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Martin

Making your browsing more secure

There are lots of free anti-virus, spy-ware/malware detection and firewall apps out there to choose from. So if you’re running Vista or XP and contract a virus – there’s really no excuse for your PC being unprotected with all the free options to choose from.

My favorites at the moment are AVG-Free A/V, Comodo Firewall and Spyware Blaster

Still you can never be too careful when browsing the internet.

OpenDNS provides a DNS service for your PC or internet connections router which can:

  • Filter out certain website types from your browser. Great for keeping kids out of trouble.
  • Speed up your  internet browsing experience overall. Who doesn’t want some of that?

Best of all you don’t need to install anything. Well if you’re confused – here comes the techie bit…What the heck is DNS anyway?

Put simply DNS or Dynamic Naming System is the method your PC uses to find and return websites hosted on servers located on the internet. It can also be used separately from the internet environment to do other stuff but we’re not interested in that for now…

So – say when you type www.ibm.com into your internet browser and hit return have you ever thought about how that IBM welcome page is returned to your browser? The contents of the internet aren’t stored on your computer are they??

Well when you type that url/link into your browser and hit return – it sends out a request to your DNS server. This servers located in your internet service providers data centre and receives all the browser requests you make. The DNS server holds a database of IP addresses for a bucket load of websites that match up with the urls which we humans like to use.

If the DNS server doesn’t know the IP address of the website we want to access from the url we send it – it will query another server, and another and maybe another until it finds the IP address of the server we want and connects us to it.

So how does OpenDNS help in this situation??

It holds a giant database of DNS records (which map our urls to IP addresses). We get a result first time and this results in our webpage being returned faster than if we use the DNS servers our internet service provider connects us to.

You can change the DNS servers you use to OpenDNS servers and it will not affect your internet connection – it’ll make it better

OpenDNS Screenshot

 

Click on this button to get started and see what OpenDNS can do:

Use OpenDNS

Adobe Reader is Bloatware…

Personally I’ve never seen the need for PDF documents…

I think all documents should be created in MS Word – and everyone should have it installed on their PCs or at least an application that can open and edit Word docs.

I’ve lost count how many times I’ve had to download and install Adobe Reader on a new PC just to open a scanned PDF in an application that’s so cumbersome to use it sometimes beggars belief. You can’t even edit PDF’s on the fly without outlaying some serious cash….

But I have the solution…
Foxit Reader Ok you actually have to download and install it – but its a joy to use. Its small, its fast, you can copy text out of the PDF, it even lets you scroll easily through those scanned PDF’s that for some reason you always receive at 1000% height x 1000% width of the original document. Great app – I’ve not gone back to Adobe Reader since.

If you’ve got an application you think does a better job than Foxit Reader – let me know….

Foxit Reader Screenshot

My first post!!

I work in IT Support and had a user come into the office who wanted their laptop rebuilt. It should have been a simple task of using the recovery cd that came with the laptop to restore the OS – but of course these things never go to plan. The recovery CD was missing and this laptop was too old to have a factory restore option…

After a exhaustive search on the internet the only recovery cd that was available was the kind you had to purchase. Since I’m not one to throw away good money on something that would probably only be used once I directed the user to get their hands on a copy of XP and use that to rebuild the laptop. But not before directing him to a really great application which is the point of this post….

Driver Genius Professional – does one simple task really well. It backs up your currently installed drivers into a folder or self installing exe. Whats so great about that I hear you ask? Well have you ever tried finding drivers for discontinued hardware? home built PCs? or just wanted to rebuild your stone-age era PC and get it back to work fast? If you have then Driver Genius is a great tool to have in your arsenal of “little apps I can’t do without”

Try to avoid using Driver Softs site to download the app as their sites so slow it begins to feel like you’re downloading the tool from a web server connected to a 56k Modem.
Apart from that this tool works great so check it out and let me know what you think?

The Blog of Martin Birrane