Computers are a pain. Since I launched our exercise site (www.area365.com) I have had a few computer glitches and some of you have found out that your computers and browsers are outdated. Here are a few of my favorite programs to keep your computer safe and working better. Bonus, they are free.

I was very thankful for this program. It instantly found a virus some jerk installed on our docaltman site. Don’t worry I removed it. We used to use Norton years ago but it made tons of mistakes and consumed a lot of computer resources.
Avast antivirus
http://www.download.com/Avast-Home-Edition/3000-2239_4-10019223.html?tag=pop.software&cdlPid=10825540

If you have an older computer or limited resources this may be better. It doesn’t seem to be as descriptive as Avast, but it does the job well. We use both programs on different computers.
Avira Antivirus
http://www.download.com/Avira-AntiVir-Personal-Free-Antivirus/3000-2239_4-10322935.html?tag=pop.software&cdlPid=10831109

Spycatcher. This has caught a few spyware apps that have tried launching from our computers. Plus, it warns you if anything tries to install itself on your computer without your knowledge.
SpyCatcher:
http://www.download.com/SpyCatcher-Express-2007/3000-8022_4-10436704.html?tag=lst-1&cdlPid=10759031

Windows fixes. If you use windows you know it stalls, crashes, and tries hard to screw up. This has been my favorite program for fixes all the crap that Windows messes up. The first time I ran this program, it found 700 errors the first time I ran it.
Plus it can control what programs start on your computer. You’d be surprised what is running on your computer that you don’t know about if you don’t monitor your startup.
http://www.download.com/Advanced-WindowsCare-Personal/3000-2086_4-10407614.html?tag=lst-1&cdlPid=10833219

Some of my documents are going to be in PDF format and many, many cool documents are in PDF on the internet. Most of you probably use Adobe to open this file, but next to Microsoft products I dislike Adobe next. It takes forever to open these documents. No More!
I use Foxit. It is much faster.
http://www.download.com/Foxit-PDF-Reader/3000-2079_4-10313206.html?tag=lst-1&cdlPid=10836621

If you are surfing with Internet Explorer you may be missing some of the internet. All of my experiences with explorer are very slow. I moved away from explorer years ago because of security issues with Explorer. Read about Firefox then try it to surf the internet. The tabs, shortcut bookmarks, and extensions make this awesome.
http://www.download.com/mozilla-firefox/?tag=lst-4&cdlPid=10832276

I hope this helps some of you. Many times FREE programs work better than paid ones.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 10:38 pm and is filed under For fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.