.

any way keep up the good writing, and Happy New Year to all