Since I started this little project I’ve watched several of the tools I used to prefer slowly drive themselves into uselessness while others pushed to the forefront of their field. In this post I’ll be listing a few changes in my preferred software for various tasks.

Free Antivirus:

Old Choice – AVG Free Antivirus – For years AVG was the best free anti-virus software on the market, a small footprint and a 95%+ cleanup percentage. That all started to go down hill with version 8 which was plagued by update problems, a much larger footprint, and an interface that everyone hated. They’ve failed to make any progress at regaining their former glory and so have been cut from my list of preferred software.

New Choice – Avira – I’ve been running Avira’s free client for the last six months or so and it’s been unobtrusive and effective. In my tests it’s average a 96% stoppage rating and never has failed to notify me when I’ve started mucking with infected files.

Malware Removal:
Old Choice – Super Anti Spyware – For almost two years this was my staple recommendation for home users to remove malware infections, but lately it has gotten less and less effective.

New Choice – Malwarebytes Anti-Malware – This has been my new recommendation for about 8 months now. It’s proven brutally effective at removing malware of all stripes, including things that I had to remove manually in the past.

Personal Firewall:
Old Choice – Sunbelt Personal Firewall – After a year of usage Sunbelt started to get more and more unstable on me, eventually forcing me to uninstall it and replace it.

New Choice – Comodo Personal Firewall – Comodo has proven more stable, more configurable, and generally better all around than Sunbelt. I’ve had zero problems with it over the past year.

Most of the rest of my tool selection has remained the same and all have proven themselves to me time after time.

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Over the last few days I’ve been witness to one of the most interesting online battles in recent memory. Editors at the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia submitted the article on Bullshido.net for deletion. Of course several of the moderators from Bullshido arrived to defend their entry and all hell broke loose.
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As regular readers will be aware my favorite CCG is Geek Fight from Diving Dragon Games. They’ve been busily churning out new sets and new cards since my last update and yet another new set is on the horizon. The rules have undergone some refinements and the entire game has grown and developed in some fantastic ways. If any of my readers are CCG fans I highly recommend ordering a set of Geek Fight cards, they are dirt cheap and the quality of the cards and the artwork is outstanding.
Check out Diving Dragon Games and Geek Fight on facebook as well.

Enjoy!

Imagine my annoyance when I was greeted with a glaring red light upon my monitoring dashboard this morning. “One of my servers low on disk space?!”, I exclaimed with incredulity. Upon further inspection it turns out that some errant program has generated 25 gb of temporary files of the format PBD????.tmp. A little bit of digging around and discovered that the Trend Micro Antivirus was responsible for this disreputable behavior.
I proceeded to shut down the service, purge the rogue temp files and restart the service. No more errant temporary files.

It seems that this happens when a Trend update is performed and the services are not restarted afterwards. Consider this yet another reason why you should always restart your processes after an update.

I get frequent requests from my loyal hordes for ways to remotely manage the processes in their own fiefdoms. In a previous article I mentioned Remote Task Manager which is an excellent tool for complete remote management, but requires a client to be installed on your target system. If you don’t have the option of installing a client, or need a more immediate solution then you’re in luck. Read on for the sweet sweet resolution.
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