Friday, August 5, 2011

The best anti-virus software

I get the question "Which anti-virus software do you recommend?" commonly. My answer is the same:

"Free? or paid?"

If free, your choices are limited. The most common being Avast, AntiVir, and AVG. We use Avast free anti-virus at Western Sky PC due to our successful history with it, but what about paid software?

"I don't know, let me find out."

That's my answer. Always. I then go to a site that compares anti-virus software, find the current best based on their reports and provide an informed answer to the client.

(If you're curious the current best according to AV comparatives is F-Secure.)

What is "the cloud"?

With all of this talk in popular media of "the cloud" I would like to clarify it's definition for all of our sanity.

I, at first, checked the trusty site wikipedia.org and was handed this brilliant definition:

" Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction "

and promptly thought "What?!".

That may make sense to businesses who like to use hip phrases like "rapidly provisioned" (quickly supplied) to sound official but what does it mean to the common person. Let me help out with that:

If something is in "the cloud" it means you can access it using the internet, normally with your web browser.

Simple eh?

Many people are already using cloud services. The most popular being web-based email such as gmail, yahoo mail, and msn mail.  Which put all of the complication of maintaining your email in the hands of the corporation. No installing expensive software, no compressing databases, simple.

I hope this helps.