AVG Internet Security is AVG’s most advanced Anti-Virus package for Home users. With the arrival of edition 8.0 we though it was time to give our opinion of the package and show our users how to use the features that the package provides.

Configuration Process:

Once you’ve installed AVG Internet Security 8.0 you will have to configure the software. It is very important that you follow through and pay attention to the Configuring Process so that you can make sure that AVG is customised/designed to your needs.

1. Click Next.
   
2. At Step two you must select a time which you are usually on the computer so that your AVG can update the virus protection and given your computer a scan. The updates will last generally only a few minutes and scan will take up to an hour.
   
3. Step three gives you the option to help AVG to improve their service by keeping them aware of any malicious sites etc that you may come across. If you are willing to help out AVG leave the tick in the box, if you would rather not help them un-tick the box.
   
4. If you have installed the AVG Toolbar and would like to set Yahoo! as your main search engine place a tick in the box. If you’d rather not have it as your default search engine un-tick the box.
   
5. At step 5 we recommend that you quickly update. It wont take very long and is very important to ensure that your virus protection is up to date. Click next to check for updates or click skip to proceed without checking for updates.
   
6. There are two parts to step 6. The first is the AVG Updating your software and the second is confirming the updates. Once the updates are complete click Next.

Click ‘Continue Reading This Post’ to learn about:

• Anti-Virus
• Anti-Spyware
• Anti-Spam
• Anti-Rootkit
• System Tools
• Email Scanner
• License
• Link Scanner
• Web Shield
• Resident Shield
• Update Manager
• How to Change Scheduled time for Scans/Updates
• How to Run a Manual Scan
• How to Run a Manual Update
• Top Tip

Continue reading this post…

You may recall back in November 07 I reviewed a nice new Dell XPS M1330 laptop, I thought 5 months on it was a good time to review how it has held up against my everyday use, and I do make it work hard!

It is my everyday work laptop, as well as a machine when I am at home, so it gets a fairly varied use. Today we will look at the following:

• Durability
• Reliability
• Practicality

Durability
This laptop gets lugged in and out of the office all the time to clients homes and offices and always just in the sleeve that it came with so no over the top protection and it is going well. Other than a few finger marks on the nice crimson red cover and some dust here and there, it is wearing very well. When I bought it I was a little concerned that because it was so lightweight that it might not be the best one to be balancing on my knee while working on another machine or plugging in cables, but it is great! A couple of small falls here and there and it seems to bounce quite nicely! [not recommended though]

Reliability
Being impatient and needing to work fast while at clients I just put the laptop into hibernation most of the time and 99% of the time it comes out of hibernation raring to go. There is the odd occasion where is just won’t connect to a wireless network and a reboot quickly sorts that out, but it is very rare.

Some people have had un-ending problems with Vista but I seem to be one of the more fortunate ones as all my machines are running fine, especially this one. Being a work laptop it gets programs installed and uninstalled for testing and problem solving all the time and that usually slows machines down, but there have been no signs of that yet!

I chose the 9 cell battery for the extended battery life, and despite it being a bigger battery it really is a worthwhile thing to have.

Practicality
Being such a nice small laptop it is easy to carry around, even with the slightly larger battery. The sleeve it comes with means it is nicely protected without having to carry around a full sized laptop bag.

The screen despite being small is big enough to work on for long periods of time. It does require a bit more scrolling but that is easy to get used to.

Summary
Stunning! I wouldn’t go back to a bigger 15.4″ laptop and the XPS machines are better than any other laptops I have played with. On a par with a mac book, both with different qualities! Let’s not get into a mac vs pc discussion here

AVG 8.0 – replacing AVG 7.5…so what’s new?

February saw the release of AVG 8.0 and it was time for users to see if AVG could better an already fantastic product. I think in practise it is very hard to answer that just yet, as it is not long released. However initial tests and installs look promising.

AVG 8.0 boasts a number of new features, the ones that we think are significant and are going to discuss here include:

• New user interface – apparently they say it’s been “Vistified”!
• Safe Search/Safe Link Scanner/Safe Surf – browse the web safely
• Improved Update Engine
• New/Revised product ranges - AVG Spyware / AVG Malware – is no more?
• No AVG Free 8.0…Yet
• Upgrade from 7.5 for free?
• No support for windows 98/ME/NT

New User Interface

I am not sure I would agree with the comment of an AVG technical guy about it been “Vistified” but I have to say I do like the new user interface. It is not so grey; instead we find white and light blues, which seems like a fresher interface. For me, it is a pleasant change

Along with the ascetic changes the user interface has all the components on the first screen you come to with their status. Then from that screen you can enable/disable or go into the component and the more advanced settings, firewall settings and update settings can be accessed from the Tools menu at the top of the window.

Some people don’t like the fact things have been moved…no one likes change, except me maybe! I found that the new layout, interface etc was very intuitive even more so than the 7.5 edition.

Safe Search/Safe Link Scanner/Safe Surf

This is a new component for AVG and is included in the Internet Security Edition of AVG. It is designed to scan links, e.g. search results to identify if the page you will visit is safe. With the vast amount of spyware and malware being downloaded unknowingly through websites these days rather than through email it is a critical part of your online protection.

This is a real-time scanner, so rather than just checking the link against a database of known safe/unsafe sites it is checked there and then. Why, you might ask, and that would be a valid question, the answer is simple and comes in two parts

1) Things change, websites change, new pages get uploaded etc. It may not be the same as the last time you visited it, or the time it was added to the database.

2) Some hacked websites have been found to not be malicious every time, 1 website was found to actually only send the user via a malware site every third time.

“Does this slow down my internet browsing?” – I hear you asking this question, as did I! – The honest answer here is Yes, but how much you recognise it will depend on your connection speed. If you are on dial-up then you will notice a slow down and may wish to turn it off. If you are on broadband then you are very unlikely to notice this running.

“What happens if I want to go to a site that is apparently infected and therefore blocked?” – the software will require you to verify that you know you are doing this and really want to go there, and then will let you through.

Improved Update Engine

Many people commented on the annoying popup windows informing you of the information during the AVG updates each day, this has now been redesigned and is less intrusive, you get only a little bubble type window appear in the bottom right hand corner of the screen when the update is complete, and it disappears automatically. Much nicer

New / Revised Product Ranges

With the 7.5 product range there were many different options you could go for, professional, spyware edition, malware edition, internet security, firewall edition and then on top there are the business version too.

This has been simplified for the home users, there are now two main products available (excluding the free version) and these are AVG Professional and AVG Internet Security. The latter is the all singing, all dancing edition with everything that AVG has to offer the Professional edition has only Antivirus, Spyware and Malware and is missing things like the Link Scanner, Firewall and Spam checker. AVG Firewall edition is still available but little is made of it.

“Which one should I go for?” – virus and malware that attack your computer and stop it from working in one way or another is not the only problem we are faced anymore. With the web being so important in our everyday lives we are facing problems with things like credit card fraud/identity fraud and we need to be thinking of how we can prevent this from happening to us. The Link Scanner is a key part of how AVG can help us stay safe online and the firewall is an important feature if you do not have a hardware firewall installed, or regularly connect your machine to different networks. Therefore my answer would be AVG Internet Security Edition being the best one to go for.

No AVG Free v8.0…Yet!

For those on AVG Free Edition, there is no planned date for a v8 release, however at the time of writing we understand that it is planned. Watch this space

Please note that AVG Free Edition is for Home users only and is only allowed to be installed on one machine per household. It also does not have many of the more advanced features that Professional and Internet Security boast. Thus your protection on the web is limited.

Upgrade from version 7.5 to version 8.0 for free?

I discovered today that users of version 7.5 are able to upgrade to version 8.0 for free. How? There is an Upgrade Advisor program that is available although in my opinion it is better to just completely uninstall 7.5 and install the relevant version of 8.0. Then use your 7.5 license code. Easy J

Support ending for Windows 98/ME/NT

As of August this year AVG will stop supporting the above operating systems. AVG 8.0 itself doesn’t support them anyway but due to Microsoft’s decision to stop supporting these operating systems the guys at AVG believe it would be hard to guarantee protection of machines that Microsoft are no longer offering security updates for.

So there you have it, AVG 8.0 as we see it today!

Continuing the review of Dell machines that pass through Brandstar’s doors with the XPS M1530. In short…NICE! Even though it is just a big version of my M1330 I was still suitably impressed.

The M1530 came with just a 6 cell battery rather than the 9 cell that my smaller laptop has which improved the sleekness of the machine greatly and the battery life is still very good. The other thing that the M1530 came with (other than a bigger screen of course) was a fingerprint reader. A nice addition but to be honest I don’t really see a huge use for it for the majority of people, but if you like gadgets then why not!

I think the only real downside of the M1530 compared to its little brother is the power supply. It is quite a bit bigger on the larger machine and I think that does let the feel of the whole machine down. Some say a small price to pay for such a great laptop, but I was a little disappointed.

As with the M1330 the M1530 comes with a number of nice accessories, wallet for the laptop, a folder for the CD’s , remote control and the touch sensitive media strip at the top of the keyboard. All in all a very nice machine but I personally still prefer the smaller 13″ model

Over on the PC Toolbox site we have started a regular posting of Quick Tips. Every Friday one of the Brandstar Team will write a quick tip, something to make life a bit easier, or maybe some generally useful information that we find our clients don’t know and want to share or maybe a troubleshooting tip to help you solve problems with your system.

A few that we particularly like…

Make the most of your Broadband - Some cool ideas of how to use your Broadband to its full potential!

Opening Firefox with Multiple tabs - A quick and easy way to browse the web!

Poor mans Sat Nav - Directions online!

Let us or PC Toolbox know if you have any suggestions!

As more and more Dell machines pass through our doors I thought I would review some of them that I think stand out! Starting with the 1525 Inspiron Laptop.

Recently Dell released what seems to be a replacement for the 1521 which is no longer available. The 1525 however is an Intel based machine rather than AMD but other than that is much the same as the 1521 or the 1520 models apart a few little changes and one significant modification of the system - The Size!

Something that I was a little disappointed with when it came to the 1521 & 1520 models was that they are rather large and in turn, not light! This has been made significantly better with the 1525 it is a much thinner laptop and that obviously makes it a lighter machine too.

I had the 1525 sitting next to an XPS M1530 (the bigger brother of my M1330 which I reviewed last year) and there wasn’t a huge amount in it. The styling of the XPS was obviously very different compared to the Inspiron, far more sleek, not so rounded and obviously a higher end machine but size wise…very close indeed in my opinion.

At the time I ordered this 1525 for a client the in built web camera came as standard, I don’t know if that will change in the range or not but it is the way many machines are going now with communicating over the web becoming more and more common.

Would I buy one..?

This is a tough question in a way as I can’t just say Yes And No. I think the answer for me would be No I wouldn’t buy one for me, but that is not due to it being a bad machine, but simply due to the fact that I have an XPS M1330 and when it comes to changing it I wouldn’t currently go for anything other than another XPS. However if I was on a stricter budget and couldn’t afford to go for another XPS then without a doubt the Inspiron 1525 would be a strong contender. I will definitely be recommending them to clients who want something in the 1525 price range

I have come across a number of people that need a simple tool to manage their address list (usually for Christmas Cards!) with the ability to easily print labels. So I decided to put together a simple Microsoft Access database that can be used for just that, plus the ability to email a group of people from the database too.

The database has the following features:

• Easily store Friends, Family, Customers, Subscribers or Supporters Contact details: Name, Address, Phone, Email, Website etc
• Sort Users by first / last name
• Easily add / modify / delete records from the simple user interface
• Print individual records
• Print Labels of those registered to receive a newsletter (Avery Label L7160)
• Email direct from the system those registered to receive an email newsletter
  • These emails are sent BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) so that you are not spreading everyones email address!
• The best bit..it’s free

As I have said this has been specifically designed for people who want a simple way to manage their contacts with easy printing, but also those managing Newsletters for Charities, Missionaries etc.

The system is free but Brandstar can offer no free support with it. If you would like enhancements made to your database Brandstar would be happy to quote for this.

Download >> Brandstar UK’s Address Database Standard

If you do not have Microsoft Access 2007 running on your system you can download (again for free) the Access 2007 runtime environment from the Microsoft website here. This enables even those who don’t own Microsoft Access to run Access files.

Feel free to leave your comments or suggestions for the system.

Enjoy, Graham.

With 2007 gone and 2008 arrived much sooner than we all imagined it is a good time to look back over the last year and into the new 2008! Many people like to reflect on what happened in 2007 and consider how 2008 could be better and then make a New Years Resolution, which, if we are honest…very few keep past January! Anyone said “I’m going to diet” yet?

Being a computer consultant I’d like to suggest to you some resolutions you could make to help protect your machine and your data and just generally give you a better computing experience in 2008!

• Backup your data regularly - No matter how amazing your computer is, there is still the risk of a hardware failure and when that happens the most costly thing you could lose is your data. How often you backup your data depends on how much you use your machine but daily to an external hard drive using SecondBackup or Memeo is quick and easy!
• Un-interruptible Power Supply - Protecting from power failures, power surges or someone accidentally unplugging your computer while it is on is one way of protecting your hardware! See our post about Protecting from Thunderstorms for more information and product recommendations.
• Microsoft Office 2007 - Give the new Microsoft Office 2007 a try, the new Ribbon interface takes a week to get used to, but once you have it is far quicker to do so many of the everyday tasks you do already. Download a trial and see for yourself, chat with us if you need some advice or want to order a full version.
• Switch to Firefox - You are probably used to using Internet Explorer (Big Blue E) to access the internet because that is what comes pre-installed as part of Windows. But Mozilla Firefox is a faster, more reliable, more secure and less prone to virus attacks! And it’s Free! Download Firefox and give it a go
• Microsoft Windows Vista - Buying a new computer? consider getting it with Windows Vista. We don’t recommend installing it on an old machine unless you have thoroughly checked out the capability of the machine first. But we do highly recommend getting it on a new computer. For more information before buying read “Windows Vista - What I think” and also check out “Which version of Windows Vista is best for me?” lots of useful advice to ensure you get the right machine and right version of Vista - there are 4! (Or just give us a call :))
• Eco Friendly - Do your bit by changing your office procedures. Little things that people can actually keep to are the best, do you really need to print that email!

That should get you going for 2008! If you think we have missed anything just leave a message

Have a Enjoyable Christmas holiday and New Years!

Happy New Year to Everyone from Brandstar Uk!!

Well 2008 is just about underway, some of us still recovering from all the festivities I am sure, and undoubtedly the diets will begin shortly

I thought I would write a post with what to expect from Brandstar in 2008, some new and some of it already underway but worth shouting about!

Firstly something new, well revived anyway. www.PCToolbox.co.uk will be a Brandstar Technical Blog, much like this one but rather than company news and some posts specific to Brandstar clients there will be a much wider range of information posted there! So keep an eye on that - Powered by WordPress!

Dell Computer Systems - following a successful year in 2007 recommending and supplying Dell computers to Home and Business clients alike we have built up an excellent relationship with Dell and are very familiar with all their products, knowing where the different ranges are best suited!

Microsoft Windows Vista - It is no secret that we are big Microsoft fans at Brandstar and have been using Windows Vista since it’s release and the beta versions for even longer. With most of the new machines we supply we will be recommending an appropriate version of Vista and for anyone wanting to upgrade we will be here to offer advice, supply the software and perform the upgrade.

Microsoft Office 2007 - Again here at Brandstar we love the new Office 2007 and have been using it since the Beta was released and haven’t even contemplated reverting to 2003! In 2008 we will be encouraging those that will benefit from the advantages of Office 07 to upgrade appropriately. For Mac users Office 2008 is expected later this month!

Small Business Server 2003 - 2007 saw Brandstar take a big step forward in the Small Business Server Market and in 2008 we will continue to move forward with the solutions we are offering to complement this excellent server operating system as well as continue testing Server 2008 which is due to for release early this year.

Continue offering the fantastic service we have done since 2006!

We look forward to working with you throughout 2008.

Graham.

Dell have deals all over Christmas, virtually a different deal every day so it means you gotta keep going back to see what the deal is for that day! Today’s deal is on a 27″ monitor. It is a bit cheeky as you can only view the current deal but if you are looking for a specific machine or device then it could be the time to get a good deal!

If you need some advice then let us know, otherwise check out the deals on the Dell site.

Happy Shopping!