They slow your computer down, they ask for your money annually and they rate no better than various free products when compared by AV-comparitives.org. If you have an ongoing relationship with Norton or McAfee, it’s time to break up. Happily, both companies provide free software for doing just that. Most people who have Norton or McAfee found the software on their computer when they bought it. That’s not necessarily a bad...

Deleting files or quickly formatting a drive isn’t enough for sensitive personal information. We’ll show you how to get rid of it for good using a Ubuntu Live CD. When you delete a file in Windows, Ubuntu, or any other operating system, it doesn’t actually destroy the data stored on your hard drive, it just marks that data as “deleted.” If you overwrite it later, then that data is generally unrecoverable, but if the...

It is a well known fact that a high percentage of identity thefts are done by family, friends (I use this word loosely) and acquaintances.  We’ve all heard the cases where someone who the victim knows gets a hold of their personal information somehow and wreaks havoc with their credit.  This can be done several ways including getting a hold of credit card offers (or other personal mail), snooping in purses or wallets, and even...

Yesterday, I told you about Tinkernut, a site I have been following that makes videos on how to geeky stuff. A question I get asked a lot is how to gain access to a blocked website. For various reasons, IT Admins have to block sites like Facebook or Twitter. Usually this is to make sure you do some work. However, there are ways around this. Tinkernut have outline some simple steps in this video that you can try and use on a blocked pc....

Tinkernut is a great site for how to videos on everything in PC land. They make quality videos with simple language. Anyway, they recently got hacked and decided to share how to make things secure so it doesn’t happen again. You need to spend time protecting you PC from hackers and other nasties. Believe me, its time well spent. It is always a matter of when, not if you get hacked. Have a look at this video for some straight...

There are many anti-malware programs out there that will clean your system of nasties, but what happens if you’re not able to use such a program?  Autoruns, from SysInternals (recently acquired by Microsoft), is indispensable when removing malware manually. There are a few reasons why you may need to remove viruses and spyware manually: Perhaps you can’t abide running resource-hungry and invasive anti-malware...