If you go to the official DefenseWall’s website which is at SoftSphere Technologies, you will find DefenseWall HIPS v2.56 but not the Personal Firewall v3 version. That’s because the v2.56 is about to be dropped and replaced with the new DefenseWall Personal Firewall v3. I’ve long heard of DefenseWall but has never given it a try but since I’ve been contacted by people from SoftSphere to do a review on v3, I’ve decided to test it out. DefenseWall claims to protect yourself from malicious software (spyware, botnets, adware, keyloggers, rootkits, etc.) and identification theft, that can not be stopped by your anti-virus and anti-spyware programs, when you surf the Internet.

I’ve been testing a lot on antivirus and this is actually my first time testing a HIPS software. This is nothing like the normal antivirus that you use. Well virus normally comes in to your computer from either the web browser, email, USB drives or network. If you disable all of them, it’s impossible that your computer will be infected by virus but who can live without an internet connection nowadays? So what DefenseWall does is it labels all those applications that comes from location where virus can come in as “Untrusted” and run them in limited rights in a virtual zone that is specially allocated for them.
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Antivirus software is the most important software you can have for your computer. It can be a very tough decision to choose the right antivirus program especially when there are so many of them and you can only have one on a computer. Late 2008 I did a test on 29 antivirus software to look for the free antivirus that is the lightest on system memory usage. I only checked the total memory usage during idle and during scanning. Other than that, I’ve also checked on the detection to see if it can detect the private trojan which I had at that time. Two years has gone by and I was curious to know if Kaspersky still do well or has been overtaken by Norton? After the new year, I’ve decided to do some tests on a total of 104 different types of antivirus and internet security applications. I’ve taken nearly a month, running the test day and night to finish this report. This is what that has been keeping me really busy the whole month of January 2010.

The test includes Application Launch Time, Boot Time Increase, Time to complete a Full Scan, Memory usage during Idle, Peak Memory Usage and Installation Size. Every test is done on the same clean Windows XP SP3 with all latest updates. Norton Ghost is being used to re-image the hard drive whenever I am going to test the next antivirus so that the test is fair. All antivirus tested had the latest versions, upgrades and updates and default settings being used. Here are the antivirus and internet security that is included in the test.
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The best way to visualize statistical information is by using charts. If you present an audience with raw figures, people’s eyes may glaze over. But if you present data visually such as when you need to show how sales of your product have grown, then more people will follow your main points. Microsoft Excel provides a pretty easy way to create charts based on the data in the worksheet but there are times when I do not have Microsoft Excel installed and I really need to create a chart.

Not to panic because as long as you have a web browser and an internet connection, you can easily create Bar, Pie, Line Plots, Gauge, Map, Ring, Cartesian, Candle, TimeSeries, Diagram, Radar type of charts. All you need to do is visit the online chart creator website, specify the size of the graph, graph type, color, X and Y data, and you’re set. Some websites requires you to create an account for free so you can actually save your graph and then modify it at a later time.
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I was looking for a tool that is able to create thumbnails of images in a folder. Although FILEminimizer Pictures is really good, but I am looking for something that is small, free, portable and supports command line. Preferably free so that everyone can use them and don’t need to resort to any cracks or keygens or spending money on it. I also wanted it to be small and portable unlike a lot of bloated batch image resizers which requires installation that you can easily find in Google. Most importantly, I wanted it to be automated without showing the graphical user interface.

I really had a hard time searching for it because the Google SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) was showing a lot of shareware or they are really bloated software that needs to be installed. After flipping through a lot of search results pages, I finally found what I wanted and it’s called Picture Resizer. I guess what took me so long to find it is because I kept searching using the keyword “thumbnail” but not the word “resize”. This tool is pretty amazing on how it works.
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I am still around and been busy testing out a lot of stuff. One of the things which I’ve tested and noticed is that when you install Norton 2010, it also automatically installs plugins to Firefox. If you have Norton Antivirus 2010, you should have a plugin called Norton IPS 2.0 and if you have Norton Internet Security 2010, it also comes with Norton IPS 2.0 together with Norton Toolbar 4.5. The IPS plugin is the Norton Intrusion Prevention System which guards against malware being delivered to your system via an exploit of a software vulnerability. The Firefox add-on specifically looks for attacks using security holes that may exist in the browser. This feature is not really essential because other functions of Norton will be able to deal with any malware that tries to run, regardless of its method of installation.

Sometimes we have too many things going on in Firefox and we don’t need extra those extra plugins. Unfortunately you cannot easily uninstall both Norton IPS and Norton Toolbar plugins by clicking the Uninstall button because it is disabled or grayed out. If you’ve searched around, most of the methods to remove the Norton plugins is by deleting the extension folders but that doesn’t work in the latest Norton 2010 products. Here is how to remove the Norton IPS 2.0 and Norton Toolbar 4.5 from the latest Firefox 3.6.
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I’ve recently reformatted my laptop’s hard drive and reinstalled Windows because it was getting a bit slow and also unstable. Well I normally install and test software on my desktop computer but sometimes I am too lazy to boot it up so I ended up installing it on my laptop. This time I am very careful on what I install because I do not want to slow it down and then had to reinstall windows and set it up all over again. It’s not difficult, just time consuming…

Weirdly after using the laptop for a few weeks, a problem started to appear that is the computer sort of hangs for a while about 10 seconds whenever I right click on a file or folder. I checked Windows Task Manager and there isn’t any process that shows any high CPU usage during that 10 seconds. I didn’t think it was virus because I could not find any suspicious autostart entries.

Then I figured perhaps it was some shell extensions that is causing the problem. For example, if you install WinZip on your computer, you’ll see a special WinZip menu when you right-click on a Zip file. This menu is created by adding a shell extension to the system.
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I would like to wish you all a Happy New Year, I hope you enjoy it with your family and friends, and may all your wishes come true for 2010 to bring prosperity and happiness to you. I have a few things lined up this year for this site which is to upgrade the site and forum design to a custom one that looks more professional. The X-Ray project is coming up really good. The coding of the prototype version is out and I am testing it out extensively to make sure it works well without bugs and also adding more features and options. The latest vBulletin v4.0 is also out and I guess the best time to upgrade it is when I change the blog theme so both section will look the same.

As for the daily post, I still don’t think I will be able to cope up with daily postings but I will try my very best. Reason is my time is pretty much stuck with my full time job and also I prefer to test stuff then write it based on experience. I do not want to post something blindly just because I need something to be posted at the blog by 3-4PM everyday.

Another thing is I have 30 genuine Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010 license keys that is already activated but unused and I am giving them away. Actually this is supposed to be for Christmas but seeing that IDM has generously sponsored 30 license (the IDM license were sent to 30 winners on 29th December), so I had to delay this one until today. Same thing, leave a comment at the end of this article and I will pick the 30 winners via lucky draw tomorrow.

Thank you all for your continuous support. I appreciate any suggestions or comments on how can I improve this site.

Here are the 30 lucky winners for KAV 2010. You should be receiving an email from me shortly.