Alpha Technical Solutions

Posts Tagged ‘Microsoft’

I have had a disturbing call from an old friend of my parents who have been hit by a scam.

The scam goes like this, a person claiming to be from Microsoft calls and claims there is a security issue with your PC and asks you to do a few things at the command prompt then transfers you to a technician who asks for credit card details, that is when he put the phone down, however they have screwed up his PC and I am about to go out to fix it, it appears they target older members of the public praying on their ignorance.

Please pass this on
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Image by nDevilTV via Flickr

Out for about a week now is Microsoft’s latest foray into anti-virus software. This time around the software is a free download designed for the consumer end of the market (with Forefront Security staying in place as a provider of Enterprise level protection).  So that’s the first thing you need to remember – this is a product designed for consumers. It’s big competitors being the ever present Norton, or the much beloved provider of free antivirus software – AVG.

I wanted to be sure about who could use this so I checked out the licence agreement. Security Essentials is licensed for use in your home or for a home based business. So this is not for you if you run a large office,  but if you are a home based business –as many freelancers are then you can use this. That’s a good distinction that Microsoft has made. Many free offerings are only free for home use, which makes it a little confusing for anyone who works for themselves from home. Security Essentials immediately gets over this by allowing in all home based businesses. In this economy that’s a lot of people; so by making this product freelance friendly Microsoft are looking to score a lot of friends.

As for the real important practical stuff – well it looks and reads like a lot of other products. It handles viruses, spyware and other assorted malware via a real-time protection system. So nothing new here. It has an interface that won’t challenge anyone used to using antivirus software. So its a case of so far, so good. It also installs easy enough – particularly if you download from Internet Explorer – in fact the download is IE friendly so if you do decide to install Security Essentials its a good idea to do it via Internet Explorer.

So what do we think. Well it looks like a plausible piece of software, but I’d like to use it a little longer before drawing a final judgement. Once I’ve used security essentials for a while – I’ll report back with a more conclusive review.

You may be wondering what providers of free antivirus software are doing now that Microsoft is stomping into their territory. Well AVG for one aren’t taking it lying down. They’ve just launched version 9 of their software and added the new feature of shortened link scanning to protect against accessing a malicious site via a shortened URL. This is good news for Social Media fans where short URLs are common place.

If you’d like to know more about Microsoft Security Essentials take a look at: http://www.microsoft.com/Security_essentials/

Ok this is not a product yet, but the rumour is that this is a late prototype. That should mean that it is not far from actually being released. Of course you can never can be sure of release dates with Microsoft. The first impression is this – Microsoft has come up with a tablet concept based upon reading, writing and organising information. To be honest this is what a tablet should do. It should be comfortable to hold in your hand, adding new content should be a breeze and it should synchronise with all of the essential workaday information held on your main computer. The touch of sharing work with named others is also nice. Too often we rely on email for sharing information. Email isn’t a great tool for this, and although there are other ways of doing this, unless it is set up for you most people take a the path of least resistance this. Its a problem that is technically nearly solved, socially not so, devices like this are a step towards more intuitive sharing.

You must guess that I like the look of this. It’s a step beyond carrying a smartphone, its not the overkill of carrying a laptop but it does look genuinely useful. I can imagine using this in a meeting, I can imagine sitting on the sofa with a glass of wine and doing some reading with this. A laptop is possible but not so comfortable or personable in both situations.

Who knows it may even be part of the evolutionary path towards the mythical paperless office.

Established 3 years ago Alpha Technical Solutions is an IT services company that has one single goal. To make it easy to get the most out of technology. The trouble is , getting the most out of technology is not as easy as some would claim. This is were we come in. We use a combination of training, design and technical consulting to do our best to make life easy for our clients. Its been an ethos that has worked.

We also take a look at our selves on a regular basis, to make sure that we are at our best and what we offer is good. As a result we’ve decided to supply additional information for free. What you can expect from this blog is that we will talk about technology, training, our projects and anything that might affect business and computing. The aim is to build up a useful resource of articles, and fun things to look at. Something actually useful to people who are working with technology who are not gurus in their own right.

Take a look at the at stone age spear head on the right. Once upon a time it was at the cutting edge of technology. Who ever had one was in the lead. Not everyone knew how to make one and not everyone was equally as good at using one. Sound familiar? Not much has really changed – except know our stones are silicon chips set inside gadgets. What we do as a company, and in this blog is to let people how to use the ’stones’ in a way that suits them.

It’s a simple aim, but one with big implications