PC Tonic » Opinion

2 Reasons Why You Might Want To Ditch MS Security Essentials, And Why Shouldn’t

Ashutosh Mishra — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 18:02:59 +0000

Combined with a capable firewall, Microsoft Security Essentials is currently the best and most hassle-free solution available for Windows. If you don’t agree with me, one of us is a monkeynut.

However, it has a few quirks (two, to be specific) that may drive you to using another security tool (a cracked Kaspersky or Norton, maybe?). So we’ll see what these two quirks are, and why you should rather ignore them and keep using this awesome tool.

#1 Revoltingly long first update

Microsoft Security Essentials takes a ridiculous amount of time to update for the first time (just after you install it). On a slow connection, it can be as long as an hour or more! Since future updates are all automatic and silent, this is likely the only time you’re gonna notice the update, and naturally you feel pissed off. You people assume it’s always gonna take that long to update (which would be outrageous), and uninstall it without thinking twice. This is not true. The subsequent updates are small and fast as any other antimalware program. So why the gigantic first update? Lets see.

You must have noticed that the MSE installer is surprisingly small (about 8 MB) as compared to other antimalware tools. However, this is because the installer simply installs the core MSE program. Absolutely nothing that’ll protect your computer – the scanner, real-time engine and the malware definitions – come with this installer. After MSE is installed, it downloads and adds these components during the first update. Hence the huge, long update. The solution is just to be patient the first time.

Also, you can simply minimize or close the MSE window when its updating without stopping the update itself, and let it do its job.

#2 Revoltingly long time to remove malware

If you’ve ever been in a situation where MSE detects anything over 10 infections on an external drive or something, you must be knowing it takes just too much time to wipe those out. Most other antimalware that I’ve used suspend/quarantine/kill malware in a matter of seconds. But MSE will often take more than just a few minutes to get the task done. Sometimes it can take upto 20 minutes, or might pretend to just plain hang (while it clearly hasn’t). This can lead you to falsely assume that MSE can’t remove malware effectively.

Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do about it. For now. Remember that MSE is still very young (not even a year old, to be exact) and the upcoming version 2 might very well take care of this issue. For the time being, just put MSE in the background, leave it to do its job, and get back to your own work. Be assured that it will remove the malware it detects, no matter how long.

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MSE is a really, really good security product that doesn’t deserve to be ditched for these minor quirks. If you’re currently paying for your PC security, you should seriously stop now and get MSE instead. Lifehacker tries to explain why.

My First Ever Hardware Review : The Samsung N150 Netbook

Ashutosh Mishra — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 09:22:20 +0000

I love gadgets. I didn’t have one until yesterday. Okay, I do have an HP laptop and an LG dumbphone since two years, but neither is the kind of stuff I’d call a gadget.

Yesterday, I got my first ever gadget gadget – a Samsung N150 netbook! I’m a big fan of netbooks – they’re tiny, light, and they won’t toast your crotches, like my Pavilion has frantically tried to do ever since I bought it. India being a poor country, you’d expect netbooks to be wildly popular and available everywhere. Nope. They are available, but for a I-want-this-model-only freak like me, this is not the place you go shopping for netbooks.

After reading tons of online reviews, checking out the design and battery life of various models, and asking 279 real world people about a good netbook (everyone was like, WTH is a net-thing!), I zeroed in upon the Asus EEE-PC 1005P. It was not to be found anywhere I and my sister and me brother-in-law looked, Bangalore included. My next choice was the Toshiba NB305, which is very popular with netbook critics for superb build quality and all. It was not to be found anywhere I and my sister and my brother-in-law looked, Bangalore included. My third choice was the Samsung N210, which promises EEE-PC like 11 hours of battery life. It was not to be found anywhere I and my sister and my brother-in-law looked, Bangalore included. Choice no. 4 was the Samsung N150. It was not to be found anywhere I It was found, and shipped to me!

So here I am, on my first ever netbook, writing my first ever review of the first ever cool gadget I’ve ever owned. I hope not to doze you off this post.

Specs

One reason why I was not so keen on the N150 was because the specs mentioned by Samsung were not quite up there with the other three models. It had a 160GB hard drive, no Bluetooth, only 8.5 hours of claimed battery life, etc. However the model I’ve received (still labelled as N150), has spicier specs, namely

2 GB memory, instead of just 1 GB
a 250 GB hard drive, that gets an impressive 5.8 Windows experience rating
Bluetooth (not that I use it much, but still useful for some quick file transfers with my dumbphone)
The Samsung battery life enhancer software, which allows your netbook to sleep using very little power

Software wise, there’s the disgusting Windows 7 Starter with a boatload of crap tools (and McAfee, for crying out loud!) which I’ve removed already. I’m also fancying a move to Jolicloud or Ubuntu Netbook Edition. So, all this software talk can be put to rest for now.

Heat

Heat was one of major issues with my HP Pavilion laptop (The CPU would get to 95C temperature, and the casing over 70C). That’s all but gone with this netbook. It just doesn’t get hot! The vent of the left side admittedly gets a bit warm, which is quite expected and not uncomfortable at all.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The keyboard is quite comfortable. It’s small for my huge hands, but I type with two fingers (still!) so that’s not much of a problem for me.

The touchpad is quite another story. It’s as big as a fifth of my palm, and it’s weird! Maybe it’ll be better after I peel the sticker off it, but it just feels so tiny and stupid. Those multitouch gestures are quite fun, but my two fingers are huge enough to cover the entire touchpad and cause undesirable clicks and all. I think Samsung could’ve moved the keyboard a little bit up and made the touchpad larger.

Display

Matte finish for the win! Seriously! With my HP laptop it was always frustrating to see my face on the screen all the time, unless I was in some super dark room doing super secret stuff. That’s totally gone, and I can even use this netbook on the balcony in broad daylight. I love non-glossy screens.

Battery

All of the other three models I was looking for would apparently last for 7 or more hours. This one doesn’t. I’ve been using it off and on since yesterday night, and so far it’s been running for about 5:15 hours on roughly 85% of the battery charge. Usually it should last 6 hours or more with the ‘Samsung Optimized’ or ‘Power saver’ power plans and normal usage, but for me it’ll probably max out at 5:30 hours as I plug in my EVDO modem to access the internet all the time. Still, anything above five hours is huge. My previous laptop lasted 2 hours on battery when it was new, and now it barely stays over six minutes.

Price

It cost roughly Rs. 18,000, which is quite cheap in my opinion. However, once again the ASUS 1005P is cheaper at Rs.17,500 and yet has longer battery life. Samsung’s hardware and design is quite better than that of ASUS, so that little extra cost shouldn’t hurt that much.

Everything else

That’s all I had to say in my review. If you want to read an actual Samsung N150 review, you’ll find it here.

Lets wrap it up

So here’s my view of the Samsung N150 in short -

PROS

Tiny and lightweight (applies to all similar netbooks)
Sturdy build; feels good in your hands
Non-glossy display
Nice keyboard
Enough USB and other ports, decent webcam, and all those petty hardware things
Doesn’t get hot
Fully supported by Jolicloud, and nearly fully supported by Ubuntu Netbook

CONS

Battery life could be better, especially as the rivals (and even Samsung N210) provide 7+ hours of battery life
Touchpad. Oh my God.
The Intel Pinetrail Atom processor. (applies to all similar netbooks)
Windows 7 Starter and all the added crapware

I’m very strict, so I’ll give the Samsung N150 a 7 out of 10, which should be taken as really good. Of course, I wish I had tried other netbooks so I could compare them all, but I haven’t and you’ll need to rush to Laptop Magazine and similar other websites if you’re looking for comparing stuff. And never come back for hardware reviews before August, 2012, because there won’t be one. Have a good day.

Microsoft Has A Download Manager. It’s Total Crap.

Ashutosh Mishra — Sat, 22 May 2010 07:35:12 +0000

There were times when everything made by Microsoft (save Windows and Office, of course) was crappy. Geeks couldn’t wait to install tons of additional software on their new Windows XP machines the moment they switched them on. And then, Microsoft woke up. From each of the dozen Windows Live offerings to the Bing search engine to the incredible Security Essentials to the redesigned Paint (hell yeah!), Microsoft has been churning out one fantastic product after another of late. Today I can shamelessly claim to be using a lot of Microsoft tools besides their flagship Windows OS and Office suite.

Turns out Microsoft has a free download manager as well. We could all do with a good download manager these days. Usually you’ve a wide variety of choices available for doing anyone particular task in Windows, meaning you’re very likely to stumble upon a software that does your job without hassle. Unfortunately, that’s presently not the case with download managers. Free Download Manager, my personal favourite, has been abandoned by its developers and is being haphazardly developed by the community (which, despite being very praiseworthy, isn’t the best way to carry forward the project). Download Accelerator Plus (free version), the most popular choice out there, is bloated with ads and crap. Orbit is a useful little tool, except that its English interface is not in English. FlashGet is again very popular, but with a very wonky interface and horrible lack of options. There’s DownThemAll! for Firefox, which is, well, Firefox-only. All modern browsers (minus IE have download managers, but none of them has a download ‘accelerator’, which is a big reason people use dedicated managers after all.

Amongst all this chaos when I heard that Microsoft has a download manager of its own, I completely went nuts with joy. It was the ‘Security Essentials’ feeling all over again – Microsoft was finally stepping in to address some issues that third party developers couldn’t! However, after using the manager for about 14 seconds, I can tell you this – it’s PATHETIC. It has nothing! Sure, you can ‘copy and paste URIs starting with a http://’ . Yup. That’s it. The damn thing won’t even plug into your browsers (IE 8 included), save the lack advanced features for later.

With Microsoft Download Manager, all you have to do (and all you can do) is paste a hotlink to any file on the Internet, and the file will be downloaded for you. Seriously, you shouldn’t waste any more time reading this article or thinking about the product. It might get better in the future – I sure do hope it does – but for now it’s a huge no-no.

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P.S. I’m not linking to the software. You may ~~Google~~ bing it and download it, but keep in mind that it’s totally not worth your time.

Source – NirmalTV.com

Mac vs PC ads : Where are they going?

Ashutosh Mishra — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:57:00 +0000

Every other day, we see a Mac vs PC ad popping up from either company that leaves no stones unturned in ridiculing the rival’s products. Apple’s ads are all about a cool Mac guy humiliating a PC nerd in every possible manner. And then Microsoft brings up a bunch of people, all of whom reject pricey Macs, grab an HP, and run away shouting “I am a PC!”. Both companies are among the largest in the world, and both are obviously spending millions in creating and promoting these ads. But the result? Nothing (except for the rare humor in pro-Mac ads, and a good look at HP models in pro-PC ads). These ads definitely don’t convert a PC (as in human) to a Mac, or vice-versa.

In my opinion, both companies had had enough of these ads (especially Apple) and should rather invest the money to develop their products (and don’t even say Macs are flawless). And Apple must consider bringing down the price of MacBooks and iMacs if it wants it’s OS to gain popularity.

What’s your say on the ever increasing Mac vs PC ads?

Image credit – EYLC

The latest VLC Player version is buggy

Ashutosh Mishra — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 09:22:00 +0000

VLC is my favorite app for watching movies and videos, but the ridiculous bugs in the latest 0.9.8a Grishenko release has forced me to look for other options. It simply fires up and gets stuck if I double click on any compatible file; the workout is to manually open VLC and drag the file into it – something which I don’t find very convenient. Unlike the previous versions, all of which were exceedingly smooth to work with, this version just doesn’t click for me. I absolutely loved the 0.9 release of VLC because of all of the GUI tweaks, but 0.9.8a is seriously setting me back.

Are you having similar problems with VLC 0.9.8a in Windows Vista, or any other OS? Do say in your comments.

My wishlist for Jaunty Jackalope

Ashutosh Mishra — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 16:22:00 +0000

It’s been two months since Intrepid was released, and soon we’ll be jumping on our toes for the next Ubuntu – Jaunty Jackalope. I’ve been an avid Ubuntu user since Feisty and I’ve always waited excitedly for new releases, until now. Seeing almost the same desktop for almost two years is kind of killing my appetite for Ubuntu. Ok, there HAS been a lot of improvement but none of these has been substantial. That being said, I’ll still keep my fingers crossed for a hopefully fantastic Jaunty. This is my wishlist for Jaunty, do share yours as well!

Enter VLC, Banshee; exit Totem, Rhythmbox

VLC is easily one of the best media players out there, and with the latest 0.9 series it has become quite user friendly. It would be just so much better to have VLC instead of Totem in Jaunty. Same goes for Banshee, which I feel is a better replacement for Rhythmbox. Totem and Rhythmbox are Gnome defaults, but then Ubuntu has done away with Gnome products like Epiphany (to include Firefox), and Cheese.

Can we have a better F-Spot, pleeeeezzz?

Most applications in Ubuntu work very smoothly in proper hardware, except that damned F-Spot. Even on my Pavilion laptop with 3GB memory, an AMD dual core processor, and 256MB ATI GPU, F-Spot surprisingly chokes and yells for help while importing my digicam photos. I’ve a very pleasant experience with Windows Live Photo Gallery, and a really horrid time with F-Spot. I would certainly love it to get smoother and more robust.

A more thorough Help and Support

The built-in Help items in Ubuntu are just too little. A more comprehensive Help tool would be a good addition. It can be even better if the Ubuntu Help can import items from the Internet, like Windows Help does.

Do something about that package updating technique

It’s utterly ridiculous that no Linux distro provides updates to big releases of their included software. For example, if a distro version comes with OpenOffice.org 2.4, and OOo 3.0 is released meanwhile, you won’t be “officially” be upgraded to the new version – rather you’ve got to wait for a new version of the distro to use the new version of the software. For this reason, Ubuntu users will have to wait till April to get officially supported OOo 3, even though it was released more than 2 months ago.

I’m not sure if it’s possible, but it would be great if we get immediate updates for new software versions.

Release a special Ubuntu version with Ubuntu Restricted Extras installed

The Ubuntu Restricted Extras is a great package to install support for most proprietary stuff on your Ubuntu. Thing is it isn’t installed by default, meaning people without an Internet connection basically CANNOT use Ubuntu on their desktops. Canonical should release a special Ubuntu version with these restricted extras package installed.

Yearly cycles for new versions, half-yearly cycles for service packs

Releasing a new OS every 6 months is simply overkill. Look at Canonical’s state – at any given time it has support anywhere between three to four different Ubuntu versions. Oh, and there are Kubuntu, Gobuntu, Xubuntu and Edubuntu as well! It would be much better if Canonical decides to release new versions once every year. Of course this will be sensible only if that package updating, which I talked about above, is modified. 6 month cycles can rather be used for service pack type releases.

So. That’s my wishlist. Linux geeks, what do you think? Pour in your comments!

Ubuntu Needs a Proper Download Manager, Seriously

Ashutosh Mishra — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:00:00 +0000

We all Linux users have to agree that there isn’t a proper substitute to the fully loaded download managers (read FDM, DAP) available for Windows. I happen to be a dual user, using Ubuntu within Windows through Wubi. With my broadband plan now upgraded, I can download anything from 1:00 AM – 7:00 AM everyday without exhausting my download limits. Naturally the time is a bit odd, so I just set a daily scheduler in FDM to start the download right after 1 and stop it just before 7. However yesterday I found out that torrent download rate via Transmission was much higher than those by FDM. As I frequently download the torrents of new Linux distros, this seemed great at first; but a bit of poking around and I didn’t find a schedule option in Transmission. Deluge has a somewhat weird scheduler which I can work out, but the thing is that I don’t download ONLY torrents. There are these other software tools and all which aren’t available as torrents, and there isn’t simply anything in Ubuntu to create a download schedule for them (someone at the IRC channel suggested Cron, now what’s that?). Therefore, this is my request to the Ubuntu team to include a download manager sort of tool in the next Ubuntu release. We understand it’s pretty difficult to include additional stuff as everything has to be packed into one disc, but at least you guys can try tweaking the default download manager of Firefox and add some more features to it (I guess that’s possible, Firefox being open source). No one wants an FDM or a DAP clone; just a few extra features like the schedule option will suffice. If it does come through, things will be much better for us folks with throttled bandwidth options. Things will be much better for Ubuntu as well, as everyone will have one more reason to use this wonderful OS.

Photo Credit : khalilshah

The Much Improved Hardy Heron

Ashutosh Mishra — Sun, 18 May 2008 15:46:00 +0000

Canonical has made my birthday for the second year running (today’s my 18th birthday, by the way). Last year I had received the wonderful Feisty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04) CD s via their ShipIt! service on my 17th b’day, and today I received my Hardy Heron CD! I have read a lot about Hardy since it’s beta was out and I was dying to try it out, so the CD was really a pleasant surprise (more so, as my Gutsy CD never arrived…).

Source : UbuntuOS

As mentioned earlier, I had migrated back to Windows XP for better blogging. But this CD made me forget everything and I just wanted to get Ubuntu back on my computer.Thankfully, the Hardy Heron Live CD includes the Wubi installer, with which you can install Ubuntu right within Windows (and uninstall it whenever you want). I went for it and Hardy was up and running within half an hour. A quick glance made it clear than Hardy is indeed a great improvement over Feisty (I haven’t tried Gutsy). Three hours hence, I have already explored quite a bit of the newest Ubuntu. I have plans start my own “Ubuntu for Beginners” tips in near future; till then here’s a quick “what’s-great-and-what’s-not” in Hardy Heron.

The Improvements
1.The UI has been greatly refined. Window borders are smoother, there are better inbuilt themes available (Human-Murrine especially) and desktop effects are present by default. Icons are sexier and there are better screen resolution options as well.

2.I am on Firefox 3! I have had trouble with beta products in the past, and that kept me from trying the betas of Firefox 3 in Windows. But this browser is inbuilt in Hardy and works without a glitch! Firefox 3 is easily much better than 2, which is what I still have in Windows.

3.GIMP 2.4 is awesome. I use Paint.NET in Windows, as it’s lighter and still has everything that I need. Nevertheless, GIMP has a Photoshop like royalty about it. The perspective clone feature in the latest GIMP looks cool, and I will be trying it out soon.

4.Tomboy looks promising. I haven’t quite started using it, but it feels much better than the old version in Feisty.

5.The NTFS editing feature is neat, ~~though I will probably not need it.~~ Looks like I will be needing it a lot…it was very helpful while creating screenshots for my article on Mozilla Prism.

6.Rhythmbox has got a more complete feeling about it. Addition of Jamendo and Magnatune stores has spiced it up.

7.Hardy recognizes and mounts my sister’s Nokia N-72, something which Feisty didn’t do.

8.Brasero is simple and un-Nero-ish, which is what I like. I use BurnAware free edition in Windows, and both have a very similar layout.

9.Geyes is great as ever. Everyone who has seen our desktop just loves those prowling eyes.

10.YouTube search integration into Totem makes my favorite movie player even better.

11.~~I haven’t quite got grasp over this PolicyKit thing. It’s supposedly very useful, which I should be finding out in a couple of minutes.~~ I am comfortable with it now. Nice add to Ubuntu.

12.I had heard a lot of Gnome Do, so I downloaded it right after installing Hardy. It looks very handy at the moment, but I haven’t yet utilized it completely.

13.The Help browser has been revamped for the better. I am still pretty much a Linux n00b, so I have to fire up the Help menus every once in a while.

14.The World Clock Applet is really cool, but our town Bhubaneswar isn’t up in the list yet. I had to adjust my settings to the nearby metro Kolkata.

15.I hate to admit that I was on Gaim all the time on Feisty. Pidgin 2.4 feels so much better, smoother and simpler. Many feel it’s boring, but I will keep using it full blast in Windows and Ubuntu.

16.F-Spot is hard to beat. Picasa or FastStone of Windows don’t match up to it at all.

Things that could have been better…
Hardy is certainly a big improvement over Feisty (and probably Gutsy as well), but there are some minor tweaks that would have made Hardy even better.

1.I am not sure if there is any name of this feature in Windows. Anyway, I will try to explain :
Using the inbuilt CD writing wizard in Windows XP / Vista, you can write data to a CD-R which already contains some data. This is really helpful as I have a bunch of old project CD s containing now-useless things like a single document or a presentation (which are never larger than 100K). These CD s can’t be erased for reuse, but with the CD wizard in Windows I can easily add more data to them.
This feature wasn’t present in Feisty, and this isn’t there in Hardy either (you will asked to enter a rewritable or a blank disk if you try this). With CD s getting obsolete, it may not be really a big deal for you anyway.

2.Plugins added into Firefox can be uninstalled only via Add / Remove Programs or Synaptic Package Manager. It would have been a better choice to provide an uninstall option right within Firefox. If there is a way to do this, please tell me.

3.No exciting games are available by default in Ubuntu, yet. There are some pretty thrilling games exclusively for Linux, but they are all massive size downloads – something which my limited broadband doesn’t allow me to get.

Update:
4.Nautilus is better than ever before, but still not quite in the league of Windows Explorer or Konqueror. I would love it to shed it’s simplicity and get a bit more robust.

These small snags apart, Ubuntu Hardy Heron has won me over. You can go ahead and give it a try as well, I am sure you’ll like it.

Is there any more cool / useful feature in Hardy than I can try out? Feel free to share via a comment.

3 Reasons Why I Don’t Like AVG Free 8

Ashutosh Mishra — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:32:00 +0000

~~Grisoft~~ AVG Technologies released the free version of AVG antivirus on 24th April. With added spyware cleaning and link scanning capabilities, the latest version of this popular antivirus has got positive reviews from all over the tech world. I was myself a fan of AVG’s earlier versions

and happily recommended it to all. However, the latest version has left me disappointed and I can’t get to like it at all. I used it for about 2 days before switching over to Avast! Home Edition, which looks wonderfully better. In this post, I have brought about the stuff that disappointed me.

1.Ever increasing installer size.
It’s another new version of AVG and another phenomenal increase in the installer size. From 28MB it has now frog leaped to 46MB. I agree that adding spyware cleaning and link scanning capabilities should require more space, but Avast! Home 4.8 too included spyware cleaning for the first time and it’s installer size is still 22MB. Moreover, Avast! Home includes a 6-shield real time protection, a skinnable interface, boot time scanning and about a dozen more configuration options than AVG. Surely, AVG is becoming the Adobe Reader of antiviruses.

2.AVG is was light.
AVG has no longer got the light-resource-usage thing that it was famous for. This new edition eats up as much memory as any other antivirus, and maybe even more. The good thing is that the scans are faster than before.

3.The “Upgrade to PRO version” slogan is on an all-time high.
The guys at AVG Technologies are well known for ~~pleading~~ [almost] demanding their users to upgrade to a professional version. I agree they make a living from AVG, but that’s no reason to ignore their most popular product, the free one. AVG Free is always displayed at the tiniest and most inconspicuous corner of any AVG page. Even the home page meant exclusively for AVG Free portrays it as a horribly crappified product.

Well these are my reasons. Many won’t agree with me, but I believe these points have got ground. With time I am starting to like Avast! more and more, and I will be covering this wonderful app in details very soon. If the default silver panel interface of Avast! confuses you, my future posts will help you out. Subscribe now and keep a lookout!