The Wizard of OS

Trodat 4911 by RubberStamps.net

2013-05-01T12:13:00.000-04:00

Product: Trodat 4911 by RubberStamps.net

Submitted at: RubberStamps.net

Fantastic Quality and Great Price!

by Marilyn - The Wizard of OS from Louisville, KY on 5/1/2013

Pros:

Easy to Use, Efficient, Quality Construction, Reliable

Best Uses:

Everyday Use, Presentations, Organization

Describe Yourself:

Midrange Shopper

Primary use:

Business

Was this a gift?:

I use this product to endorse my checks and have no complaints. The quality is excellent and by far exceeded my expectations as the price was so low.

Security: Websites - Who Can You Trust? Fox Mulder said Trust No One! Was he Right? WOT, Site Advisor & ZenOK surfing toolbars to the rescue???

2011-09-12T23:27:00.000-04:00

Web surfing is getting more and more dangerous these days. It's becoming very hard for the average user to know which websites are dangerous and which are not. One has to contend with the fact that many sites can innocently be carrying infections while others exist for the sole purpose to intentionally do harm to your computer.

We have examined 3 different web browsing tools that can help protect you from landing on harmful sites and/or downloading Rogue or harmful software. All 3 are available for the most common web browsers. They all have the same color coding - Red=BAD, Green=Good, Gray=unknown.

ZenOK is a toolbar that can be downloaded by itself or it can be added to our Wizard of OS Toolbar by clicking add to browser from following this link: add to Wizard of OS Toolbar (adding it to our toolbar is not available for chrome)

This toolbar will flag a site bad from their list of bad sites, it does not give a full report necessarily on why it is bad, but it will show up as red and say dangerous site and/or if you have the toolbar version installed on your browser, it will produce a STOP page in a new window and you will have to agree that you understand the risks but want to continue to the unsafe page anyway. I like that it makes a huge effort to notify you, but dislike that it has no settings that allow you to decide to be stopped or merely notified when it perceives a site to be dangerous.

Here's the irony - McAfee's Site Advisor may or may not flag the site where you can download the zen toolbar? That may look like this:

However, that being said, you can then click on the RED McAfee to view the report and it then says:

Hmmmm... What? You gave us a serious warning and then said you were just kidding? Ok, ok, so maybe some of the sites within the conduit toolbar site are questionable? It is just a toolbar site and the toolbars have been created by various sources. Yes, I'm sure some of the toolbars might be suspect as probably close to 300,000 publishers are on that site. But, MANY toolbars originate from conduit and many nice ones like ours. Therefore, don't flag an overall site or good toolbar when only minor issues have been found with a few of the toolbars and the majority of the toolbars have no known issues. It begs the question, was the Site Advisor security toolbar trying to discourage us from downloading a competitors security toolbar? Just asking...

Well since McAfee has flagged another security toolbar as dangerous and then took it back, let's actually take a look at McAfee. Their toolbar is called McAfee's Site Advisor. Let us make a note that none of the other security tools flagged the Site Advisor page as bad. This is what the McAfee Site Advisor toolbar looks like on your browser.

Of course the green means we are on a good site, it turns red when a dangerous or risky site is encountered and/or throws up a banner at the top like the one above for the ZenOK toolbar download.

I really like the control that the site advisor bar allows the user. You can use the toggle right beside the McAfee word and it gives so many options.

You can choose to let it block risky sites for you or only warn you. You can add trusted sites. This is very useful as it certainly doesn't have a grip on EVERY site available on the web. Most that it hasn't evaluated it doesn't flag them as red/bad, but just goes gray with a question mark.

It also has a locked protection option - you can set a password that will NOT allow flagged or risky sites to be loaded without the password. This is a nice feature for the kids or friends using the pc that might have a tendency to over rule the warnings and load a dangerous page. However, that option only comes with the paid subscription version. A subscription currently runs $19.95 per year. It appears to be hard to get your site added or evaluated to the tested and approved sites as well. For example we requested our http://wizardofos.net and http://wizardofosweb.com sites be evaluated and they are still queued and say they will be tested soon. Although, it has said that since we submitted them almost 2 years ago. Of course, the good news is it doesn't automatically declare untested sites as bad. The sites it hasn't bothered to evaluate it doesn't flag one way or the other, just states unknown. However, regarding the zen toolbar site above, it actually flags it, but after you click to see the report, it then says it is tested and is OK. However, sadly most won't bother with the report, they will just see the warning and assume it's a bad or risky site. Again, these bars aren't perfect, we've found seriously BAD sites that the McAfee toolbar not only doesn't flag as bad, but it won't let you leave a review either. Regardless, I'd much rather get a false POSTIVE than a positive FALSE. So, an unknown rating is no better or no worse than without the bar. However, not being able to leave a review on other sites and/or able to get them to evaluate our site in almost 2 yrs is a bit of a deterrent for believing they are on top of their game.

WOT (Web Of Trust) is the third security tool I want to mention. It doesn't present like a toolbar exactly, but just looks like a little icon by your web address bar area. I like the simplicity of that as it doesn't appear bulky or want to take up 2inches of your bar width like some of the others. It actually attaches to your existing browser bar and plays nice.

Ok site bad/poor site

unknown or not enough ratings

It also throws this banner up when a "poor" site is being loaded.

You can then click the rating details and it will give you more info relating to how it is unsafe or poor:

The same with this WOT tool as the McAfee Site Advisor one, you can open the settings and pick and choose how much control you want it to have, etc. We of course, love having an option menu. It has rating choices, warning level options, search engine options, popup search option and some advanced options including one that will recreate the WOT icon browser button toolbar if it gets removed. The fact that it allows you to rate a site and shares your opinion with the community is also a big plus in our book. It also allows you to verify immediately if you are a site owner via meta tags or via a file that you can add to your site. However, we frown upon the fact that you have to BUY a WOT trust seal for your site as opposed to just being awarded one for being a legit and trustworthy site. Of course, who are we to reinvent the wheel? The Better Business Bureau has operated in that same manner for as long as I can remember and no one questions their integrity.

Conclusion:

Fox Mulder did say "Trust no one," but he also said "I want to believe." Most of these flagged sites are only as good as the users that have flagged them good or bad. I'm sure some of the sites that are blocked are evaluated by an employee that works for that security toolbar company, but would imagine most are not and only rely on what users report. Of course, the ones that only rely on their own evaluations will never be caught up. I would think the most successful ones would be those that count the user reviews and also have employee interventions or evaluations as well. However, generally if a site does come back with any dangerous ratings, that should be given some consideration before completely ignoring the warnings and downloading various things from the site. In our findings none of the toolbars were aware of every bad site, but generally 2 out of 3 found TRUE bad sites to be bad and warned us or blocked us before loading the site. Doubt any of them are full proof, but any and/or all of them can be helpful. I don't think you can go wrong with all of them, but not sure you can actually go RIGHT with only one of them? However, if you have to choose only one, WOT might win out with us because it gives the user more setting options than the others and seems to make rating a site easier for the user. Of course, any of them will still be better than none and should be used with common sense.

So, overall we give all three a thumbs up, but warn they are to be used as a "help" and/or a safety suggestion tool with much discretion applied.

WOT

Zen Toolbar

(or Zen Tool to be added to Wizard of OS Toolbar)

McAfee Site Advisor Toolbar

Software: CCleaner - could be your new BFF, er we mean BTF (Best Tool Forever.)

2011-08-24T02:53:00.000-04:00

If you use your computer much at all, odds are you have collected some garbage along the way. CCleaner helps you easily take out that garbage. It is a program that allows you to easily do some routine cleanup that doesn't require a computer degree to do it. It will dump your browsers left over temp files, history and cookies. Depending on which browser you are using, that could be numerous areas and or clicks to manually maneuver. But, wait that is not all. It will also clean up your recycle bin, recent documents, windows temporary files and Log files. You also can check or uncheck these options to clean as much or as little as you want. Although we find that usually the default options already selected are very suitable. To make the deal even sweeter, everything we just mentioned you can do with just one click on the run cleaner button after only opening the program.

If that sounds like too much to remember you can also set it to auto run when you boot up the computer. Then it just automatically happens when you start your computer.

It also has a registry cleaner which can be very helpful as well. Think of the registry as one big file that contains just about everything you do in windows. It lists your programs and keeps track of what little files go with them, etc. and where they are stored. Think of your registry as the bookkeeper over your computer. Now we all know how important it is to keep good books right? Otherwise we mostly have no clue what is going on with our business or money. If you open your registry you will be surprised to find how cluttered it probably has become.

How does your registry get cluttered?

Generally when most programs are removed, they are simply lazy and they don't cleanup after themselves very well. They clean the basic stuff but almost always leave unneeded entries behind. Windows in general operates in the same manner - it constantly creates and logs new entries, but seldom cleans anything after it is no longer used. Bottom line, you are left with a bigger registry file than is really needed and having that in general will slow down your computing experience because now the system has to shuffle through more crap than is necessary. It will always take longer to get from point A to point B if you have to stop and search through a bunch of useless clutter first. Right? Not to mention just loading a bigger file into the pc memory is more of a strain than necessary on your system and just a waste of extra resources.

But who's comfortable cleaning their registry?

The problem is manually cleaning the registry can be a nail biting experience and can be very risky. Delete the wrong entry and you could render the computer unbootable. I would say if you are not an expert to never attempt that at home (or at work either, no matter how much you hate your boss). Well unless you back it up first for sure. ;-) But, luckily this great program also has a registry cleaner built into it that safely just deletes the clutter. It also offers a backup option before fixing the registry, just in case you over clean (if that's possible?).

So over all we love this program and give it a shout out of thumbs up - we think it should be in everyone's tool kit and/or in everyone's startup.

Download CCleaner

Equipment: Linksys Router E4200 Disappointment

2011-08-22T21:41:00.000-04:00

The Linksys E4200 Router - one of their top routers - advertised as their maximum performance router - well other than everything doesn't really seem to work?
Description:

Linksys E4200
Maximum Performance Dual-Band N Router

Features:*

• Simultaneous dual-band Wireless-N
(2.4 & 5 GHz) Maximum speed up to 300 + 450 Mbps
• USB storage port with built-in media server
• Gigabit Ethernet ports for high-speed wired devices
• Cisco Connect software for easy setup and maintenance

If you upgrade to the firmware 1.0.02. then the media server doesn't work at ALL.

If you want to use the server then you can either wait till they fix it, or roll-back to the previous firmware. Here's the old one 1.0.0.1 http://www.mediafire.com/?qscbxpgls2hkmxb

I've also found that the usb port comes and goes using the 1.0.0.1 firmware. I would think this is just a lemon router I purchased, but if you take a look at their forum - doesn't appear to be just the one I purchased. It appears to be a common issue with the E4200 that they don't seem to be very interested in
fixing. I find that shocking since this is a $180 router.

Linksys forum regarding this issue: http://homecommunity.cisco.com/t5/Wireless-Routers/E4200-Media-server-doesn-t-work/m-p/404467?comm_cc=HSus&comm_lang=en#M204509