Software Spot

I just picked up a Acer Aspire One Linux edition with the 8Gb SSD. It a great little portable netbook. I chose the Linux version over the XP edition for a number of reasons. Mainly the price; I picked mine up for just $299, plus because I got display model they through in the 2 year extended warranty for free. Secondly I have enough XP and Vista computers and laptop the deal with already, and I didn't want the hassle of installing firewalls and virus scanners and spyware detectors, plus I'd inevitably end up installing many many other apps which over time begin to bog down the windows registry and general slow windows to a crawl. In general I just want my netbook to be as hassle free as possible. The Linux Linpus OS on the Aspire One has "almost" everything I need out of the box to use as light weight cloud computing platform. Browsing around the net there are a number of "hacks" and enhancements for the AA1. Here's my recommended list the optimize the ...

After many years of using AVG anti virus I've recently switched a couple of my computers to Avira Antivir and so far I've been impressed. My reason for switching was because AVG 8.0 stopped working on my Vista machine, plus I've been getting frustrated with having to manually run the updates since upgrading from AVG 7.5 to AVG 8.0. So I went hunting for an alternative in order to keep protected. I've tried Avast in the past and although it gets good reviews I've always found the usability and user interface to be limiting. I had not come across Avira before, but it's ranked #2 at download.com (behind AVG). Installation is easy, the user interface is simple and straightforward. I have been so please with the install on my desktop PC that I've just switched my laptop from AVG to Avria as well. The only minor annoyance is the advertising window that appears with updatin the virus definitions, however I feel this is a fair trade for a free product

The most annoying thing with the Windows Live sites (Live Mail, Live Spaces, Live Gallery, Live SkyDrive etc) is the huge banner ads at the top of the screen, which on devices with smaller screens like my laptop, take up a whole load of useful screen real estate. I'm generally okay with advertising on web pages, particularly to support free web services (please feel free to click through on any of the Adsense sponsors on the blog), but large banner ads on the Windows Lives sites make the services unusable for me. The solution: I wrote a quick greasemonkey script the remove the realestate hogs. this works well for me, your mileage may vary. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/30087