I have used a number of Antivirus programs over the years. I was a big fan of Mcafee back in the DOS days, moved onto Nortons when it came with my PC (Threw it away when it got too bloated). Tried a number of others and then settled on AVG.

AVG was great. It was free, wasn’t bloated like Norton was (I have been assured that the 2009 and 2010 versions are much better) and seemed to do everything, except custom scheduled scans, you needed to pay for that.

Over the last few years it has worked great for me and I have been through a number of versions, till the recent v8.

However, I noticed it too was getting a bit bloated, using memory and system resources that seemed a bit big while idle.

I thought I would try Avast.

It too is a free anti virus program, for non commercial use and has all of the current drop of shields including Instant Messaging, Web,Mail, Network and more.

Resource wise it was better, not to much between them, but it definitely used less memory than AVG. This was ideal for my laptop that only has 256mb of RAM.

After some toing and froing between versions, the newest version of Avast has been released, so installed this on the resource challenged laptop.

Well some of the initial tests have been quite stunning.

While the proof will be in the protection it provides (The previous versions seem to be good in that regard), the resource usage of this new system is quite staggering.

With AVG installed, the laptop idled once fully loaded at around 260mb (remember this only has 256mb of RAM)

With Avast this reduced to 195mb, around 65mb less. On such a tight resource budget this is huge. Updates and scans obviously take more cpu and RAM, but that is to be expected. Why waste resources when they are not needed.

Well done to Avast, they have made a good product even better, enough to get a WOW out of me!

You can download it here

Twitter is becoming clearer.

Now I have TweetDeck, Twitter becomes a much better experience, I now know when someone I am following has posted something up, and it even allows me to reply from within TweetDeck.

Now the thing with TweetDeck, is that it is a program you install on your PC, think of it like Outlook for Twitter (Though much better and definitely not a Microsoft thing)

I means you do not have to refresh twitter to see what people are saying. It also means you can get notifications when there are new tweets in your stream.

I can see when I have been mentioned (@deepwebdesign) and also a list of my direct messages to other Twitter users.

But the real benefit, it to create groups of users so you can filter out the people you really want to hear from and leave some of the noise behind.

I can’t believe how much it has changed my Twitter experience.

The only downside is that it is a bit memory hungry (over 100mb of user memory when running, written in Adobe AIR)

But overall one of the few apps I am really happy about.

Click here to download TweetDeck

They also have TweetDeck for iPhone

New Zealand’s own Sidhe Interactive and their new game Shatter is up for an award after unwittingly keeping one of the 1Up.com journalists on the game for a half hour, after only intending to have a go for 5 minutes.

To me it looks like a super suped up version of Arkanoid, some levels played in spheres, huge power ups, explosions and much more.

Will they win the “Best in Show” category?

They are starting to get a bit of notice, and mentions like this can only help. Releasing Shatter on Sony’s Playstation Network will mean that it will get some airtime and if it is as addictive as indicated they could be on to a real winner.

Well done guys!

If you are sick of Internet Explorer, Opera is a great browser.

You can download a beta version of Opera 10 here

I use Firefox and when I am building websites I need to make sure that they work well in IE and Firefox predominantly (due to their market share)

But before Firefox came along, I was a big Opera fan and user.

The main thing about Opera is that it is fast and seems to be pretty light on the system resources.

I wont bother doing timed tests for sites and download file speeds, but I downloaded the new Beta version of Opera 10 and it looks good, worked well on the sites I tried and it was fast.

While I cant recommend it yet for production use, for anyone who is willing to try out stuff in Beta will like this. It will also sit alongside your other browser, so you dont have to get rid of it. Yet

What is your favourite browser and why?

Well Bing is here.

What is Bing? Well it is the new Microsoft search engine. Technically replacing Live as their search engine.

There have been plenty of blogs and articles today about the premature launch (it was supposed to launch on the 3rd of June), but came out a little early.

To the point where Googles Matt Cutts has been taking aim at some of the results from Bing against Googles results for the same query.

The comments vary and peoples experience so far has been unhelpful in deciding whether this is a serious competitor to Googles search dominance.

It is new, but you would expect them to get it pretty right from the first release.

How will this affect NZ? Not sure at this stage, I am going to do some of my own research and present this in a few days.

Check back.

There has been plenty of talk about online video.

When Google bought Youtube, that seemed to be the end of online video sites, as they had with Google Video over 80% of the video market.

However, Hulu and Vimeo have made waves for different reasons.

Hulu is the one closest to Youtube in style and delivery. The key change seems to be the promotion of commercially produced full length episodes of TV programs so often banned and taken down on other sites.

Youtube is still the choice for uploading any kind of content, subject to the terms and conditions. If you are quick enough, you can find replays of Champions League, Premier League and more. Wait a couple of hours and the videos are starting to be taken down as violation of copyright.

The surprising thing is that people do it every day, knowing they will only last a short time. The amount of resource that Youtube (and other providers) need to put into the policing of this is amazing.

However, for non US residents, Hulu is not available, due to copyright agreements in place in other countries around the world.

They provide a popup, where you can put your email and region, so they can let you know when Hulu becomes available. (It could take some time)

Then there is Vimeo. Vimeo is a different kettle of fish. They provide this as a simple guideline to the content they want on their site

Vimeo exists to provide you with a space to showcase your creativity and share your life. As such, we do not allow you to upload videos that are commercial in nature or videos that you did not make yourself

So, this gives a completely different feel and purpose for this video site. I have seen Vimeo used for hosting training, video tutorials, video blog files and more.

The quality seems better than Youtube (even though the controls seem a bit obtrusive) so looks like a nice platform.

You won’t beat Youtube for potential traffic and viralness (Is that a word?) but Vimeo looks like a great alternative for staging video content on your site.

Do you have a preference, any others  worth noting?

I don’t normally plug other sites, but this one looks like a good one for businesses in NZ – www.madefromnewzealand.com

My biggest like is the tone it seems to have of a great place to be; lots going on, plenty of information on businesses, people and events.

The other cool aspect is the social side of things.

Not only is the site itself a social networking experience, they have also made the effort to integrate the site into other social networks. You can link to your Facebook profile using Facebook Connect, you can also attach your blog to your profile and use RSS to bring in your latest posts.

A possible suggestion is to something similar to Twellow, where they offer integrations to a larger range of other networks including Twitter, Flickr and more.

They even have blog plugins to provide an easy way to share people, businesses and networks with others via the blog. Here is one to my profile: Deepweb

So a great place to get listed and connected with other businesses in NZ.

Give it a go.

A great article on PC World about the “The 20 Worst Windows Features of All Time”

Some great nostalgia runs here, Ooh I was tempted by Active Desktop, found better apps for drive compression, got annoyed by the popups, lost data when I shouldnt have, just like millions of others.

Can you think of any others?

Cheers

Steven

IE7 is here. The major update to the worlds most used browser has been a long time in coming. I downloaded it in Beta to make sure the sites we are desiging will work with the new browser (so far so good).

So whats so good?

Well, tabbed browsing is a good thing, but Firefox and Opera has had that for a while now (and the reason I switched) and the antiphishing is to be appluaded, but there is still not enough to make me shift back.

Also Firefox 2.0 is now for download here, I have installed it and it is stable and works just as good as 1.5.

So I dont think I will be changing my default browser any time soon, there is just not enough of a reason to do it.



What do you think?

Till next time

Deepweb