My Technology Guide

Microsoft today released a new, limited beta for their increasingly popular security application, Microsoft Security Essentials, the next big version of the well acclaimed Windows security software. Microsoft Security Essentials was first released in September 2009 and is Microsoft's award-winning, no-cost, freeware, light weight security application. It's designed to give security to computers running genuine Windows editions.

Norman Security Suite 8 DnBNOR edition is a special edition of the latest version of Norman Security Suite, offered free by the company. This special edition does not need any license key to install and activate the program, and will protect your computer for 4 years, which is really long!

Norman Security Suite 8 DnBNOR Special Edition does have some limitations. Features like Intrusion Guard, Privacy Tools and AntiSpam are disabled from this special edition, but users will have the standard Antivirus, Anti-spyware, Norman Personal Firewall and Parental Control features for free which is valid for 4 years. The offer page can be found here.

My Technology Guide readers knows it very well how important computer security is for them. So, we will not stress any more over the importance of having a security suite installed on your computer. New technologies like behavioral detection and heuristics, have emerged to further strengthen the standard protection layers offered by a security suite. One such security suite that we took for a review here is Emsisoft Anti-Malware.

Emsisoft Anti-Malware is a stand-alone antivirus, anti-malware product and uses two scan engines (the Emsisoft Anti-Malware, and the Ikarus Anti-Virus engine) to increase protection and to increase the malware and virus detection. The three guards present in Emsisoft Anti-Malware protects your computer against new infections: File Guard, Behavior Blocker and Surf Protection.

For protecting our computers from security and malware threats we sometimes experiment with different security suites to see which one is better than the other. In this process, we install and uninstall these security suites as it is always advisable to use only one antivirus or a full featured security suite at a time in our system. More than one antivirus or a full featured security suite that includes everything from a firewall, antivirus, anti-spyware, anti-malware, and more can cause lots of performance and stability issues.

Although we can easily uninstall the existing security program using Windows built-in "Add/Remove Programs" (or Programs and Features in Windows Vista and 7) applet but it's not a perfect solution. Sometimes the uninstaller of the program doesn't remove all the components and registry keys installed by the security program completely, this can hamper with the newly installed security program and may even cause system instability and BSOD's.

Microsoft has recently issued a reminder that it will stop providing support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP Service Pack 2 on July 13, 2010. Public support for these products ends after this date and Microsoft will no longer offer any assisted support or security updates. Microsoft also announced that on the same day, Windows 2000 Server will move out of Extended Support while Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 will move from Mainstream Support to Extended Support, which will end on July 14, 2015. Microsoft normally provides Mainstream Support, followed by Extended Support, and then finishes with the product by just providing Self-Help Online Support.

AVG Technologies has unveiled AVG LinkScanner for the Mac operating system. AVG LinkScanner for Mac is the first free AVG product designed for Mac OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard and supports Internet browsers Safari 3.x, Safari 4.x, Safari 5.x and Mozilla Firefox 3.x and higher.

According to AVG research, 99 percent of all malicious threats are delivered through the web and cannot be stopped with traditional antivirus software. These threats can come and go within hours and can live on familiar, big-name sites and even on third-party applications on popular social networking sites, without users even noticing. And with the growing popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and others, the bad guys are using these sites as their main vehicle for spreading malware.