The most popular mobile game today is now also available for PC. Angry Birds has set a new benchmark in the popularity of mobile games. Be it Android or the iOS platform Angry Birds have captured all the markets with lightning fast speed. Fluffy birds out to free their fellow birds in captivity is the main concept behind this game and users just seem to get addicted to it. Changes in difficulty level and patters make it even more interesting.
One can now enjoy a wide screen experience of the game while playing on a PC. The game is easily available for download online and has more or less no compatibility issues. Angry Birds has been designed for all platforms, be it Windows, or others. Just go through the installation instructions once and the process should be a smooth.
The bottom line: After the last version's radical new interface that brought this security stalwart into a visual comparison with its competitors, Avast looks to the future with version 6's edgy improvements.
Review:
Avast made great strides in its previous update. Version 5 set the stage for the modern, massively popular, and free security suite with a new interface that ditched a quirky, late-'90s jukebox style for a more polished look. Easier to navigate, it also became easier to add new features.
Make no mistake; Avast 6 adds features both big and small. Some that had previously only been available to paid upgrade users are now free for all versions, and newer features have been seamlessly added to the interface experience. If you're familiar with Avast 5, upgrading to Avast 6 won't be that big of a leap.
Installation
Installing Avast is a painless process that compares well against its free competitors like AVG, although--like those competitors--it's much slower than installing paid programs like Trend Micro, Kaspersky, or Norton.
Some items of note during the installation that will come up later in the review: to completely avoid the new Windows 7 and Vista desktop gadget, or the new WebRep browser add-on, you must choose the Custom install option and uncheck those here.
Automatic installation of these features is frowned upon, although Avast does provide a clear method for uninstalling them. It's just not as simple as a check box that gets its own installation window, since you have to go through the Customize menu, which makes the auto-install sort of surreptitious.
On the plus side, installing Avast doesn't require a reboot, and using its uninstall tool we detected no remnants in the Registry or on the desktop. Avast has said that the installer has shrunk for all three versions by about 20 percent, although it's still a large download at around 57MB for the free version.
Avast Internet Security 6 (screenshots)
Interface
Avast 6's interface is virtually identical to the previous version's. Perhaps the most major change, aside from a slight lightening of the gray in the color scheme, is the removal of the Windows Explorer-style forward and backward buttons. We actually liked those, since they made it easy to return to a previous pane, no matter how deeply into the settings you had explored.
The only other change is the addition of the Additional Protection tab to the left nav area, which hosts the new AutoSandbox and WebRep feature controls.
For users new to Avast, the sleek user interface is a change that came at the end of 2009. The gray-and-orange color scheme stands out well on the screen, and the tab-based navigation on the left makes it easy to navigate between features. Highlighted with the familiar security colors of green for safe and red for dangerous, the Summary tab gives up-to-date info on shield status, auto-updates, virus definitions, the program version, and whether the silent/gaming mode is on. There's also an unobtrusive ad urging you to upgrade to Avast Internet Security 6.
The Summary tab contains a second submenu, Statistics. If you're curious to see how Avast's shields have been performing against threats, here's where you can get your math geek on. For each shield, it tells you how many files were scanned and when, and presents the data in a concise graph.
Avast 6 keeps its interface from Avast 5, and adds features both big and small. Some that had previously only been available to paid upgrade users are now free for all versions, and newer features have been seamlessly added to the interface experience. If you're familiar with Avast 5, upgrading to Avast 6 won't be that big of a leap.
The scans live in the second tab, where you can choose and adjust four default scan types plus a custom scan option nestled into the bottom right corner. Real-time shields live in the third tab, and again the clean interface comes into play here as navigating what could be a mess of options and tweaks is instead dead simple. Click on a shield to reveal a real-time chart of what the program's been defending you against, with a Stop button and settings options at the top of the window. Another button at the top takes you to the advanced settings for that shield, and links at the bottom expose the shield's history as a graph and export a log file.
Below the Additional Protection tab, which we covered above, the Maintenance tab contains the virus chest and manual update buttons. On the top right of the interface live the Help Center and the Settings, from which you can get much more granular control of Avast. This includes everything from toggling the system tray icon to managing updates to password-protecting Avast access. This is also where you can "uninvolve" your anonymously submitted data from Community IQ, the Avast crowdsourced behavioral detection engine.
One last change: a green Like Avast button has been added to the bottom of the left nav that expedites your Avast-related social networking. Fortunately, it's unobtrusive.
Features and support
As mentioned, the two big new features in the free version of Avast 6 are the AutoSandbox and the WebRep add-on. The debut of the AutoSandbox makes Avast the second antivirus option to offer a sandboxing tool for free. Competitor Comodo introduced a sandboxing tool in January 2010. Avast's sandbox probably works differently, as Comodo has a pending patent on its version. And certainly, one of the most frustrating things about sandboxing technology is that there are some indications that it doesn't work perfectly.
The AutoSandbox, new in both free and paid Avast versions, automatically places suspicious programs in a virtualized state when it suspects them of being threats. As the program runs, the sandbox keeps track of file behaviors and what it reads and writes from the Registry. Permanent changes are virtualized, so when the process terminates itself, the system changes it made will evaporate.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)
Avast's version automatically places programs in a virtualized state when it suspects them of being threats. It walls off suspicious programs, preventing them from potentially damaging your system while allowing them to run. As the program runs, Avast's sandbox keeps track of which files are opened, created, or renamed, and what it reads and writes from the Registry. Permanent changes are virtualized, so when the process terminates itself, the system changes it made will evaporate.
The company hasn't said whether the virtualized state begins after the program already has access to your system, so it's theoretically possible that it could be compromised. There's not a single security feature in any program that hasn't been been compromised at some point, though, so "theoretically hackable" is true of all security features.
The AutoSandbox is different from Avast's paid-upgrade sandbox, and the paid upgrades to Avast Pro and Avast Internet Security include both the automatic version and the older, manually initiated version.
You can access the AutoSandbox settings from the new Additional Protection option on the left nav. It defaults to asking the user whether a program should be sandboxed, although you can set it to automatically decide. There's a whitelist option for programs that you always want to exclude from the sandbox, and you can deactivate the feature entirely.
Avast 6 also marks the debut of the program joining (or succumbing to) the browser-security add-on, with the new WebRep. Security add-ons have a long-standing word-of-mouth reputation for decreasing browser performance, although Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate's impact meter pegs Avast's plug-in at 0.07 second, well below the threshold of 0.2 second that IE uses as the default upper limit for browser performance impact.
WebRep works with IE and Firefox out of the box, and Avast says it plans to release a Chrome version soon. It supports a search result ranking and Web site reputation service that uses a combination of data from Avast's virus labs and user voting to determine a safety score for a site. User voting is a crapshoot for many security vendors, although Avast is known for its vast user base and their passionate support of the program, so the company's plans to give users incentives to vote could easily work in its favor. And make no mistake, Avast fans are truly fanatics: Avast Free has an average 4.5-star rating from Download.com readers, extremely unusual for a program with more than 15,000 votes.
It's important to note that the add-on installs to both Firefox and IE as you install Avast 6. If you don't want it, it's surprisingly easier to remove from within Avast instead of from within the browser. Currently, removing the add-on using the browser's interface will cue Avast to reinstall the add-on the next time the computer is rebooted.
Many of Avast 6's small improvements are worth noting as well. The Troubleshooting section now comes with a "restore factory settings" option, which makes it easier to wipe settings back to a familiar starting point, and comes with the option to restore only the Shields settings, leaving other changes untouched, like permanently running in silent mode. There's a new sidebar gadget for Windows 7 and Vista, and you now can set automatic actions for the boot-time scan. Available under the Scan Computer tab, the boot-time scan customizations give you far more flexibility in managing the lengthy and time-consuming boot scan.
Two features that have trickled down to the free version in Avast 6 are the Script Shield and site blocking. The Script Shield now works with Internet Explorer 8 and 9's protected mode.
Avast doesn't offer an on-demand link-scanning feature, like AVG and Norton do, although the company says that the way that Avast's Web shield behaves ought to protect you automatically from any malicious URLs by automatically preventing the URL from resolving in-browser. A page will appear letting you know that Avast has blocked the site because it is suspected to contain a threat.
If you're running Avast Pro Antivirus 6 or Avast Internet Security 6, the big new feature is the introduction of SafeZone, a virtualization feature that the company envisions people using for secure online banking. The basic difference between SafeZone and AutoSandbox is that the sandbox is designed to allow suspicious activity to run within a safe, walled-off, easily discarded environment, while SafeZone is the opposite. SafeZone creates a secure space that, ideally, prevents threats from getting in.
The AutoSandbox, new in both free and paid Avast versions, automatically places suspicious programs in a virtualized state when it suspects them of being threats. As the program runs, the sandbox keeps track of file behaviors and what it reads and writes from the Registry. Permanent changes are virtualized, so when the process terminates itself, the system changes it made will evaporate.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)
SafeZone is accessible from the right-click Windows Explorer context menu, from the middle icon in the Windows 7/Vista desktop gadget, and from the Additional Protection tab in the Avast interface.
The difference between Avast Free and Avast Pro is that Pro gets the SafeZone, whereas Avast Internet Security differentiates itself by including SafeZone, antispam measures, and a firewall.
If you're new to Avast, the core features are what make it one of the best security suites around. The antivirus, antispyware, and heuristics engines form a security core that also includes multiple real-time shields. The adjustable mail and file system shields join the pre-existing behavior, network, instant-messaging, peer-to-peer, and Web shields. The behavioral shield is a common-sense feature, as security software publishers draw on their large user bases to detect threats early and warn others.
Other features include a gaming mode that can be used to permanently "silence" Avast notifications, and an "intelligent scanner" that only looks at changed files after establishing a baseline.
Program scans live in the second tab, where you can choose and adjust four default scan types plus a custom scan option. What's useful about Avast's layout here is that you can adjust all Avast-related scans from this tab. This includes Quick and Full scans, the Removable Media scan, and the Folder scan. In a polite turn, running a scan does not prevent you from exploring the rest of the program.
You can also schedule a boot-time scan and access scan logs from the scan tab. While running a scan, Avast will tell you not only how long the scan has taken and how many files have been examined, but also how much data has been tested and how fast it's being tested. As with the summary graphs, Avast exposes a lot of data here.
Performance
As far as Avast's impact on system performance goes, in a real-world test Avast completed its scans in a timely yet not blazingly fast manner. A Quick Scan took about 20 minutes, and the Full Scan took 59 minutes. RAM usage was surprisingly light, with Avast 6 only eating up about 16MB when running a scan.
As you can see in the chart below, CNET Labs benchmarked Avast 6 as having a moderate impact on system performance. It wasn't the overall best suite we tested, but the three versions of Avast did perform better than average in every category execpt one.
There were some notable areas where Avast did well. Avast had a minimal impact on startup time, with Avast Internet Security 6 adding 6.25 seconds, Avast Pro Antivirus 6 adding 5.76 seconds, and Avast Free Antivirus 6 slowing down the boot cycle by around five and a half seconds. All three posted a tiny impact on system shutdown, around 1.3 seconds slower than an unprotected computer. Scan times as well were competitive, slower than AVG, Trend Micro, and Panda, but faster than most competitors including Microsoft Security Essentials, Norton, and Ad-Aware. Also, Avast Pro Antivirus posted the best Cinebench score we recorded.
Avast's one point of weakness in the lab was its MS Office decoding test performance, where it was slightly slower than average but by no means the slowest suite tested.
Thisprogramis one ofthe best softwaretoplay the videoin allformatsandthat thisversionupdatedas oftodayisrunningallformatssuch asRMVBformatare not supportedinprevious versionsof thisprogramsupports allversions ofthe following MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DIVX, DVD, VCD, RMVB, WMV, AVI, MP4, MP3, OGG, OGM, MOV, WMAandmany otherformatsforvideo
VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multi-platform multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, Ogg, OGM, MOV, wma, wmv...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. The VideoLAN project targets multimedia streaming of MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and DivX files, dvds, digital satellite channels, digital terrestial television channels and live videos on a high-bandwidth IPv4 or IPv6 network in unicast or multicast under many OSes. VideoLAN also features a cross-platform multimedia player, VLC, which can be used to read the stream from the network or display video read locally on the computer under all GNU/Linux flavours, all BSD flavours, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, Solaris, QNX, Familiar Linux...
SIZE : 21 МB Windows® 2000/XP/Vista/7 Date ofissuance ofthe program
Info Hotspot Shield protects you online and lets you access the information you need. Join 7+ million users in 100+ countries who use Hotspot Shield everyday to: 1. Access blocked services like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Skype in countries where internet is censored. hotspot shield 2011 2. Keep hackers from stealing personal information while users are browsing internet on public locations like Starbucks. hotspot shield 2011 3. Browse internet privately. Hotspot Shield is the most stable and the only 100 percent free VPN tool in the world with no bandwidth limit and it does not slow down the Internet speed. Hotspot Shield does all of this without collecting, let alone making use of, any information on your personal identity.
Price: Free Date added: december 26, 2010 Operating system: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7
WinRAR is a lightweight, flexible, and easy-to-use archiving utility that can unpack most archive formats, as well as compress to both RAR and ZIP. Free to try for 40 days ($29 for single license), WinRAR is definitely top dog in the compression category.
WinRAR's interface is about as simple as it gets. Start creating (or add to) an archive by dragging and dropping your files into the interface or by browsing through the Folder Tree side panel (when enabled). From there, the most common functions are laid out in the form of colorful, mostly intuitive icons, which can all be customized by downloading themes from the company's Web site. Add files to, Extract, Test, Delete, or even Repair archives right from the main interface. Drop-down menus house the program's more advanced features, including self-extracting archives, archive locking, benchmarking, and autodeletion of temp files.
In our performance tests, both creating and unpacking archives was blazingly fast. Compression ratios varied depending on file type, but in general seemed on par with or slightly better than other archiving programs. Overall, WinRAR is a winner because of its speed, simple interface, flexibility with file formats, and powerful advanced features.
he freeware CCleaner hasn't seen many major revisions since Piriform launched it in 2004, so when you do see a major update, you can be assured that it's going to come with impressive new tools. CCleaner 3 doesn't disappoint on that front, introducing two major new features that make it worth the upgrade.
One is a drive wiping tool that can wipe all the data from your hard drive, but can also scrub only the available free space. As with many of the tools in CCleaner, it's fairly nuanced and allows for a simple one-pass overwrite, a Department of Defense-level three-pass option, a National Security Administration-level seven-pass cleaning, and a 35-pass Gutmann-level deep scrub. The more passes you select, the slower the deletion process.
This simple freeware application works pretty well, given how basic the interface is. It has two main features: to download FLV files from YouTube, and to convert them to most major formats. If there's a YouTube URL in your clipboard, it will automatically paste it for you when you click on the dialog box. From there, just hit OK and the downloading will commence. One more left-click is all it takes to load the file in the converter, which supports iPhone, iPod, PSP, cell phone, AVI, MP3, WMV, and Xvid. Surprisingly, there's also a basic video editor for cropping videos by time stamp. You can also cut out the sound when converting.
This is one of the lightest editors around, but the simplistic interface belies its functionality and it performs exactly as advertised. We'd like to see support in future editions for hunting down missing codecs, and version 2.1.5 and earlier won't work because of embed code changes on YouTube itself. Still, the YouTube Downloader is proof that not only is video-making accessible to everyone, so is video downloading and editing.
The never-ending mantra chanted by security suite vendors sounds a lot like "faster scans, easier to use, better performance," and AVG has released a new version that it says accomplishes all three. Certainly, the scans are faster, it does install more quickly, and some tweaks to the interface have made it easier to use. However, changes to the engine that powers the detection and removal of threats has made it hard to come to a conclusion until independent labs return their efficacy results later this year.
AVG Anti-Virus Free 2011
Installation
The new AVG Free has sped up its installation process, although it's not as zippy as the minute-long installations that some of AVG's paid competitors offer. We found that the program can go from completed download to ready to use in about 5 minutes. Gains might have been made elsewhere, but a big contributing factor to that is that AVG has cut down the number of install screens users see, from 13 in the previous version to 5 in the 2011 version.
AVG's toolbar is still an opt-out feature. It also will commandeer your default search engine for Yahoo, so if you don't want it to do that, you'll want to uncheck the box that changes your search engine, too. Also unchanged is registration, which is a free process and can be completed from within the AVG interface.
Users who opt out of installing the toolbar but want it later will need to rerun the installer to get that component.
Interface
The changes to AVG's interface in the 2011 version are minor but actually improve usability quite a bit. The top and left navigation sections have been redecorated with light text on a dark background, although the main controls in the center of the window retain their standard black text on a white background. The safety status icon at the top of the interface has been simplified and made larger.
A new one-click Fix button for automatically repairing security breaches appears at the top along with the old red X when your system safety has been compromised. It disappears when your system gets a clean bill of health.
Joining the one-click Update button on the side nav this year is a one-click Scan Now button. There's a cleaner look to the nav, as well, with bigger fonts and timestamps for the most recent scan and most recent update.
For those not familiar with the interface, AVG has placed icons for its security components in a central pane. Double-click on one to access more information and basic configuration settings for each specific tool. Advanced settings are available under Tools on the menu bar at the top of the window.
The new interface changes are small, no doubt, but they do make AVG easier to use.
Features and support
AVG Free has some new protective features this year, too. The software offers what it calls "smart scanning," which leverages AVG's behavioral detection network to scan known safe files once, and only rescan them if it detects changes. As with its competitors, AVG's network is made up of its user base anonymously contributing data up to the cloud. You can choose to opt out of contributing your data when you install, or from the options menu. AVG says opting out won't negatively affect your security.
The never-ending mantra chanted by security suite vendors sounds a lot like "faster scans, easier to use, better performance," and AVG has released a new version of AVG Anti-Virus Free 2011 that it says accomplishes all three. Certainly, the scans are faster, it does install more quickly, and some tweaks to the interface have made it easier to use.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)
The smart scanning tech also gives you a built-in system resource manager that prioritizes scans. If a scan is scheduled to begin while the computer is in use, it will automatically restrict the scan so that it runs slower but doesn't interfere with the computer's other tasks. When it detects the computer idling, it will then allocate more power to the scan. The feature comes with a slider so you can customize how sensitive it is.
Another big improvement has been to AVG LinkScanner. LinkScanner, which comes with AVG Free but is also available as a separate download, now scans links posted on Facebook and MySpace. It adds a green check next to safe links, a red X next to unsafe ones, and adds a notice below the link stating that it's been evaluated by AVG.
Concurrent with this new release, AVG has opened a new Web site called Threat Labs. The site is designed as a click-through landing page for people who want to learn more about the LinkScanner's ratings, but it's also available directly so that non-LinkScanner users can evaluate links on the fly.
Another important new feature is the resource-managing slide at the bottom of the window. Drag it to adjust how big of a burden the scan will be on your system, including the default setting for taking more resources only when your system is idle.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)
There's a new desktop gadget for Windows Vista and Windows 7 users that lets them initiate scans and updates with one click, without having to open the full interface. It also contains links to AVG's Twitter and Facebook pages, which the company uses to bolster its support for the free version.
It's potentially big news that AVG Free has made the threat detection engines in the free version identical to its premium-upgrade siblings. This means that AVG Free users won't have to worry about getting a lesser standard of basic security, if it winds up improving the level of security. Independent benchmarks of last year's AVG versions were strong but mixed, scoring highly but not always consistently.
The PC Analyzer option is new this year, and scans your system for Registry and disk errors. It includes a disk defragmenter and a broken-shortcut cleaner, as well. Although the feature is restricted in full to paid users, if you have the free version, the PC Analyzer comes with a one-time offer to clean all errors it finds. It provides a link to download the separate PC Analyzer tool, once the scan is completed. This is an interesting twist on the idea of letting users detect but not repair errors, and it provides more functionality while not affecting the basic security of your computer. However, it's likely that some users will shy away from the extra download.
Although toolbars have long since fallen out of favor with the browser cognoscenti because they decrease stability and slow down browser performance, AVG has said that the toolbar remains a popular feature. Along with the standard option of adding buttons to the toolbar that access your most visited sites, such as Facebook or your banking site, this year's AVG toolbar introduces a button that ties directly into the LinkScanner tech. It lets you know if the page you're on is safe, unsafe, potentially unsafe, or unknown using LinkScanner's color-coded scheme of green, red, yellow, and gray, respectively. Fortunately, the toolbar is not required to get access to the benefits of LinkScanner.
Although toolbars have long since fallen out of favor with the browser cognoscenti because they decrease stability and slow down browser performance, AVG has said that the toolbar remains a popular feature. Along with the standard option of adding buttons to the toolbar that access your most visited sites, such as Facebook or your banking site, this year's AVG toolbar introduces a button that ties directly into the LinkScanner tech. It lets you know if the page you're on is safe, unsafe, potentially unsafe, or unknown using LinkScanner's color-coded scheme of green, red, yellow, and gray, respectively. Fortunately, the toolbar is not required to get access to the benefits of LinkScanner.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)
Other features are restricted to users of AVG's paid upgrades. The paid upgrade version of AVG Anti-Virus 2011 distinguishes itself by offering chat link shield, a download scan for files sent via instant message that looks at all ports, not just port 80, and telephone support 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The PC Analyzer option mentioned earlier is also included, and comes without restrictions. AVG Internet Security 2011 includes all that AVG Anti-Virus 2011 offers, and adds in a firewall and antispam protections.
Performance
AVG claims the scans in the new version of AVG Free are three times faster than last year's, and its system performance impact turned out to be about average, once the computer had finished booting. CNET Labs' benchmarks found that AVG Anti-Virus Free 2011 had the greatest impact on computer boot time of any security suite we've looked at so far this year, slowing our test computer's start-up by more than 13 seconds. However, it also had the smallest impact on computer shutdown time, adding barely one-third of a second. AVG Free has one of the fastest scan times we've seen yet for 2011 suites, completing its first scan in 548 seconds.
