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Avast Home Edition 4.7

 

I have tried almost all known anti-virus programs (English ones off course). This is one of those AV that I like to talk about.

Avast Home Edition 4.7 presently in my eyes seem to be doing a lot better than AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition in terms of usability and network performance. I have been using AVG for sometime and before that NOD32 2.7 Professional. But now I am sticking with Avast for a while because of its nice skin-able interface, very good performance, and its got a ICSA Labs Certification.

Since its running as free (only have to register) it can be easy for them to catch many viruses in the wild. At Download.com they have registered more than 12.7 million downloads in 39 days !!!. Impressive but it nothing compared to AVG which had registered more than 42.8 million downloads in just 5 days !!!. Wow.

What are AVAST's Good FREE features?

1. It has a simple and skin-able user interface.
2. Auto Incremental Updating
3. Very Good Performance even on a low-end PC
4. Boot-time scan
5. Able to repair infected files (only if Virus Recovery Database is complete)
6. And its a freeware

What is missing from Avast? Well of course some professional stuff such as:

1. Enhanced User Interface
2. Command-line scanner
3. Defining your own anti-virus tasks
4. PUSH updates (Whatever that is)
5. Virus notifications (task-based)

O.k the stuff that is missing really doesn't mean anything to me so I don't need to worry. I really love this anti-virus for its really good AV definition too. So go ahead try it. I like it so you will too.

You can download it from Avast Website. For registration of Avast Home Edition. Visit this page.

TestDisk

A great freeware that saved the day.

I had a task, to install Some application on a rack-mounted server. I don't usually carry CDs of those application cause its unreliable so I had a soft-copy made on my portable 2.5 inch 80GB External USB Hard Disk.

After Installing Windows 2003 STD Server over Redhat Linux server. I plug in my 80GB External HDD. I then released that I had to install a web server on a different rack-mounted server, so I switched to the other server and continued with its installation.

Now when I switched back to the previous server I went into "Disk Management" and checked out what HDDs were attached. I saw a there were two, A. a 65GB SCSI HDD and B. a 78GB HDD. Then I thought that this was an extra HDD and I right click the partition and deleted it. OMG, wasn't that my 80 GB External HDD.

F#&$ F#&$ F#&%.

What a stupid mistake? what am I going to do? I had lots of important data and my application server setup was in there. OK relax. I quickly got hold of another PC and searched Google for some answers for my dilemma. And I did.

TestDisk from CGSecurity was my answer to my prayers. It only uses a DOS interface which also work in Windows (There is a different version if you want to run in DOS, etc). In my case the 'Windows' version will do.

This app only took 5 ~ 10 minutes to recover and find the partition. And once you try to exit it it asked to save the changes, I said 'Yes' and It did it. It recovered by HDD back. Thank God.

After reviewing this app further it is interesting to note that the application is able to do many more, example recover boot sectors and repair MFT (using MFT mirror). and supports many file systems and Operating Systems such as Windows, Linux , Mac, etc. I really recommend this application to anyone so please go ahead and try it.

TestDisk