Month: November 2009

USB sticks, memory keys, pendrives. It doesn’t really matter what you call them, memory sticks are useful creatures. It’s precisely this usefulness, though, that leads to their major weakness: most people use them all the time without a second thought. They swap them between colleagues, lend them to friends and stick them into unfamiliar computers. Is it any wonder they are a major security risk?!

If you are an occasional user of a memory stick, it might be enough to run a context menu scan when you plug it in. Of course, this option has to be facilitated by your regular anti-virus, but most of the top ones, AVG and Kaspersky for example, offer this tool. Just find the memory stick in My Computer, right click, and chose Scan with….

If you are a more frequent user, you might want a specific anti-virus that targets memory sticks and USB drives. The trial version of USB Disk Security only offers one option, but it’s a good one – real-time monitoring of your computer for security risks from USB devices. It sits in the taskbar until you connect USB stick and lets you know if it there’s a problem. Continue reading “The ultimate guide to USB drive security”

The 12th Annual Independent Games Festival is almost upon us, and has a huge selection of submissions to check out. There’s a record 306 entries, covering a huge range of genres. Lewie Procter at SavvyGames has completed part one of a ‘Pretend you are an IGF judge‘ series, which usefully brings together all the publicly available submitted games, so you can check them out yourself.

The sheer volume of games is pretty intimidating, but there’s sure to be tons of great stuff. I’ve already reviewed AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, which I love and Terry Cavanagh’s excellent Don’t Look Back is also there, alongside his upcoming and highly anticipated VVVVVV (no demo for this yet, sniff!).

While publishing giant Activision’s Modern Warfare 2 will break barriers by allowing you to be a brutal terrorist, these indie developers are proving that you don’t need to shock or ask ridiculous moral non-choices of your players to do something revolutionary with video games or story telling. There’s also a wealth of humor, weirdness and creative enthusiasm that I feel is lacking from many of the season’s big upcoming releases – which unless I’m forgetting something are all sequels. While there is certainly lots of good stuff to play, like Hollywood before it, the games industry seems stuck in a blockbuster-sequel cycle, making it seem difficult for genuinely new games to make their mark.

One of the most widespread problems people had with Snow Leopard when it launched was a compatibility issue in Mail.app (aka Apple Mail) which prevented messages being sent and even crashed the program in some cases. Nick wrote a guide to fixing these issues, so this obvious failing in Apple’s QA testing needn’t be too much of a hindrance.

That said, my first thought when I read about people having problems with Mail.app was: why are these people even using Mail.app? I’ve had my current iMac for around two years and I’ve never even run the Mail program. Not once. That’s because I use Gmail, a mail application that renders Mail.app and all other desktop email clients more or less obsolete.

For those of you still toiling in the dark with an email client, I know there is sometimes a good reason for that. If you’re trying to handle lots of different accounts, or if you need to connect to an Exchange server, it’s difficult to live without a mail client. But for the average home user and even for most home office users, webmail solutions will always be a better idea than clients. Here’s why:

Security and stability

Desktop email clients are inherently less stable than Gmail or other equivalent webmail services. Storing your data on a local disk (even if you backup) will never be as safe as trusting Google’s datacenters (which are, themselves never 100% safe: nothing is).

But perhaps more importantly, email clients generally rely on downloading message files (and often attachments) to your computer before you filter out content you don’t want. This means that the potential for spam and even malware finding its way onto your computer is significantly higher if you use a mail client application. Continue reading “Why are you still using that email client?”

TuneUp Utilities is one of those programs that improves with every new release. We were particularly eager for its latest version, TuneUp Utilities 2010, because it offers full support for Microsoft’s brand new Windows 7 in both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions. But this isn’t the only new feature in this excellent program. Let’s take a look at all the new functions and improvements we can find in TuneUp Utilities 2010.

Redesigned Interface
The Start Center in TuneUp 2010 has been redesigned. A quick glance is enough to learn about the system’s current status and find out if there’s any problem. A cleaner, more minimalist style makes the program more comfortable and easier to use.

Turbo Mode
When you’re playing your favorite game, you need your computer to offer the highest performance possible. Turbo Mode can help you with that, disabling all superfluous Windows services and background applications with a single click. Continue reading “What’s new in TuneUp Utilities 2010?”