AVG Free Edition

For a number of years now we have been recommending AVG Free edition as the ideal Anti Virus product for the average home PC user. It has many advantages over other Anti Virus products:

* It is free of charge for home PC users
* It does not consume lots of memory and processor power, so is ideal for older less powerful PC’s
* It is very effective at protecting your PC from Viruses

Recently AVG released a major update to their AVG products. Those with the paid for AVG products will automatically be upgraded to the new version, but the AVG Free users will have to upgrade manually. The existing AVG Free Version 7.5 will not receive any virus database updates after 31st May 2008, so users of the old free product will need to uninstall version 7.5 and install the newer version 8.0 as soon as possible to ensure continued full virus protection.

Some of our customers have had some difficulty in finding the download link for the new AVG Free Edition program so we have put a link to the download on our webpage. Just go to our website www.computerrepairinrugby.co.uk and you will find AVG Free Edition V8 under the “useful links” section on the right hand side of our web page.

Please note that the AVG Free edition is only for home PC users. Business users, or home PC users requiring more advanced virus & spyware protection, should consider the paid for AVG Anti Virus and AVG Internet Security products. We are an authorised AVG reseller so can supply these paid for products if you require them (you can purchase and download via our website, or we can visit you to supply and install these products). However, the average home PC user will find the basic AVG Free version will give perfectly adequate protection from Viruses.

Chris Moody
ASL Computer Services
Computer Support and Repair for Small Businesses

Clipmate

We recently found a useful utility called “ClipMate”, from Thornsoft Development. Normally the Windows Clipboard only holds the last entry copied into it, with prior entries being lost forever. Clipmate keeps all your clipboard entries in it’s own internal database, to be available for subsequent retrieval. Clipmate also lets you manipulate the enties in the clipboard.

Here are just some of the powerful features of Clipmate:

·         ClipMate Remembers everything that you cut or copy to the clipboard.

·         It works with all Windows programs that work with the clipboard.

·         Searchable database can hold THOUSANDS of clips, in Text, RTF, HTML, and Bitmap format.

·         “Shortcuts” place commonly-used clips within easy reach for quick re-use.

·         PowerPaste™ feature helps you quickly paste a series of clips, or break apart complex data by comma, linebreak, etc.

A 30 day trial of Clipmate can be downloaded from www.clipmate.com and the full program costs around thirty five USdollars, under twenty pounds sterling.

Chris Moody
ASL Computer Services
Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre, Great Central Way, Rugby CV21 3XH

 

The PrtSc key on your keyboard

Many people are not aware of the existence of the “PrtSc” key on every PC keyboard, or what it’s function is. In fact this is a very useful key. The “PrtSc” stands for PrintScreen and every time you press this key, an image of the current contents of your PC display is copied into an area called the Windows Clipboard.  You can then “paste” this image into any windows application.

So why is this so useful? Imagine you had to keep a permanent record of something on your PC screen, perhaps details of an online internet purchase, or maybe an error message that has popped up.  Just press the PrtSc key, then open up Word or Wordpad, and click on Edit-Paste in the drop down menus. An exact Image of your PC screen is now in contained in the word (or Wordpad) document and can be saved, or emailed to someone else.

Perhaps you need to document how to complete a particular task on a PC for someone else to follow. Just go through the task, and PrtSc every stage of the process, pasting the screen shots into word as you go along. We all know “pictures are worth a thousand words” so your documentation on how to do this particular task will be easy for others to follow.

If you don’t want to capture the whole screen, just the currently active “window”, hold down the “Alt” key while you press PrtSc.

Thanks to Tim Foden for giving me the idea to write about the PrtSc key.

Chris Moody
ASL Computer Services
Computer Support and Repair for Small Businesses in the Midlands (based in Rugby)