Firewalls for Windows PC’s

 A few years ago firewall products such as Zone Alarm were very popular, and rightly so, as they protected your computer from external attack. Then when Windows XP Service pack 2 was introduced the operating system included it’s own built in firewall, so everyone tended to forget about firewall products. However, hackers are getting more devious. More and more people are on broadband and leave their PC on all the time (just waiting to be attacked by a hacker who wants to empty your bank account).

 

We have been looking at some of the firewall products available and they have improved a lot in the last couple of years. Both “Comodo Firewall” and “Kerio Personal Firewall” are impressive products, far more sophisticated that the Windows XP built in firewall, and they offer a good level of protection. The best part is Comodo is totally free, and the Kerio product comes in both free and paid for versions (the free version looses some the the more advanced features after the initial 30 day trial).

You can download these programs below

Comodo: http://www.personalfirewall.comodo.com/

Kerio:  http://www.sunbelt-software.com/Kerio.cfm

Chris Moody
www.aslcomputerservices.co.uk
Specialists in Computer support for Small Businesses and
home PC users in Northamptonshire and Warwickshire

 

File Recovery Program

 PC Inspector File Recovery 4 is a free utility that does an impressive job recovering accidentally deleted files or files lost through corruption of the file system. It has some nice features, like the ability to recover files with lost headers, and to recover partitions even when the boot sector has been lost or damaged. This is no home written utility - it is a serious product from a reputable German company with a long history in commercial data recovery.

You can download this program from:

 http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

Chris Moody
www.aslcomputerservices.co.uk

Creating PDF files

Ever wanted to create a pdf file from that word document, excel spreadsheet, or even a web page? Well now you can with PDFCreator. To create a PDF document you just “print” from any application to the PDFcreator dummy printer. This means you can create PDFs from Word, Excel or indeed any program that allows you to print.

 You can download this free application from:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=57796&package_id=53473

Chris Moody
www.aslcomputerservices.co.uk