Best of Breed - The Best Freeware for Windows

I am truly amazed and appreciative of the quality that Avast provides to it’s home users free of charge. The Avast suite is a “first class” anti-virus package. I know no better and I’ve seen most. Being an anti-virus vendor, you must establish and continually provide a vigilant relationship with your customer and Avast constantly updates their virus database and they do it as transparently and efficiently as possible for both fee and free customers. I can’t thank Avast enough for the value they provide to us free users consistently. Every home and business user should run Avast. I have no doubt, they are the best, so install their software and put your Virus troubles behind you.

More information from Avast
http://www.avast.com/eng/programs.html

‘Breedlink’=1click download
Breedlink: Download avast! 4 Home Edition FREE Download.

SpyBot Search and Destroy

Spybot is a very popular adware and virus scanner. Spybot is an essential part of any home computer system. The GUI is pretty intuitive so download it, learn what it does, and your computer will benefit. I don’t spend much time protecting my PC from all the crap that is out there. If you take a few precautions (running spybot 1 time a month is one of them) you shouldn’t have any trouble either.

The latest version (1.4) of Spybot has a ‘tea-timer’ which is a process that runs in your system tray and notifies you of any changes to the registry and allows you to approve or deny them. It’s a small process that is worth the cycles. Spybot also ‘immunizes’ your system against a lot of the spycode that is out there. It’s common sense to for any computer connected to the Internet to be running Spybot.

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

I decided it was time to take another look at the free firewalls. I found an article on LifeHacker and then an article on ‘Freeware Genius’ (both great ‘Market Sight’ resources) and they led me to a product named Comodo, which I’d never heard of before. I was suspicious but impressed to find a review by PC magazine, which named it as one of the top firewalls (bar none).  The research eventually led me to this report by MatouSec, which lists every firewall in the market, evaluates their performance, and identifies which products are free. I was blown away to find Comodo Firewall Pro, which was tagged as freeware, at the top of the list. That sealed the deal so I downloaded and installed it and now I’m a firm believer in Comodo Firewall Pro. 

It uses about the same amount of resources as Sygate and Zone Labs, so no surprises there, and I was very satisfied with the simple and straight forward GUI they provide.  Now I can say with Confidence that this is the best Firewall on the market, and it’s freeware and that makes it a crucial part of our ‘best of breed’ suite of products.   You can download it at the link below!

http://personalfirewall.comodo.com/

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As a side note, that report by MatouSec also provided a table that included link’s to all the firewall companies it reviewed.

XP Antispy is a must have program for anyone running Windows XP. There are all kinds of things in Windows XP that you don’t necessarily want to run. This program allows you to shut off a lot of the unnecessary services that XP is running. It basically puts a GUI around the administrative chore of shutting down the services that might be a problem. The GUI tells you what it is doing and provides some great information about the services so you can make the right choice on whether or not it’s necessary for each service to run in your environment. Everyone running Windows XP should install and run this product because it tightens up your security and saves you a lot of resources.

After you download and install, plan on spending about a half hour reading each item carefully. You can normally take the developers advice about turning off or leaving on the service. There are some things on the list that he suggests you not shut off in certain situations so it is a good idea not to go down the list checking off the boxes. There is a menu item that lets to turn the list back to ‘default’ if you need to.

http://xp-antispy.org/index.php?option=com_remository&func=sellang&iso=en

This is a different kind of post than I normally write, so heads up, there is no freeware to download on this post. What I have brought to you in this post is important information about a web site that will help you shut down the unnecessary services running on your operating system (NT).  I wrote this a couple of years ago, it all still applies, I did have to change the url, but looking back on it now I think I wrote too much.  I probably should have pointed you to BlackViper’s web site and not tried to explain things from my perspective. (more…)

Like most people, I’ve struggled with Internet passwords since the Internet was created, and I still do, but now most of the time I’ve found a solution that works for me. Passwordmaker provides a good interface to store the passwords in and it automatically records the url. It will generate a password for you but, to be honest, I have not gotten to the point where I use the automatically generated password yet. I still use one standard password for as much as possible and then write it down in the interface. Therefore, I’m not using all the capabilities of the product but I may soon be confident enough in the system to do it. I’m just not there yet. However, this works as a great spot to store my passwords for now and I have room to grow and more things I could use it for as I move over to a more secure system. By the way, in the picture you can see that it asks for a ‘master password’ and it’s optional and I don’t use it. Just in case you were worried about having to type a password to get your password…

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/469

ps - I’ve tried nearly every solution they have out there for this. I spent a significant amount of time on Roboform (and some of the others) but never really got them to work well. So learn from my mistakes and use this for now. If you want to security of generated passwords it is in this product for you and I’ll update you if anything better comes along.

pps - One other piece of code, that I use as a safety net, is Password Exporter and you can install that at the link below. It exports all your passwords to a file on your PC and you should go through that manual exercise once in a while. You can also just look at your passwords through it’s interface.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2848

Maybe I’ll get some hits Due to Al’s inspirational message NoScript is probably the most important security extension for Firefox. It works well and delivers the information in the least intrusive way possible. When a page loads it stops all the scripts and you see an icon on your statusbar with a cross through it and then you know you need to OK the scripts. notifies you with a banner across the bottom of your browser. If you want the scripts to run then you just click on the icon and select the site to run either temporarily or permanently. I notice it mostly when ads are trying to run. It is important to stop these ads from executing scripts on your PC. It’s a pain in the butt but it’s the easiest way to take care of all the garbage that you may run into out there. Everyone should use it. You can install it from the link below.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722?application=firefox&category=Popular&numpg=10&id=722