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I am often asked which is the best antivirus. The answer depends on your environment. I choose my preferred antivirus based a number of criteria, not only because it wins awards or passes scientific tests. I want an antivirus with the ability to recognise an intruder by its method or behaviour, an antivirus with a broader scope than just virus detection, given that malware and spyware are just as prevalent, and an antivirus that doesn’t consume system resources with a big footprint. This is especially important with low performance laptops running Vista. The wrong antivirus can cripple performance on some laptops and lead to data or system corruption.

Note the number of tests run against each

So NOD is at the top of the list, as it also has been at PC User Magazine for 7 consecutive years. NOD also has a small footprint. This is one of our favourite features because it doesn’t slow machines down like other antivirus’s do.

Wired Office is an authourised NOD agent for consumer and enterprise editions. If you would like a quote for your office, home or business or enterprise server (including installation services) pop over to www.wiredoffice.com.au and ask for a quote.

There is a tendency among Outlook Office users to have many contacts folders in the contacts tree to group contacts into specific categories. There may be good reasons for this but if what you really want is to view your contacts by category (such as sales, accounts, by industry etc) you can create categories and keep one master contacts folder. You can view contacts in a category list. I keep all my antivirus renewals and licence codes for customers in a set category for example and rely a lot on this Outlook feature in my work.

I use colour coding for categories. You can rename existing categories or create new ones. Use the help feature in Outlook to look up the how to’s for organizing data with categories. You can send a new contact to an existing category with a click of the mouse, or even automate the process with rules.

We seen this one from our Vista News friends and were immedaitely intrigued. When an email arrives you can see a thread or history from that person or company in the Xobnic Toolbar.

It’s free. It’s in beta and I understand there may be some issues with Exchange.

Download it or read more here.

One of the more popular features for Outlook’s calendar is the capability to add your country or region’s holidays into your calendar. This way, you’ll never miss the next holiday.

Adding holiday items to your calendar is pretty easy:

1. From the Tools menu, click Options, then click Calendar Options.
2. Click the Add Holidays button under Calendar options.

   

3. Select the check box next to your location, and any other location you might be interested in, and then click OK.
   

I really rely on my Outlook calendar and use it for both work and personal use. If you’re like me you might be interested in this add in which allows you to personalize your calendar with an image highlight of the year, share your calendar and print it.

It’s not free but you can take it for a test run

The problems we have had on our Vista test machine from the early RC to the RTM versions have been solved with updates and patches, so I have been waiting for SP1 with anticipation that it would solve the extremly slow copy and network transfer I was seeing. I downloaded the service pack and installed it without incident and copy /transfer issues seem to be resolved.

There are a reamining issues with SP1 that are of interest to users with Zonealarm Security Suite, BitDefender, and Trend Micro. There are links to the vendor updates and advisories here.

Remember to turn off your AV when installing service packs.

Data can be protected by secure backup, antivirus and firewall protections at the network and desktop level, but data remains vulnerable to theft or loss. Bypassing passwords is within the realms of a knowledgable user so data theft has become a serious issue in business and home-office users.

Vista Ultimate and Enterprise comes with Bitlocker drive encyrption. BitLocker also comes with “Longhorn” (Windows Server 2008). You can get details here.

Other versions of Vista do not come with BitLocker but there are third party options such as Seagates DriveTrust available on the Momentus 5400 FDE.2 drives, and MySecureDoc from Winmagic.

The new network feature in Vista named Network Discovery allows you to see (discover) other computers, printers, files, but it is turned off by default as a security item. This is the path…..

Select Start, Control Panel, and Network and Internet.

1. Select Network and Sharing Center.
2. If Network Discovery is turned off, you’ll get a dialog box to that effect. Click “Turn on network discovery,” then click the Apply button.

Or you can make use of  Vista’s new search capabilities.  Just hit the Windows (start) key on your keyboard and type “network”. You will see Network Discovery” appear. Click to go there and turn on discovery.

The ribbon in Word 2007 is designed to make life easier by making everything more accessible across the ribbon, but if you’ve been using Word 2003 for years you may need to reach for the help button in 2007 to find the same features. Or you can just use this great little tool from Microsoft to find it.