PCTips Box

This second and final part of our quick tour through the world of portable applications will focus mostly on programs that are not necessarily needed by the common user, but may come in handy in certain situations or to the more experienced Windows fans.

Compressing and decompressing files may be a very easy task, but things change when you have to use another computer that doesn’t have a compression utility installed, so here are some of our suggestions. You can try using the trial version of popular archivers WinRAR and PowerArchiver, or consider giving 7-zip, IZArc2Go and PeaZip a go, which are free for both personal and commercial use.

An organizer is not very helpful if you need to access your agenda from more than one computer. To overcome this inconvenience, feel free to install any of the following portable organizers and personal information managers: Sunbird, EverNote, EssentialPIM Pro, Avignon Concept or MSD Organizer. (more…)

At the beginning of May, security company PC Tools revealed that Windows Vista “is not so immune.” And in this attempt to wrap the obvious together with statistics from a limited pool of users and serve the result as a revelation, the security outfit went on to claim that “Windows Vista is more susceptible to malware than the eight year old Windows 2000 operating system, and only 37% more secure than Windows XP”. Apparently, PC Tolls had detected 639 unique threats per 1,000 Vista machines, in comparison to just 586 for Windows 2000, 478 for Windows Server 2003, and 1,021 for XP. The conclusion is, of course, nothing short of obvious and was stated as clear as possible, with a challenge to Vista’s malware immunity.

Now, the fact is that citing data from over 450 million computers, in respect to PC Tools’ just 1.4 million machines, Microsoft disputed the findings, and continued to claim that Windows Vista is the safest Windows operating system on the market. Microsoft has repeated this refrain since Vista was launched, and provided ample proof, from the data collected through the Malicious Software Removal Tool to vulnerability counting games involving the main platforms. (more…)

An update version of the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool is now available for download and it’s a perfect fit for the latest service packs for Windows Vista and Windows XP. The Redmond company releases new versions of the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool on the second Tuesday of each month, accompanying the availability of the Security Bulletins dropped as part of the monthly patch cycle. The updated version of MSRT is distributed via Windows Update, Microsoft Update, Windows Server Update Services and is also up for grabs on the Download Center.

Microsoft has failed to emphasize the fact that MSRT integrates seamless with both Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows XP Service Pack 3. However, tests reveal that the tool plays well with the latest releases of the two operating systems. Vista SP1, RTM’d on February 4, 2008, was released to the general public on March 18, and XP SP3 is accessible to end users since May 6, having been released to manufacturing on April 21. (more…)