Norton Internet Security 2010, makes life easier!

Seriously, been using free anti virus since years, but my computer is still vulnerable & keep getting affected again & again. I don’t understand why they aren’t powerful. For me, an anti-virus software should be “Install & Forget”, it should be capable of taking care off all sorts of malicious bad software, trojans, spywares & let me concentrate on work!

Norton Internet Security 2010 does just what I wanted to. It takes care of all bad stuff & allows me to do my work peacefully. As you can see in the below screenshot, NIS has got really nice dashboard which tell you everything about current processes.

Clicking on the performance button shows how NIS is performing on your machine, how many issues it has found, details of the issues it found, memory/CPU consumption ..etc, everything plotted over a nice graph.

Elegant settings window allows you to configure NIS as per your requirements. Certain things which you might already know like scheduling scans, network settings, computer settings, web settings, everything comes under this. All these settings have a simple button which can turn ‘on’ or ‘off’ anytime .

We surf internet all the time. But, the fact is we find new sites via search engines (or I can say just Google?). NIS nicely integrates with Google search results page & shows whether the listed links are safe to visit or not. In my opinion this itself hugely reduces chance of getting infected!

With NIS you can have better understanding of installed applications. Norton scans every installed application & automatically finds out whether to trust the application or not & assigns proper access rights. Norton also tracks CPU & memory usage history of all applications!

Today, my friend’s came come with an infected thumb drive & asked me to format it since he was unable to fix it with the free anti-virus he had. I just plugged the thumb drive in, NIS automatically scanned the drive, found the threat!! I just clicked “Fix” & bingo! NIS took around 5 to 10 seconds to fix it & all the data was safe.

It just covers everything! I don’t think my PC would ever get affected with NIS installed on it! There’s still a lot of settings & configuration available, I just gone through few which impressed me.

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Usually I download lot of stuff from internet, sometimes when I want to go to bed, it says 1hour remaining. I would be in a confusion state whether to sleep & run my PC all night or wait till it completes or pause downloading & shutdown the PC. I wished if a sleep timer functionality like in TV implemented for PCs.

Though this functionality doen’t comes with Windows XP, I found a freeware which simply does that. Auto Shutdown is a freeware with which you can set sleep time & it automatically shuts down the PC at that time! This really filled my requirement, depending on download I can set a time to shutdown. When I start my PC again, I can see completed download. The sleep timer was useful for me because of downloads, you might have different requirements to set sleep timer. If you can estimate completeion time for any process running on your PC, instead of sitting in front of it until it ends, just set sleep timer.

In case downloading, several download managers like Free Download Manager comes with an option to shutdown computer after completion of downloads. For all other cases you can get Auto Shutdown at Rabid Software.

Yeah! it’s the easiest way to set a Guinness World Record! As we all love worlds’s most advanced, most customizable browser, we can help it to set a world record. It’s new version Firefox 3 is to be released soon. Official date for it’s release is not yet announced. So, Firefox 3 is all set to make a guinness world record as most downloaded software in 24 hours. The date to download will be announced on Spreadfirefox.com. You can also pledge & give your email ID, and a reminder will be sent to your email ID too.

Let’s join hands & set this world record

Google has released Google talk labs edition with lot of new features. The most awaited group chat is implemented in this labs edition. Group chat was implemented on gmail web chat app few months ago, but it’s desktop application was lacking this feature. Following are new features found on Google talk labs edition:

• Group chat, have conferences in Gtalk desktop labs edition. I used to log in to Yahoo! for this feature before.
• Notification from other Google services orkut & calendar.
• Tabbed chatting, no hassle of new chat window, chat with different friends in different tabs.

There are also few things which I don’t like in this new client:

• Installation is different from previous client, is pretty similar to Yahoo! messenger. First downloads a 300kb installer, upon executing that will download other required files to install application. This installer may not work at office, because they might be blocking the port through which installer tries to connect to server.
• One more much awaited feature “Invisible Mode” is not yet implemented.
• Copying of text from chat window is not possible! This looks really annoying for me.

You can get Google Talk labs edition here. This is the labs edition, you can click on “Feedback” button present at bottom of application to send your feedback about the application & to improve next Google talk release.

It’s april first again, time to fool your friends & relatives. Will you again do that same kind of “Cockroach!, cockroach!” kind of fool? Let’s try something different wit computers without harming your computer. By the way you can fool anyone who is residing anywhere in this world! Pranks Online has a set of Computer Pranks to fool your friends. Following are the few popular programs they have:

Flasher:

This cool program will flash the image of your choice on your victim’s screen at any time interval you desire. The image will show so quickly and unexpectedly that your victim will wonder whether or not they really saw what they thought they saw. The possibilities on this one are truly endless. Use it to show a picture of your victim’s ex, steaming dogshit, or anything else you choose.

Bomb:

This program is a harmless way to give your victim a “bad day.” Bomb.exe can be set up with any application on a computer to simulate a program crash 5 seconds after the program has been run. The crash will feature the dreaded “Illegal Operation” windows message but does not actually crash the system or damage any files.

PC system crash simulator:

Maybe you’ve heard of the “Blue Screen of Death”, maybe you haven’t… Either way, this will FREAK you out. This is a screensaver you can install easily on any Windows PC (instructions included). When it runs, it will simulate a complete PC system crash without doing any damage. The author, Mark Russinovich, is a known PC expert from Sysinternals.com.

These are only few, you can see more application here.

For those who don’t know about Skype, It’s a VOIP client/messenger. Skype is used to talk to friends all over world, many times it is also used for corporate meetings/conferences. You can get Skype for free at www.skype.com.

Callgraph got my notice at DevCamp Bangalore, a developer un-conference. Callgraph integrates into Skype & records all calls automatically. Callgraph can record calls of Skype, Skype In, Skype Out & store them in mp3 format. Recorded calls can be tagged for your convenience & you can search for recorded calls using tags. Callgraph allows you to configure it as per your requirement including changing location to store calls, enable/disable notifications, enable/disable automatic call recording…..etc.

Callgraph is absolutely FREE works on Windows XP & recently released to Vista also. Download Callgraph at www.callgraph.in, Happy Calling

Irfan View is a Image Viewer with plenty of handy options in it. The most usefull feature for me is, converting from one format to another.Just give “Save as” & save the file whatever the format you want.Irfan View supports almost all image formats. Listed features of Irfan View in its official website are as below:

• Many supported file formats (click here the list of formats)
• Multi language support
• Thumbnail/preview option
• Slideshow (save slideshow as EXE/SCR or burn it to CD)
• Show EXIF/IPTC/Comment text in Slideshow/Fullscreen etc.
• Support for Adobe Photoshop Filters
• Fast directory view (moving through directory)
• Batch conversion (with image processing)
• Multipage TIF editing
• File search
• Email option
• Multimedia player
• Print option
• Change color depth
• Scan (batch scan) support
• Cut/crop
• IPTC editing
• Effects (Sharpen, Blur, Adobe 8BF, Filter Factory, Filters Unlimited, etc.)
• Capturing
• Extract icons from EXE/DLL/ICLs
• Lossless JPG rotation
• Many hotkeys
• Many command line options
• Many PlugIns
• Only one EXE-File, no DLLs, no Shareware messages like “I Agree” or “Evaluation expired”
• No registry changes without user action/permission!
• and much much more

For more information & downloading go to www.irfanview.com