I always know when AVG release a new version of their fantastic free anti-virus software as it usually results in a torrent of abuse being launched towards me by my readership – “you said this software was free and now it’s asking me for money or it’ll stop working.”

Now, I must admit that it is true that whenever a new version of AVG is released and an old version is discontinued, they do try and push users down the route of buying the more advanced package. I don’t blame them for this as everybody needs to make money, however those that actually bother reading the message will see that there is still a free option available. It is this version, AVG 8, which I will be reviewing today.

I have always pitched AVG as being the anti-virus checker that my readers should be using and amazingly the best thing about this application ISN’T the fact that it’s free – In actual fact there are plenty of reasons that you would want to use AVG even if you had to pay for it.

My favourite feature of the application is its non intrusive nature; it silently gets on with it – In my opinion there is nothing worse than a virus checker that gets you too involved and prevents you from getting along with the job in hand. Everything is done in the background so you want have to be involved if you rather understandably don’t want to be; it will update itself and even perform full system scans without you ever realising and then, if it finds a virus it will efficiently dispose of it.

Install and forget is a nice philosophy and beats gigantic boated pieces of software such as Norton Internet Security which prompt you every 15 seconds about problems that you wish it would just work out for itself; I’ve never understood a virus scanner which will actually ask me if I want to remove a virus it has found. In my eyes this is a stupid question – why would I voluntarily keep something that is liable to wipe my hard drive and provide me with months of extra unpaid work?

Version 8 improves on the background scanning of the previous AVG application and provides new and quite possibly overdue Spyware protection, along with a handy LinkScanner feature. The latter is a new component which provides you with a quick graphical evaluation of a sites perceived safety before you visit it whenever you do an Internet search in an engine such as Google. It works by taking the findings of those that use the AVG toolbar by warning you via a small graphical link if a site that appears in your search results is likely to be malicious.

Updates are provided free of charge for the life of the product and of course all the usual features such as e-mail scanning and resident shield are provided and turned on by default.

In terms of installation, the application is a 45.6mb download which can be obtained by visiting http://free.grisoft.com – It is worrying to see such the size has growth significantly from AVG 7.5’s 16mb footprint but this is still much smaller than many other virus checkers on the market. After advice given to me by our resident techie who resides upstairs from Refresh at Switch Computer Support, I would recommend removing AVG 7 before installing version 8 as by all accounts the installation program does sometimes simply ‘forget’ to remove the old version first which can cause problems.

I recently [...]]]> I’ve recently received a couple of questions regarding last weeks safe shopping article in which I discussed the bases that you could cover in order to protect yourself whilst shopping online. Below I have printed one such e-mail which raised a couple of unanswered questions:

I recently read your article supporting Internet shopping with interest as I have always feared shopping online because I have had friends whose cards have been “cloned”. You mentioned a couple of interesting points regarding the protection your credit card company will extend to you however I only have a debit card and so in your opinion would this be equally safe to use?

I am myself aware of checking that the site has padlock symbol on the bottom of the toolbar and that its website starts with ‘https’ but are there any other checks which would help?

Seán, Brixham

This is an interesting question and one that I had to do a little bit of research on in order to find a satisfactory answer. In terms of the protection offered to you by your debit card company I discovered that unfortunately this is a little less than when using a credit card. Because there is no ‘credit’ involved when you purchase a good by debit card you are unfortunately not covered by the Consumer Credit Act and therefore if you are trying to retrieve any money off a company then the card issuer isn’t equally liable. With a credit card you would be entitled to claim the money back off the card issuer and they in turn will chase the retailer in order to obtain the money themselves. Although debit cards don’t afford you this protection there isn’t a huge need to worry as in the event of a non delivery, bankruptcy or a fraudulent transaction the financial institutions would claim the money back off the companies merchant bankers who in turn would be left to claim the money back off their clients.

With regards to checking out potential suppliers I would tend to suggest using simple common sense. As you mention; check for the padlock symbol when entering your card details as this means your card details are being securely transmitted but other than that you should be able to do your own research in order to establish how legitimate the company is. I tend to work on a number of factors and so far have never suffered a fraudulent Internet transaction.

- Does the website look professional? I would tend to trust a nicely designed site with my card details rather than one that looks like it was designed by a 5 year old, is riddled with errors and has a large amount of out of date, non rotating stock.

- Check the Internet for reviews of the company you are about to purchase from. Obviously take them with a pinch of salt but a quick search on Google and you should get an idea as to their customer service reputation.

- Install the Google and Alexa Toolbars – Although in no way a guarantee this will show you how important Google ranks a particular page and the Alexa toolbar will show you how popular the site is on the Internet. If Google rate it as PR0 (the lowest available) and according to Alexa no one ever visits it I would be cautious about giving them your card details. If a site has a large number of visitors and it doing a lot more business it is probably a lot safer to assume that they won’t be going out of business before your goods are delivered.

- Check for contact details and try phoning them just before you actually place an order. Be very careful about buying from a site with no phone number unless it’s a name you know you can trust.

- Don’t place too much importance on logos such as ‘ShopBuy’ and ‘ICOMMU’ – I have these logos on www.refreshcartridges.co.uk and know that it’s basically just a way for the logo issuers to make money off merchants such as myself. These schemes do very few background checks on a company and are very limited in how they can help should anything go wrong.

- Don’t pay by cheque; you have practically no protection in the event of a non delivery.

The above points are only my own personal methods of shopping online so don’t take them as gospel and whilst to the best of my knowledge the legal standpoint at the beginning of this article is correct, please do check with your debit card issuer. If you want to download last weeks article about protecting your card online or read up about the Alexa and Google please visit www.computerarticles.co.uk

Having recently been dragged around several car boot sales it’s come to my [...]]]> There is a great deal of talk at the moment about buying on eBay but in my experience I’ve found there is substantially less information related to the actual subject of selling online.

Having recently been dragged around several car boot sales it’s come to my attention that there are people literally giving away potentially valuable items at these sales which they could shift faster, easier and for a greater price online. There is no greater way of highlighting this fact than when you consider there are now people starting businesses literally buying items from car boot sales and selling them online. This week I’m going to explain how to cut out the middle man to obtain the most money for your unwanted items.

I’ve found the best way to get in to eBay is to start of slowly; due to a ratings system you’ll find people unwilling to deal with you if you haven’t been signed up as a seller for long or have little positive feedback. Whilst new users may find that their items still sell it may be at a much lower value than similar items listed by more trusted sellers so start by listing just one or two items a week to build up the trust between you and the eBay community. Of course, feedback also works in your favour as you can easily identify less reliable buyers – many sellers even specify that you can’t bid on an auction unless your feedback is above a certain level.

Listing your site is easy, just sign up for a free eBay account and then simply click on the ‘sell item’ link, enter the details of your listing including postage details, a reserve price (if appropriate) then upload a picture and click submit. Your item will then instantly become live on eBay for any one of the millions of active members will be able to find it.

The cost of listing an item is relatively cheap; you simply pay a basic listing fee (typically 15p or so) plus any fees for upgrading your listing and a percentage of the items final sale price. The usual time for an auction to last is 7 days but this can be adjusted at the sellers discretion and additionally you can choose to allow a buyer to instantly end the auction if he agrees to meet a ‘buy it now’ price that you set initially.

As a seller you will probably want to set up a PayPal account as this allows your buyers to immediately pay you by credit/debit card rather than having to worry about writing out cheques, sending cash or doing a bank transfer. PayPal takes a small percentage of the transaction value and you are then free to withdraw the money straight in to your nominated bank account.

Another tip is not to limit your online sales to low priced items; eBay can be used as a viable method for selling many mid and high priced items which would usually be sold at an auction house as well as luxuries such as your car which would usually have to be advertised by a more expensive, conventional method.

You’d be surprised how much more you can get for items once you start selling them on eBay – due to the worldwide appeal of the site you have a much higher audience than simply selling your items at the local car boot.

So check out www.ebay.co.uk and get yourself signed up but just don’t get distracted and start looking up items that you recently gave away or sold for pennies – I made this mistake some years back and found an old computer similar to one I’d simply thrown out which went on to sell for several hundred pounds online!

[...]]]> I have featured a number of sites in the past which offer free downloads of fantastic utilities and assorted pieces of software. Unfortunately such sites often contain software which is simply trial versions or shareware rather than completely free of charge which makes finding the completely free goodies slightly more difficult.

Recently I came across the site www.freewarefiles.com which has an absolutely huge selection of files that are completely free and delimited. These programs will not ever ask for money or expire after a certain period of time whilst still being legal which is the way that I like any piece of software to be.

There’s not a huge amount that I can actually comment on when it comes to the site itself as the layout is a pretty standard affair but the quality of the files is what sets it out from other sites on the Internet. Online we have simply thousands of files that can be viewed by the most downloaded, highest rated, title, date, category and additionally you can choose to search the files on the site by a particular keyword. The site doesn’t suffer from pop-ups or intrusive adverts but they simply make their money by participating in a Google AdSense scheme like the one that I featured in Click last week.

Additional features include a number of free articles and ‘how to’ features along with the option to sign up for a monthly newsletter with a selection of editor picks and new additions to the site.

As mentioned above the most important thing for a site like this isn’t the layout or the interface but ultimately the quality of the files that it hosts which is where Freeware Files excels. A selection of the completely free files that caught my eye follows below – I have been careful only to feature programs that haven’t ever featured in Click before.

TV 2.0 – A program designed to allow the user to search for and view TV stations LIVE from around the world. I’m quite impressed by this program so would imagine that it will get a review in Click in the near future.

CDBurnerXP Pro – This is a quite capable piece of software that whilst will not be of interest to those of us lucky enough to be using Nero will be a worthwhile utility for those who currently only use the CD writing utilities built into Windows XP.

ABC Video Roll – Whilst not particularly powerful this utility is designed to allow you to easily mix video clips with special effects, transactions, morphs and so on.

Eraser – This utility allows you to permanently remove sensitive data from your hard drive so that it cannot be recovered by file undelete utilities like the ones I have covered previously in Click.

ImageForge – An extremely small but capable image converter capable of converting images or manipulating them with the use of special effects tools and filters.

To summerise, check out www.freewarefiles.com – It won’t cost you a penny and I would be extremely surprised if after five minutes of looking around you didn’t find some piece of software that will soon become indispensable to you.

It’s that time of the year for me to bang on once again about remanufacturing cartridges and how it will allow you to save both money and the environment. I have in the past introduced the concept of remanufacturing inkjet cartridges and how this reduces the amount of waste entering [...]]]>

It’s that time of the year for me to bang on once again about remanufacturing cartridges and how it will allow you to save both money and the environment. I have in the past introduced the concept of remanufacturing inkjet cartridges and how this reduces the amount of waste entering our landfills but until now I haven’t had chance to discuss toner cartridges.

For those not in the know, a toner cartridge is a piece of technology used by both laser printers and photocopiers that rather than containing liquid ink they contain electrically charged toner; a powdered ink that is fused to the paper during printing. The fact that these units are being thrown away when they can be recycled is quite worrying; in 1999 over 7 million toner printer cartridges were consumed in the UK and three-quarters of these were thrown away which accounted for as much as 15,000 tonnes of waste plastic and metal. Rather than binning the cartridges when empty, you can send them to a charity of your choice for them to make some money on or alternatively you can sell them to several different companies on the Internet; the addresses of which I will introduce shortly.

Before I tell you how to go about getting a cartridge remanufactured or indeed how to purchase a cartridge that has been remanufactured I think it would be beneficial to learn a little more about what a toner cartridge is and what is involved in its remanufacture. Due to the fact that each toner cartridge contains not only the toner but a complex system of delicate parts, simple refilling is not usually a reliable way of recycling such a cartridge; some toner cartridges contain well over 100 different parts and obviously these will wear out over time if you get into a habit of just refilling the cartridge but providing no other maintenance. In contrast to simple refilling, remanufacturing involves the cartridges being sent to a specialist factory where they are completely dismantled and cleaned, any worn parts are replaced and the cartridge drum is either re-coated or replaced. They are then refilled with fresh toner, tested and sold with a full guarantee.

So let us assume that you or your workplace owns either a photocopier or a laser printer which has just run out and so the toner needs replacing; what do you do? First off you would be wise to source a replacement remanufactured cartridge to keep you printing and there are many companies on the Internet that will be able to help you with this including our own site www.refreshcartridges.co.uk which is also happens to be one of the cheapest suppliers in the UK. Once your replacement cartridge has arrived you obviously want to do your best to keep things environmentally friendly so you should find someone that is happy to collect your old cartridge such as www.cartridges4charity.co.uk, www.recyclingappeal.com, www.oxfam.org.uk or if you fancy making a little bit of money rather than giving it to charity then try www.officegreen.co.uk. All the aforementioned companies will almost always either give you a freepost envelope to use or arrange for a courier to pick them up if you have saved a few cartridges to collect.

The printer in my office uses Hewlett Packard 4127X toner cartridges which cost around £79 for the HP original cartridge whereas the cost for our remanufactured 4127X cartridge is just £39.99 including free courier delivery. So now you have some idea of how you can help the environment, save some money without a loss of print quality and how you can help out a charity of your choice by sending your empty cartridges back to them. The websites mentioned above are only to be used for a guide as I have never personally sent any cartridges back to them myself as my cartridges go straight back to my trade supplier; for this reason, do compare companies on the Internet but certainly remember that whenever you or your office needs a replacement cartridge that you can save some money and the environment by getting a remanufactured one.

This week I’m going to introduce you to two websites that I think you may find of interest starting with the site www.kelkoo.co.uk which I’ve been using quite a lot recently. For those of you unfamiliar with this site, I have been using it to [...]]]>

This week I’m going to introduce you to two websites that I think you may find of interest starting with the site www.kelkoo.co.uk which I’ve been using quite a lot recently. For those of you unfamiliar with this site, I have been using it to compare prices for specific products across a number of different e-commerce sites as to be sure that I’m getting the best value for money whenever I make a purchase. Kelkoo (a play on the French saying ‘quel coup’ which translates to ‘what a bargain’) was founded in 2000 and is now one of Europes largest e-commerce websites and has operations in 10 European countries.

Essentially the idea of Kelkoo is not to sell anything directly to customers but rather to get customers in touch with retailers who can help them get what they need at the best price. It is a search engine that just looks up the price of a given item from the shops located within its database and returns the best of the bunch to the potential customer; think of it as Google but with instead of returning website matches it returns product matches with prices. Let’s say you are looking to buy a new camera and after looking around in town you find a model to suit but you obviously you want to make sure that you’re not getting ripped off so simply make a note of the model, go home, type it into Kelkoo and it will pick up the best prices from all the retailers listed in their database. Obviously the same process can be used when online shopping; you’ve found a product that you want but you need to ensure that you can’t get it for less so you check the prices across a number of difference retailers using Kelkoo.

The downside to the site is that there is still the chance that you will find cheaper prices from stores that aren’t listed in Kelkoo because retailers do have to pay to be included the directory so the majority of them choose not to be listed. This aside it is still a good starting point for any products you are thinking about purchasing and the discount you could get by checking out every e-commerce site online would probably be negligible and not worth the effort.

Finally, Kelkoo offer a free toolbar that you can download and install on your computer to quickly search for items that you want to compare prices on. To be honest, it’s pretty useless as it only saves you having to type in their website address manually and no where near as useful as the fantastic Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com) which everyone should have installed on their machines by now.

Next time you see an item that takes your fancy, just head to www.kelkoo.co.uk to see if you can find it cheaper; you may not find it at any less but for the sake of 20 seconds of your time surely it’s worth a look?

I’ll conclude this week by briefly mentioning the second website that I promised you which is www.computerarticles.co.uk. Over the past few weeks I have taken the liberty of putting online every article I have written for the Herald Express over the last three years on to this site. I must be honest, it isn’t Shakespeare but if you have missed a few articles or remember me writing about a specific item and you’ve since binned the copy then take a few minutes to visit!

I remember the days when a mobile phone was exactly what it said on the tin; my very first mobile was a Nokia 5110 which I purchased shortly after they first came out and at the time it was an incredible phone – ‘lightweight’, ‘well specced’ and ‘user friendly’ although [...]]]>

I remember the days when a mobile phone was exactly what it said on the tin; my very first mobile was a Nokia 5110 which I purchased shortly after they first came out and at the time it was an incredible phone – ‘lightweight’, ‘well specced’ and ‘user friendly’ although by modern standards it is considered heavy and very under featured. Some of the older generation who remember when a mobile phone weighed approximately the same as a fully grown badger would say that I’m wrong to mock my very first mobile but when I compare it to the models available on the market now I wonder how I was so proud to be seen in public with it.

Fast forward to the year 2004 and we see people carrying the fairly new Nokia N-Gage handset which resembles anything other than a phone; in fact I don’t think Nokia are even calling it a phone but rather a ‘Mobile Game Deck’. The unit weighs in at a fairly hefty 137g including the battery but is really packed with features including a colour screen and a multi-tasking compliant processor and whilst you may be wondering what you’d need these features on a phone for I plan to shed a little bit of light on the situation.

The N-Gage is Nokias latest attempt to target the youth end of the market that require a phone just as much for the ‘cool’ factor as the actual ‘phone’ factor. I remember when I used to work at Carphone Warehouse we used to get 12 year old children coming into the store with two hundred pounds worth of twenties stuffed in their pocket. They’d ask to see the phones and would merely be interested in the games that the handset played rather than the actual features of the phone and once established that the phone could play the game ‘Snake II’ they would stuff the money into my hand and run out the shop completely ignoring the option of insurance. More often than not they’d then come back into the shop a week later with another pocketful of twenties as their first phone had been stolen by their ‘best mate’ who was somewhat jealous of their new toy. I found it remarkable the amount of money that a large proportion of youth of today have access to; it’s clearly a very lucrative market for the phone manufactures.

To target this audience, the Nokia N-Gage has a fully featured games console built integrated into it which you can use to play far more sophisticated games than ‘Snake’ on – In fact it reminds me somewhat of the Sega Megadrive that I used to have as a teenager although slightly smaller. Games such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Tomb Raider and FIFA Soccer can be bought on removable memory cards which slot into the machine for around £30. Two people who both own N-Gages can also play head to head as the units can be linked wirelessly via Bluetooth. It has to be said that compared with modern consoles the games are very primitive but remember this isn’t a modern games console; it’s a phone.

Additional features include an inbuilt MP3 music player (including the ability to make an MP3 your ring tone), stereo music recorder, Voice recorder, FM radio, an XHTML browser, E-mail support, Multimedia Messaging, Bluetooth connectivity and 3.4mg standard memory which is fully upgradeable via memory cards and all of this is managed by the Symbian Operating System. It seems like technology gone mad and also such a shame that 99% of these units will end up in the hands of people who aren’t allowed to buy a lottery ticket legally and have no need to be carrying around that much technology in their pockets.

Having said that all of the above, I’m willing to bet that if you ask me in a couple of weeks then temptation will have probably set in and I’ll own one but ask me again in March and I’ll be sure to admit that it’s next to useless and I’ll wish I’d have stuck with my bulky but trusty 5110.