Microsoft enters anti-virus space
The market for anti-virus software is about to get very interesting with the entry of Microsoft into the space.
Microsoft is taking on the giants like Symantec, McAfee and others by launching “OneCare,” a $50 suite of products that will attempt to solve all of your computer maintenance chores. Not only does OneCare include anti-virus, but also the Windows Defender anti-spyware product, a backup software product, a firewall and disk maintenance utilities.
The big question is whether there is room for Microsoft in this already crowded market. Most corporate customers already have a contract with a provider and I am sure Microsoft will go after that market hard.
On the consumer end, you’re looking at a very fickle crowd. More than half of people never renew their contract after their first period when they install their anti-virus product. (For some, I am sure, it’s a matter of cost; for others it is complexity.)
Some people never install an anti-virus product and happily go through their computing life hoping they won’t get infected. (They will if they are running Windows.) So the idea of building even a basic version of OneCare into Windows (which you know they will for the upcoming Wndows Vista) will at least expose folks to anti-virus products.
What is going to be interesting is whether fifty bucks will be the right price point for this product or will people keep their current product. After all, there are several good products like AVG and Avast that offer free anti-virus protection to home users.
But despite good products being available for free, people are willing to pay for other things. Some do it out of habit; some to get the support. Otherwise no one would spend $450 for Microsoft Office and instead would simply go to Open Office (www.openoffice.org) and download the free version gratis. After all, Open Office is powerful enough for most users.
I like the idea of bundling all kinds of useful applications in one user interface together (sort of like the old Norton Utilities for DOS) so from that perspective I like it. If they all worked 50 bucks is not too much to pay. The trouble with the spyware aspect is Windows Defender, while a capable tool in the spyware and adware arsenal, is nowhere near the only tool you are going to need. (If your PC is brand new, it may be enough to keep a new PC from being royally infected, because its warning systems are pretty good, but in terms of cleaning an already gone PC, you will need more help than this.)
I guess we need to wait and see for a complete review of OneCare until it has been out in the market for a while and we have a chance to pound on it in the real world. It will be interesting to run it against some best-of-breed utilities and see where the suite’s components stack up.
In the meantime, make sure you are running some kind of anti-virus protection (something, anything) and you are keeping it up to date. Run a complete virus scan once a week on Fridays while you’re sleeping and make it a regular habit. Run Windows Update on the second Tuesday of the month and your month is complete.
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James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm, and computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim@cyberdads.com
Online backup finally makes cents
One of the hardest parts of the computer service business is facing someone who has lost a hard drive. It’s something I’ve written about before but something that never gets easier.
As much as I preach about backing things up I confess I’m not great at it sometimes, either. On precious things I try to preach to have files in three places including an off-site location. (After all, what good is backing up your wedding photos from your hard drive to CD when your home is lost in a tornado or flood?)
I woke up in a panic the other night when I realized that my 99.9 percent completed book about the adoption of my children exists only on my laptop hard drive and on a USB thumb drive.
If you have an off-site backup system (I have since surmised) a whole lot of the problems evaporate. On many systems, the backup is done for you, over the Internet, while you sleep. At a certain interval, your PC kicks off a backup job, the files are encrypted and zoomed over your high-speed connection and kept safe in the vault off-site.
Of course, you may not want to back up your whole PC given the time it would take over the Internet and the cost. But, the times they are a changing.
I am playing with a new online service called “Carbonite” that offers to back up as much data as you can toss at it (within reason) for five bucks a month or $50 a year. The company’s software sits in your system tray and monitors your files. When something changes in your files it makes a copy, encrypts it and periodically sends a copy off-site using your Internet connection.
This is a great idea.
What’s the catch? Not many that I can find so far. When you sign up you get to pick what it will back up (everything, just “My Documents and My Desktop” or just what you select) and off it goes. It won’t back up system files, temp files or executables, so it’s not something you can restore your whole PC from. It’s for data.
It won’t take files larger than 2 gigs, so forget your videos and large photos. And overall it says 40 to 50 gigs is the overall limit and it reserves the right to toss piggies overboard. You can right-click on files and prevent them from ever being backed up if you’re paranoid and also specifically assure certain files are being backed up.
It works only on Windows XP and, of course, you need a broadband Internet account.
Is it worth 5 bucks a month? So far I would say absolutely. Just consider what data recovery services charge ($300 and up for the dedicated pros; $1,000 and up for the clean-room guys PER DRIVE) and backing up data never looked so cheap.
Get the details and a free test drive at www.carbonite.com and see what you think.
And, please, BACK UP YOUR DATA!
WEEKLY WEB WONDER: Consistently one of the best technical reads out there is the Red Herring. See it at http://www.redherring.com/
James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm, and computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim@cyberdads.com
Printers may kill you
Aside from the computer itself, one of the most oft-used peripherals I would imagine has to be the once-lowly printer. We’ve come a long way since the dot-matrix days, both in terms of print quality and pricing.
I thought I had hit the big-time on my Commodore 64 when I could print out my pages of BASIC code on my $499, nine-pin dot-matrix beauty. I later upgraded to an impact printer that gave my work the appearance of being typewritten, which was really impressive for the time.
In my IBM days there was nothing finer than the workhorse HP LaserJet, which would print lovely black and white copies until the cows came home. If the print got dark you took the toner cartridge out, shook it up and put it back. That trick was good for another 500 pages every time.
My, how times have changed. Laser printers are under a hundred bucks now; inkjets seemingly come in Happy Meals. Dell usually tosses one in with every computer sold unless the moon is high. A cheap color Lexmark will run 40 bucks.
What happened, of course, was cheap off-shore manufacturing and competition. The printer market is as bloody as any out there and the main game is to get the unit in the house or office. (Because that’s when the fun starts.)
All of the manufacturers have patents on their ink cartridge designs so the goal is to get the printer purchased and in use. After that, it’s all about the consumables. Paper is paper, of course (although they try to convince you to use a certain brand for photos.) The money is in the ink.
Because you’re locked into one brand (if you get a “free” Dell printer, you’re locked into buying Dell-brand ink) there is a captive and therefore lucrative market for hugely high-margin product. Where else can you sell an ounce of anything for $40?
I called this the “Barbie” concept in a paper I wrote for my MBA class (give the doll away and sell the clothes for $15) but there are a few things you can do to save some money.
---Buy the USB cable you will need online. A USB A/B cable (square on one end, rectangle on the other) will cost two bucks on Ebay or at an online tech store and $25 from Dell or a big box retailer.
---The jury is still out on refilled ink cartridges. Some printers can tell the difference and won’t work, some leak and some are fine. Your mileage may vary.
---Get an all-in-one printer if you can afford it but leave out the fax if you’ll never use it. The copying feature is nice if for nothing else than complying with all the copying you need to get the rebate on the purchase itself.
---Get a printer with as many separate ink cartridges as possible. It sucks to throw out an overall “color” cartridge when all you ran out of was yellow because your kid was printing pictures of lions. My Epson has six different color cartridges, so I can replace only that one.
---Remember when you buy a printer it usually comes with “starter” cartridges with only a whisper of ink. Keep an eye on warehouse clubs, Sunday ads and online specials and stock up.
WEEKLY WEB WONDER: A Web site has been set up so Americans can donate frequent flyer miles to soldiers stationed overseas so they can come home to see their families. To date more than 540 million miles have been donated. See Operation Hero Miles at www.heromiles.org
James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm, and computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim@cyberdads.com
Letters, we get letters
Reader mail has clogged the box along with pitches for Chinese pharmaceutical stocks, so let’s get right to it (the mail, not the stock picks).
Q. I have a new Dell laptop but I am barely getting an hour of battery life from it before I get a warning on the screen and I have to power it off before I lose everything. Is that normal? What can I do to get better battery life? I called Dell but I got nowhere.
A. Well, you have a couple of things to do. If you bought a low-end Dell you probably got a low-end battery. You can shop around and upgrade to a longer-life battery for less than $100. Secondly, you can reduce the brightness of your LCD screen when you’re running on battery. That will sharply lengthen the amount of time your laptop will run on battery power. On a Dell you just hold down the Function Key (marked “FN” in blue) and hold the key marked with a sun symbol with a down arrow until it is as dark as you can stand. To increase brightness, you hold down Function Key again and hit the sun symbol that has the up arrow. (Other brands will do this differently; look in the user manual.)
Lastly you can enter the Windows control panel and look in the power section and assure that your laptop is set for maximum battery. That will spin down your hard drive and such at short intervals.
Q. A friend of mine told me I could fry my laptop if I put it down flat on the bed while it is running. She always puts hers down sideways open, like a V, while it’s running. I told her I was going to write you and loser buys the beer.
A. Fork over the Budweiser. I have a small stack of laptops in our shop of burned out laptops where people have laid them down on carpet, beds and whatever and covered up the fans. That resulted in them burning up as they overheated and died a horrible, miserable death. When I lay down my running laptops, even my Apple (which has no fan on the bottom), I lay it sideways. (This all being said, there are few “right” answers in computers. As I have said before, these kinds of things start fistfights in nerd bars.)
Q. What is the best free e-mail account to avoid spam?
A. The “best” word is a tough one. I have used free accounts with all of the big providers at one time or another and probably my current favorite is Google. Its “gmail” service offers a ton of storage (1 gig of free storage is a lot) a good spam filter. Yahoo has gotten much better lately at filtering spam as well. The key with a free account is picking a non-obvious user name. That way the spammers that use the dictionary programs to send spam won’t tend to get your email address if your user name is “j45q3211p”. (The trick is, of course, remembering it.
WEEKLY WEB WONDER: Ever wish you could vote about what news was on the front page? Now you can with Digg (www.digg.com).
James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm and computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim@cyberdads.com
