MaconMacGuy.com:

Putting the tech pieces together
for Macon & Middle Georgia
for "a good while now"

Microsoft offers a FREE antivirus/anti-other-bad-stuff application called “Miscrosoft Security Essentials”.

It is NOT the best thing out there, but works pretty doggone well. It DOES “suck up some CPU cycles” – i.e. when it’s running your machine will slow down a bit.

It is DEFINITELY better than running nothing – so if your subscription to Norton or Symantec or whatever is running out, and you don’t have the cash, check it out.

http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?t=523334930-a275dfeedae0baeeab728d8c7a14c0c1-bf&brand=TECHREPUBLIC&s=5
for an article about it, with links to the download.

More details at
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/products/?p=839

Download the product at
http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/default.aspx

I am using using it on one of my machines, and it seems to work well. When it’s scanning the machine does slow down, but this is on a slower Pentium 4 machine.

Yet another client story:
I received a phone call from a client who is unabashedly not comfortable with computers. She was getting some weird errors from Firefox and AVG, but couldn’t really describe what they said.

Fortunately it was on may way, so I was able to swing in quickly just to see what was going on. I confirmed the errors, which were the “generic” type of thing you get when the application has a situation it doesn’t know how to handle.

I tried to do a quick online virus scan, to no avail – the machine was running way too slow. Granted, its a slow machine, underpwoered, needs RAM (which the company has not installed yet), and is running Windows 2000 – but even by IT’S standards it was running slow.

After a few minutes I thought the check teh hard drive. That 18gig drive had – wait for it – 20 kilobytes of free space.

{insert dragnet theme here!}

The computer had no working space on teh hard drive – avg had nowhere to stash the virus definitions update file, and Firefox couldn’t update it’s cache.

I deleted several non-used apps, and cleared out the Windows Temp folder…. a simple fix for a major problem. It isn’t a long-term solution, but will keep them running for a while longer.