News from CyberArtisans Web Developers

Last month we reported that Microsoft Security Essentials (MSSE) was available for free download. MSSE is an antispyware/antivirus package that Microsoft recently started offering. Some reviewers had said that its on-access scan slowed systems down much less than other, more expensive packages, so we were anxious to test it out.

So we installed it on one of our computers. We turned MSSE's on-access scan on and turned our other (ZoneAlarm Security Suite) antispyware on-access scan off. Note that you never want to have two antivirus on-access scans running at once – they will conflict and may destabilize your system to the point of crashing it.

The on-access scan, incidentally, is a process that grabs a file just before your computer is about to run it and examines it for viruses. Although it does this very quickly, many small increments of delay add up. As an experiment, we ran Process Monitor (a utility that shows each event in your computer as a rapid and continuous scroll) for 10 seconds. In those 10 seconds, ZoneAlarm scanned 248 files, or almost 25 files/second. And this was while our computer was essentially idling.

The result of this admittedly very unscientific test was that we found a number of system functions that took noticeably longer with MSSE than with ZoneAlarm. After using MSSE for a month, we have turned off its on-access scan and turned ZoneAlarm's back on. Of course, results may have been very different if we were comparing MSSE to a different antivirus package (Norton, for example, has long had a reputation for slowing systems more than others).

Our conclusion? MSSE seems to be a competent antivirus/antispyware package, but ZoneAlarm Security Suite puts a lighter load on your system. Is that worth $40/year (the cost of renewing ZoneAlarm Security Suite)? It depends on how sensitive you are to system delays. The difference was noticeable during certain events, but never more than a couple of seconds, and usually not noticeable at all.

And speaking of Twitter, recently we have had several requests to give our talk on using social media for job hunting. There are quite a few tricks to know about LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter that can be helpful if you are job hunting, as well as marketing a business or just keeping yourself up to date on various events.

If you know of a group of people who feel left out of the social media craze and would like a 1-hour tutorial on how to use it effectively, please have them contact us. It's free. All we need is a place to aim our projector and an audience.

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