The LAST BLOG>>> McAfee and Stuff

While I was at work today, my computer started acting crazy. It was restarting itself after every 40 seconds. Soon after I realized that almost all the computers were behaving that way.
Twitter has been buzzing with the news this afternoon that McAfee updates were shutting down XP PCs.
This is what Mcafee saida according to this article:

The faulty update has been removed from all McAfee download servers, preventing any further impact on customers. We are not aware of significant impact on consumers and believe we have effectively limited such occurrence.

McAfee teams are working with the highest priority to support impacted customers and plan to provide an update virus definition file shortly. McAfee apologizes for any inconvenience to our customers.

Anyways, our group project came out pretty good. It matches the requirements for the Group Iteration 3 which is good. Although I am little jealous when I look at Adam Heeter's Group project which by the way looks amazing. But I really enjoyed learning about Ajax.

I am so happy that this semester is finally over. But I have four more months to graduate. So last weekend we finally completed our project. I really enjoyed blogging for this class. Although commenting could be hard sometimes. In the end, I would like to thank John Drake for all the encouragement. I would also like to thank Joe for being so supportive during the entire project.

And Good Luck to everyone else.

"Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success."
– Thomas J. Watson

School Provided Anti-Virus

As many of us work our way through school we look for every means to keep a dollar in our pocket. Being we are all IS major, many of us spend the majority of their on either school or their home computers. Recently, after having my personal anti-virus expire, i was feeling less than eager to kick out another $49 for another years subscription.

Many of you don't know that Eastern has a partership with Mcafee to keep the school and its students pc's clean. Free Anti-virus . You can get access to the free 2 year subscription to Mcafee Corporate Edition. I greatly like the corporate versions of many kinds of software. I find them cleaner and with less flash in the pan. They tend not to be the most initially user friendly, but after some use often open up features you would of not had access to before in a retail copy.

The only downside is at this time the do not have a wholy compatible version for Win 7. Many users have simple installed the vista version with ease. Over time this creates system instability issues and improper firewall blocking by Win7 as well as incorrect file quarentine. Until the new compatible version becomes available there is always Panda!

Windows Defender

An IT friend of mine recently commented on a Windows virus protection tool saying that it's very good. It's called, Windows Defender and is included in Vista and Windows 7 operating systems. In my history of using virus protection tools, the one tool I have used for the last four years which has not hindered system performance is a German product which you can download for free, called Avira. I've been virus free since using it. While McAfee is the only other product I have experience with, I found that it really slowed system performance and comes with an annual cost.

Windows Defender is also a free program and is light weight. It evolved from another product which was developed by Giant Company Store called Antispyware. Microsoft purchased this product in 2004 and hacked away at it to enhance it and be competitive in this space. They released a reengineered product in 2006. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft these days but this doesn't look like a bad product.


There are two features which Microsoft is proud of in this tool but I don't see how this is different from other tools. They are

1) Software Explorer

2) Real-time Alerting

These features alone do not impress me but I'm willing to try it out. Avira does throw advertisements dialog windows at start-up and I experience some slowness with this tool but nothing significant. I'm willing to try something new though, why not? Has anyone out there used this tool or appreciated any of it's features over other tools?