JonesPC

This is a question that I get asked a lot. Years ago, the no brainer answer was Norton. We all know that isnt true anymore (or hasn’t been true in the past 5 years or so). Actually, a lot of people don’t know what to use. Its also hard to find good information on which antivirus software is the best to use. if you search any combination of ‘antivirus’ and “software”, you’ll probably find more viruses and malware than information.

Lets face it, most of the antivirus software out there cost about the same so you might as well use the best. there is a website that I check from time to time that can help you out. AV Comparatives puts all those AV suites to the test and give you comprehensive info about who are the best and how well did they perform in different categories. Enough about that, you can visit the site if you want the best details. Here are some of the top picks of 2008

Best Antivirus software of 2008

Avira.

Ive used Avira before (actually using it right now on my Media center PC) and I like it. Ive also used Nod32 in the past and really like that also.  Nod 32 was the runner up so AV Comparative liked them also.

Other tops spots for 2008 include…

Overall performance:  Nod 32

On Access scanning speed:  Kaspersky

Lowest False Positives: Mcafee

Fastest On demand scanner: Symantec

A while ago I bought a little product that was being heavily advertised called “The Magic Jack”. I actually thought it was pretty good. Everything worked out for me. No problems, They finally got a local numbers and it was no hassle at all switching my number to the new number.

It hasn’t been that easy for a lot of people. Some complained, some just wanted to get rid of it but it seems as if it is one piece of software that is really hard to remove from your system once you got it set up.

If you are one of those people, you might want to check out uninstallmagicjack.com. At that website, there is lots of information, Including a tutorial telling you how to rid your system of Magic Jack if you don’t want it anymore. I actually got the tip from someone that commented on my review of Magic Jack (which you can read here).

Visit Uninstallmagicjack.com  here.

In the past 4 or 5 years I have subscribed to these magazines

Maxim

Stuff

EGM

PC Gamer

Xbox Underground

The Official Xbox Magazine

Jet

Ebony

PC World

Computer Shopper

Car and Driver

Automobile

Motor Trend

Electronic House

Game Pro

Blender

Playboy (shh don’t tell anyone)

Computer games (Games for Windows)

Entertainment Weekly

Sound and Vision

There are a few more but I just cant remember the names right now. But you get the picture, I have had a plethora of magazine subscription. That’s a ton of money I have spent on magazines. Well not quite. I have actually gotten all of those subscriptions for free. Many of them I have gotten over and over again as they ran out. Some I got in digital format, some I got in paper. But the point is that I haven’t paid for a magazine subscription every since I discovered Freebizmag.com

How I first found out was by an email I got from a friend with a link to a free subscription to an Xbox magazine. I clicked on the link and it took me to Freebizmag.com where I had to fill out a short survey. The survey generally ask for information about what you do for a living and what role you play at your place of employment. After you finish, you get the magazine that they are offering you, and they usually offer you other free magazine subscriptions based on how you answered the survey (hint. if you answer with photography as your job, you will get photography magazines offered to you).

It doesn’t stop with the magazine subscription that brought you to the website, once you sign up, you will get offers or more free magazines every once in a while that will in turn lead to more free magazines once you re-fill out the survey.

After a while, you will have so many magazines coming to your house that you cant even read them all.

Check out Freebizmag.com for more info

This Windows 7 Feature could be a pretty helpful feature for bloggers. Lets say you were blogging about a particular peice of software, giving a tip or showing a bug or something. you wait till the item you want is on your screen and you want a screenshot of it…what do you do?

Well for me, I usually hit the print screen button, then open up paint and paste the screenshot into pain, then crop the portion of the screenshot that I want for the blog post.

In Windows 7, there’s a little tool called the snipping tool that makes things a lot easier.

All you have to do is click on the snipping tool from your start menu and your cursor turns into the snipping tool. you hold the left button and drag the box over the area you want to get a shot of then save it. You now have a image of whatever you outlined for your blog post. Import it into wordpress or whatever blogging platform you use and its ready to be added to your post.

The only problem I see is that you cant hit any menu’s (the start menu) when using this tool but for items already on the screen. the snipping tool works pretty well

As time goes on, people loose things. Recently I was doing a little repair on a friends laptop. There was a lot wrong with it. Viruses, random errors, missing files. I think that at some point his laptop got hit with a really heavy virus that borked things up permanently. Not to mention he was using one of those registry mechanic style software suites (which Ive never had anything but problems using and I never recommend anyone to use them).

After getting things sorted out to a usable state, I decided I was just going to wipe the whole thing out and start from scratch. I called and found out what he wanted to back up, made the backup, then proceeded to reinstall his Windows XP Pro.

There was one problem

He didn’t have any of the software that came with the laptop (Im guessing its about 3-4 years old) and there was no recovery partition. On the bottom of the laptop, like most laptops was the certificate of authenticity which also had the cd key for his OEM version of Windows XP pro.

I haven’t used any type of bit torrent or anything like that in a long while so I had to download Utorrent and I went searching for a OEM version of Windows XP Pro. Once I found it, I then downloaded the free version of Virtual PC 2007 (yes it really is free, available at Microsoft’s website) and installed it on my PC. I wanted to test everything out to make sure things work before I wiped his laptop clean.

Needless to say, it worked, with his legitimate CD key and I was able to install and activate WinXP pro on his computer.

I don’t know how legal that is, Im guessing it shouldn’t be anything wrong with it since he did own the OEM version…just lost the cd. but if you find yourself in that situation, this may be an option.

Ive said it before, I really hate the iTunes software. Ive stayed away from iPods since they were introduced years ago, not because of the software (I didn’t know how bad it was) but because I didn’t want my music to be locked down to one player. Ive had the iPhone now for about a year and a half and have installed iTunes on several machines, through several versions of Windows and each time I would say that iTunes is virus-like with its bugginess.

Right now, Ive been using my Media center PC to sync my phone, well up till a few days ago. I finally got tired of Itunes and decided to check out other options as far as syncing my media with my iPhone. Luckily there are other options and I’m going to let you know about 1 I tried out.

Media Monkey isn’t really new to music management but it has recently added support for the iPhone and iPod touch. The good thing about Media Monkey is that you could possibly get by without having itunes installed at all.

As far as using it with the iPhone. You can synce your music, along with your playlist (there is a shuffle option). You can also search for, manage and sync your Podcast. All without using iTunes. I kept itunes installed but removes all the settings that allows iTunes to start with windows, or when a iPod is plugged in. Then I installed Media Monkey and plugged in my iPhone. I went through all of the settings, which more detail on configuring an iPod (or iPhone) can be found here. and everything was set up. took less than 10 minutes.

The Time consumption came when I went to sync all of my Podcast. MM (MM = Media Monkey) easily brought over all my music and playlist when I imported the iTunes music folder to MM, It also imported all of the podcast. The problem was that since I created that list of podcast within iTunes, there were no Feed address associated with any of the podcast that I listen to (and there are about 30). I had to go through and edit every podcast to add the RSS feed.

As far as finding podcast, there are ways to search using MM. Digital podcast, Podcast.net and Podcast.com are included by default but you can add more directories. Even still, its a lot easier to just go to a website and search for the podcast you want and subscribe by cut n Pasting the RSS feed.

So far, MM has worked out pretty well, Ive only synced my phone once…just to see if it works, but there is a big difference as far as my system performance without having iTunes running.

MM is free, but there is a “gold” edition that cost $19.99. Also, Winamp plugins all work with MM.

Here’s a problem that I ran across running Windows 7 and a solution.

Problem

I went to install my bluetooth adapter on my notebook. Downloaded the Vista drivers and went to install. About half way through the install I got a error message telling me that my program didn’t install correctly. I tried it several times with the same results. I eventually gave up.

Later, I went to install Java, on a different computer that has Windows 7 installed. I got the same error and never got it installed.

Both times I got a message from Windows 7 new “solution center” interface (which seems to be a lot more helpful than any other version of Windows that Ive used). The solution given was this….

I followed the directions on both of my computers and kept getting an error message (not the error listed in the solution). I gave up on both of those installs for a day or so. Today I decided that since the direction were just deleting a registry key, I opened regedit and deleted the key’s manually.

Solution

Open regedit

type regedit in the start menu

Right click regedit

Click “run as administrator”

Once regedit is open, click on the following registry items to get to where you want to go.

On the left window double click on these (all in the same tree)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

SOFTWARE

Microsoft

SQMClient

Windows

and lastly  DisabledSessions

That last item (DisabledSessions) is what you want to delete. Just right click on that item and delete. If you look, you will see that what you just did is the same thing Microsoft’s Solution center message is saying to do but you just did it manually.

After I went through and did that to both computers, the programs I was trying to install worked with no problems. This registry key has something to do with Microsoft’s beta feedback and will most likely not be there when Windows 7 ships.

I was really sad to hear about 1up.com a week or so ago. I’ll be honest, I hardly ever went to the website. For my gaming news I prefer IGN or I just read random gaming items on Digg. There were several 1up Podcast that I listened to religiously. 1up yours, GFW, and 1up fm. Out of all the gaming podcast, Ive always felt that those 3 were the most entertaining to listen too.

Lets back up a minute…in case you dont know.

1up.com is a gaming website. That website was also the home for several gaming magazines, EGM and Games for Windows. If you remember, almost a year ago Ziff Davis (who owns all of those publications) shut down Games for Windows Magazine. Luckily all of the writers were just converted to the website only pc gaming section. Also the GFW podcast was still left intact.  A couple of weeks ago, Ziff sold the whole 1up.com and EGM magazine to UGO, a gaming website I never visit (actually, I didn’t know they still existed). The bad thing about that transaction, UGO shut down the EGM magazine and laid off most of the talent at 1up.com.  1up.com still exist and UGO claim to want to keep the website intact and running, but writers such as Shane bettenhausen, Anthony Gallegos, Nick Suttner and Ryan Scott.

What are these guys going to do? I don’t know, there have been a few things that has started since the transaction, Ryan Scott and a few others have started a new Podcast at Geekbox.net. Nick Suttner and Anthony Gallegos have their thing going on at eat-sleep-game.com with a new podcast (called rebel.fm). And Shane got picked up by a gaming publisher (Ignition Entertainment).

Hopefully things will work out for all those guys.

If you want to hear the farewell podcast, check out 1up yours on Jan 30th.

I rarely use Twitter, I’m more of a lurker than Twitter-er. I have a Facebook page but I really don’t use it much, other than to see what others are doing. Ive never signed up to Friend Feed. Should I be using those apps/services more?

This question has been on my mind every since I listened to an episode of Twit a couple weeks. A few of the guest were talking about how using services such as Friend Feed and Twitter were starting to become their main focus…with blogging being put on the backburner.

Is this something to watch or is it “inside baseball”?

I ask myself this question because sometimes, in the tech world, things will end up being “inside baseball”. Trends, talk, or topics that only those handful of “blogging elitist” care about. Those services ussually live and die by the hype those guys (or gals) are able to keep going. Sometimes that hype is enough to push those apps forward, beyond the “cool guys” of tech. Sometimes it isn’t.

Apps like Twitter has slowly been going beyond that circle and I would almost have to say that President Obama had as much to do with it as anyone else. Not only did Obama using Twitter help his campaign, it also gave Twitter the ultimate legitimacy in the world beyond the Twit crowd, or Gillmor gang followers.

If everyone started shifting thier focus to those services, what will become of blogs…and blogging? What will be left to surf when you are looking for information online? or just general reading material? I cant see those collections of 1 or 2 sentence per post services being enough for people that want real info, but it has its place.

Wordpress.com has launched a pretty interesting website the other day. If you ever wanted to figure out how to setup, configure, and use wordpress, you can now visit Wordpress.tv.

Wordpress.tv offer video tutorials and help with all types of wordpress task’s. If you are new to using wordpress you can visite Wordpress.tv and get all of the knowledge you need to get started and get going.

As far as the website, It reminds me of Hulu.com the way its set up. Tutorials arent the only type of videos on the site, there is also other wordpress related content that may interest anyone that is a fan of Wordpress.

For more info, visit Wordpress.tv