Best Antivirus for Windows 8.1 – From AV-Test Labs

Best Antivirus for Windows 8.1 – From AV-Test Labs

When it comes to Virus protection, we are overwhelmed with the options available which often results in confusion. Let me make it easy for you to choose the best by showing the experiment results carried on Antivirus software.

AV-TEST is an independent IT Security Lab which conducted tests on various Security solutions. Based on their results, I would like to discuss which one should be the best Antivirus for Windows 8.1.

Study results are focused three useful parameters namely:

1. Protection: Protection against malware infections (such as viruses, worms or Trojan horses)
2. Performance: Effect of antivirus on Computer’s speed (whether it is slowing down PC)
3. Usability: Impact of antivirus on Computer’s usability (whether it is annoying, giving false notifications, etc.)

BitDefender Internet Security 2014 tops the chart and can be considered as Best Antivirus for Windows 8.1 closely followed by Kaspersky Internet Security. Both of them are really good at protection computers from Virus and at the same time do not cause any disturbance while working or degrades system performance.

Though not displayed in the chart but let me tell you that Norton Internet Security is good in terms of Protection but it hampers the performance or in other words slows down PC. That’s the reason it is not even in top five.

In case, if you are looking for free solution, AVG AntiVirus Free Edition is good followed by Avast 2014 Free Antivirus.

Do read difference between Antivirus and Internet Security before deciding anything.

From the list, what I observed is that most of the Antivirus software are good at detection of malware. The reason they are not on top is because they either have higher false detection rate or slows down PC.

Another surprising revelation this test does is that Windows Defender isn’t something to rely on for security of computer. It has the lowest Virus protection rating.

If you would like to know more, visit the results summary on AV-TEST website.

Never Forget Mobile Phone’s Charging USB Cable at Home

Never Forget Mobile Phone’s Charging USB Cable at Home 

With Phone’s becoming smarter, battery drains have increased significantly. While traveling or moving away from home, one thing essential to be carried along (of course after Mobile phone) is its USB Charging cable. Smart device you are carrying is nothing without its charger. Pretty much dumb, isn’t it?

Considering this issue and importance of carrying Charging cable, NOMAD has come up with a revolutionary product called ChargeKey. It is basically a USB charging cable for Phone, tablet, etc but really portable. This way one can never forget to carry charging cable.

Smartphones and tablets these days can be charged just by plugging into USB of Computer / Laptop so no need of even power adapter. While travelling, it is easy to find someone with laptop or a place with desktop computer which can act as power source for charging. [sws_pullquote_right]So small in size that you can tie it up in keychain or maybe carry in wallet. [/sws_pullquote_right]

Not just charging of battery but also this cable can be used for data transfer or sync between devices. Just like your 3 feet cable which enables mass storage device on phone when connected to computer. Only diffreence is that ChargeKey is way smaller in size.

Cable between microUSB and USB connector in regular charging cable is replaced by a flexible rubber material of size approx 1 inch.

ChargeKey is available in two variants namely microUSB which is standard and widely used in Android devices, Windows phone or any other platform devices except Apple. Other kind of ChargeKey is especially available for iPhone, iPod and iPad which has different kind of connector.

ChargeKey is priced at $25.00 which can be purchased from NOMAD’s official website

You are Over Confident that your Home PC Won’t get Hacked

You are Over Confident that your Home PC Won’t get                                             Hacked 

Imagine a complete stranger rifling through your purse, glove box, pockets and phone. You’re not comfortable with that, are you?

Nowadays, home PCs hold a myriad of personal files and information that most people wouldn’t be comfortable sharing. Search history, emails, instant messages, bank usernames and passwords, tax details and a host of other sensitive data can now be found on your home PC – and without adequate protection from cybercrime, this information could fall into the wrong hands.

Identity thieves and hackers target home computers because they know families often do not maintain adequate security protection on their PCs. This makes these family users easy, lucrative marks. Many hackers access your personal information in order to steal your money and your identity. Others might want to use your home computer as a shield to mask their identity as they steal from others.

But it won’t happen to me!

Identity theft is more common than you think – and the advent of the Internet has simplified the process for would-be thieves. It’s estimated that a quarter of all cases of identity theft originate on the Internet. More specifically, according to the Internet Fraud Complaint Centre, email and web pages dominate the fraud methodology, and the vast majority of victims actually have email contact with the perpetrator.

How can identity theft occur?

Anyone can fall victim to identity theft. Here’s how:

• Accessing the Internet from an unsecured PC—Without a security layer between your computer and the Internet, you invite hackers to steal your identity, destroy your files, or use your PC to attack others

• Obtaining potentially unwanted programs like spyware or adware on your PC—Malicious software programs may monitor your keystrokes, track your Internet logins, transmit your confidential information, or redirect your browser to fake web sites

• Sending personal information over the Internet—Hackers can easily retrieve sensitive data that is sent over an unsecured Internet connection

• Downloading files from friends and family or accepting unknown emails—You can obtain a virus, worm, or Trojan simply by accepting files from your friends, family, or others

• Not recognizing phishing scams or spam— Ever received a dodgy looking email claiming you’ve won big? All you have to do is send over your bank account details… Phishing scams use fraudulent emails and web sites to lure unsuspecting users into revealing private account or login information.

• Leaving your wireless network unsecured—Since your wireless network’s radio waves travel through walls, a hacker with a simple antenna could attack you from miles away to steal your information or to launch attacks from your PC

How you can fight identity theft

Common sense dictates some very obvious measures to protect yourself, your family and your computer. Make sure to set up parental controls to keep the kids from accidentally clicking on untrusted ads and websites. This includes not downloading files or clicking on hyperlinks sent by strangers, avoid storing financial information on your computer and using a secure browser.

Over-sharing on social media has desensitised our notion of online privacy, and it can be very easy to fall into complacency when sharing your personal information online. There are a number of ways that hackers can compromise your home PC and access information, most of which can be avoided with adequate security protection and a little online vigilance.

How do you keep your Home PC protected from Hackers?

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Why You Should Stop Visiting Local Shop and Start Online Shopping -

Why You Should Stop Visiting Local Shop and Start Online                                       Shopping -

Are you still making purchases from local shop? In this post, I would like to give you some insights on why you should consider online shopping instead. I have been an early adopter and now a regular online shopper who buys from printer cartridges to shoe polish online.

Reasons are justified:

It is Cheap

First and foremost reason of shopping online is Savings.

With so many web stores on the internet, there is a cut-throat competition and almost everyone is competing on pricing.

How many times you have considered visiting more than 3 shops for comparing prices? At a point, you settle down for the one which YOU think is reasonable. In online shopping however, you can go on opening browser tabs after tabs to visit shops after shops. If that isn’t enough, we have sophisticated solutions like price comparison websites to find the cheapest online retailer.

Also, you can always find a discount coupon which can help you save few more bucks. To find a coupon, just google search the keyword “<product you want> coupon code“.

That’s not the end, online shops offer various promotional offers which you will come to know about on checkout. Products like Magento discount extensions help webmasters setup various rules for offering discount to customers.

Free Home Delivery

You don’t have to go out chasing traffic. Though not every time, but in most of the cases, you are eligible for free home delivery of the product. Even if they ask, amount is minimal and nothing compared to the comfort and convenience of shopping offered.

Read Reviews before Purchase

In a shop, person serving you would always offer something he want to sell, not something you want to buy. If you are unaware, your decision of purchase will highly depend on what others say. In online shopping, you get to read the read reviews about the product from real customers.

Return/Refund Policy

This is seen in general in most local shops.

Online sites have set fixed rules for return and refund of product which is generally not seen in local shops (at least in India). I have been a customer of Myntra.com for years now. Though, never faced such refund issue but once when I did, they accepted the faulty product even after the grace period mentioned in return policy.

This may certainly vary from shop to shop but with so much competition online and customers with freedom of speech on social platforms, they do worry about reputation.

No Compulsion to Buy

I have had many awkward instances when sales person tries to impose his tactics. It is not easy moving out empty hands in those situations. However, there is no such real person involved in online shopping.

Definitely, there are some things which you cannot buy online such as fuel (petrol/diesel) or shouldn’t buy online such as prescribed medicines. For other stuff, you should consider online purchase.

I hope I was convincing enough with valid reasons. Let me know what is stopping you from online shopping by commenting below.

How my Small Business is Saving $452 by Moving to Cloud -

How my Small Business is Saving $452 by Moving to Cloud -

Being a professional Blogger, we have the flexibility to work virtually anywhere. All these years, never felt like having our own office, maybe because I was worried of spending on initial setup and infrastructure. Fortunately, with the advent of Cloud, we work from a small office while leaving the infrastructure worries to cloud.

Being a newly formed enterprise, cash flow is tight initially so we had to find ways of saving a dollar wherever possible.Quick search on cloud computing services for business revealed shocking benefits that small businesses can avail by opting Cloud. If you don’t know what exactly this mean, let me tell you.

Technology is moving up and settling in cloud. 

Before Internet came in, we purchased physical hardware infrastructure with software licenses in form of CD.  However in Cloud Computing model, everything runs on provider’s server. We just have to purchase subscription and access using web browser. So, you aren’t installing anything on own system but just renting those services. Simple example would be utility service like electricity in which we do not own a power-plant  and generate on our own. We subscribe and run our appliances on it and then pay according to use.

Benefit of Cloud services:

• We do not need to install anything on our systems so, no worries of storage and high end infrastructure.
• Can be accessed anywhere from any device irrespective of Operating system. All you need is a web browser.
• Easy to collaborate and share with colleagues.
• Comparatively cheaper and sometimes free.
• Pay only for what you use.

Cloud can be used as platform to deploy our apps to get it up and running. It can also be as a service where we rent a software.

For example: We need Office suite namely Excel for maintaining expense and work sheets, PowerPoint for client presentations and Word for PDF reading and making. This could cost $219 if we went for Microsoft Office suite for business. Instead, we preferred Office Online which is a cloud service allowing us to access office suite online for free of charge.

For storage purposes, we could have used an external Hard Disk which costs around $98. Instead, we preferred to have cloud storage (OneDrive in our case) which offers 15GB of free space. This takes care of documents and images related to work. Even the routine backup of this site is taken on cloud with no offline backup whatsoever.

These were just some of the many examples. Sophisticated solution using Cloud services by Amazon Web Services and Rackspace are available for enterprises with complicated and custom requirements.

By opting cloud, you make IT maintenance someone else’s problem. According to requirements, if there are any upgrades or downgrades required, it can be made with one click. You also save on technical department responsible for handling these. For us, a part time employee handling these stuff could cost $135.

And we did it all for $0.00, yup.

This is how it sums up to $452 of savings in a year.

That was all about Enterprise level. Let us see this from a personal user point of view and how can we benefit using Cloud services.

Storage: We keep on accumulating data and then worry about how to store it. Most of us opt for an external Hard Disk of 1 terabyte or more space for storage. You may combine cloud storage services and get more than 200 GB space online for free.

Office Suite: This is probably most essential requirement of any home user. Instead of Office professional subscription why not go completely online or opt for hybrid cloud like Office 365 subscription which is way cheaper.

There are many possibilities and applications, check out webware sections for more and use accordingly

How to be Awesome on Facebook: No Non-sense Guide

How to be Awesome on Facebook: No Non-

                    Non- sense Guide

OK, let me guess.

You think that your friend who gets more likes on Facebook has a happening life than yours.

Awesome, cool, funny. <whatever> incidents don’t happen with just them. It is just the way they present it to you in form of status update on Facebook. Even you can be popular among your friends by being more presentable with your words.

It’s not even about having a good time anymore.
It’s about showing everyone on the Facebook what a good Time you’re having.

I have been noticing the engagement on my status updates for years and accordingly compiled this article to tell what works. Yes, I am that awesome. 

1. Be KISSable

Keep it short, silly.

People may spend hours on Facebook but they don’t have a minute to read if your status update crosses three lines.

So, please don’t make them read your essays. Try to sum up in few words whenever and wherever possible.

Also, a research suggests that a post with less than 80 characters gets 66% more engagement.

2. Don’t be Easy on Words

Personally, I love sarcasm and practice it regularly to the extent that it has almost become my second nature.

It takes a twisting of brain muscles to understand. Not everyone gets it but those who do have a good laugh.

What exactly is sarcasm by the way?

Using pretty words which appears to be praising when actually you are taunting

3. Make Fun of Yourself

I like self-deprecating humor, although I really suck at it. (See what I did there?)

When you point out a loser in you, it appears more natural and real. People find it easy to connect and feel you are not perfect either, just like them.

By making yourself a target, you can come up with some really stupid stuff without risking to offend anyone.

Just be careful with how far you go. There’s a fine line between self-deprecating humor and an embarrassing cry for help.

4. Post BeYoutiful Stuff

Facebook is your personal space, people love to know
what’s on your mind.

Dare to take a Stand. Write what you purely feel about some incident or person without dilution of others’ opinions.

No one remembers the guy who kept mum. Stop being diplomat. Say something about something you liked or stand against if didn’t like it.

Not everyone will appreciate but that isn’t a goal, is it?

5. Go beyond Liking

It would be difficult to maintain any relationship in real life if everything was received with, “I like that.” Or silence. Feedback, people. It’s all about feedback.

Leave a comment. Say something in words to express. It makes you noticeable and stand out of liker crowd.

How To Stop Spamming on Facebook Friends and Timeline

Bonus Tip: Have Professional Looking Photographs

Profile photo or display picture represents the real you on Facebook.

Some photos look good on full screen but when set as profile photo, they look unclear in smaller size. You need to know the exact size / resolution of photo accepted by Facebook and upload accordingly.

I recently came across AP Social Media image maker which creates perfect sized images for profile photo as well as Cover Photo. Along with the resize option, it offers option to retouch which is basically applying effects to look awesome. If that wasn’t enough, check out Facebook cover makers.

Lastly people, invite friends to parties not on CandyCrush.

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