Free AVG not as free as it used to be.

Ok, it is still free technically (http://free.avg.com/us-en/homepage).

I used to highly recommend free AVG because it was, well free! Now they have teamed up with trialpay where you have to sign up for a trial of one of their partners before you can get to the download.

To be clear, I like AVG’s product line, for both servers and clients, I think it is really good at what it does.  I purchased several licenses for a small business data center I used to run.  However I find it hard to continue to recommend the free AVG tool with the condition of signing up for a trail of some other service I may not want.  I understand their model, but I am not in favor of it when I have choices.

Microsoft Security Essentials to the rescue.  I have been running it on my Windows 7 desktop and laptop and it seems to work just fine. Check it out here

Your Face is your password from Lenovo …

Other vendors may have this as well, but I seen it first on the Lenovo site. Very cool face security.

(from http://www.lenovo.com/us/en/)

When you navigate to the site click on the 3rd flash button (see the image below).

Visual Studio ve-####.tmp files

While in Visual Studio you may start seeing temp files start to appear in your solution. You delete them and all of a sudden they reappear again.  In many cases this a problem with your anti-virus solution.  Go into your AV solution and exclude the Visual Studio types from being scanned, especially the *.vb and *.cs extensions.

In my case this happened with Microsoft Security Essentials. I did not have this problem when running Microsoft OneCare or earlier versions of Free AVG. It also seems like this problem surfaces a lot with Trend Micro solutions as well.

Microsoft Operating System Security

I am not sure why I would purchase any commercial security suite these days at least for a Windows PC.  I can understand the reasoning for a non technical consumer to purchase a security suite, maybe for convenience (either perceived or real), however for tech savvy it just does not seem to make sense.

• Windows Defender (included with every install)
• Microsoft Security Essentials (free download for anti-virus)
• Windows Firewall (including in every install)
• Microsoft Malicious Software Removal tool (provided by Windows Update or by download)
• Windows Update (included with every install)

Seem to do a great job at protecting my Windows installation.  Before Microsoft Security Essentials I used Free AVG which worked great and is a really good product. I realize there are several other free spyware and anti-virus solutions on the market.  I also realize there are pros and cons to a single vendor solution. The point here is I am not sure how much longer companies that sell security suites will remain relevant with current offerings. What and how will the innovate to convince (somewhat educated) consumers to buy their products.

Over the years it seems like some of the larger players in the industry have gone backwards in performance, reliability, innovation and only upward in price. As always only time will tell.