AVG Technologies, developers of the world’s most popular free anti-virus software, today announced a limited public beta test of its new online tool, AVG Threat Labs. Designed to help consumers combat criminal elements on the Web, Threat Labs is an innovative online information portal that merges the quantitative Web threat detection data that AVG routinely collects from its almost 100 million users with data from AVG’s LinkScanner technology.

AVG users with LinkScanner already installed are protected in real-time from sites containing malware. Threat Labs complements this software by enabling the user to type in the URL of a specific Web site to gather more information. Users not currently using AVG software still benefit from visiting Threat Labs as this unique tool provides an instant and complete safety analysis of a Web site including detection statistics, a detection timeline, an analysis of linked sites and a detection map. AVG’s Threat Labs augments AVG’s existing free, downloadable anti-virus software and enhances the company’s unique “people powered protection” approach to security.

You can now make calls from Gmail to a phone. Checkout the video below. Gmail is integrating Google Voice, bringing free calls to the U.S. and Canada and cheap international calls to Gmail and it’s available now. Check your Gmail account. Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at low rates.

Do you miss the days when M-TV was actually Music Television? Well so do I. I have thought about trying to find all the old videos that I liked so much in the 80s and download them. However, the time it takes to track them down, then hope the site let’s you download them, then download them hoping your not downloading a virus instead, was just too much of a headache. Then I found “Mediaraptor” by Audials. It does all the work for you. You will search video sites for public broadcast videos and downloads them for you. Not only does Mediaraptor.com download them for you, it will also create an organized library for you. Granted it will occasionally get some with lower quality (which you can adjust the setting to filter those out) videos, and it will also occasionally grab a homemade video, but those can easily be deleted. It still saves a tremendous amount of work on your part. Just let it run overnight and in the morning, Voila! Videos!! Let me tell you how easy it was.

I went to Mediaraptor.com and downloaded their program. I ran the install, and to my surprise it asked me if I wanted to install it to the hard-drive or to a thumb drive. Alright, portable app, I love portable apps. So, I tried that first. It need 150 megs available on my thumb drive, easy enough I happened to have a 4gig drive handy, and it had space available which is a wonder in itself. I installed it to it and tried it. Worked like a charm. No hassle, no fuss, just installed and was ready to go. Now, the one thing I did find disappointing, but I have found this many times with other portables, it still had to install a few DLLs on the host computer. Not a big deal, but it does leave a minor footprint, and when I use portable apps I prefer them to be totally portable without and residue left behind. However, as I said, minor annoyance but tolerable. I then tried it on three other computers and again it worked flawlessly. It started right up, saved my videos to the thumb drive and other than the DLLs nothing else was added to the host computer.

So now that the portable was a success, down to business. I installed the full program onto a system and tried it as a local app. Just as easy, as far as I could see there was no difference in the program from the portable to the locally installed one. The program starts up in a empty list. You can click on search and look by artist or song title. You can then choose whether to look for videos and mp3, video only, or mp3 only. As I already know Audials programs work great for mp3 download, I was more interested in the video portion. So I chose video only. I did my search and found numerous listings for each search. Not only that, it told me what service would be providing the videos and the quality of each video. Not bad, I downloaded a few, it didn’t take that long, maybe 10 or 15 minutes, and the quality was excellent. Okay this was great, but still time consuming if I wanted to build any kind of library what so ever. So I need something more, and Mediaraptor provided.

They have a wish list. With this you can choose an artist to search for and the program will search the providers for music and/or videos by that artist. It provides a much broader spectrum than searching individually. Type in the name of the artist, or browse by genre and then click on the artist you want it to find. You can create multiple wish lists with up to 100 artists per list. I created two. I created one for country music and one for Rock. You then click which wishlist you want it to search under, and click fulfill, easy as pie. As it pulled them, it would list them on the right side of the program, while at the same time saving the files, grouped by artist, in my music folder.

This program was a joy to use, in no time I had hundreds of videos to enjoy at my leisure, and it only took a few minutes to setup and implement. I would highly recommend this program to anyone wishing to create their own video or music library.

Usage of Windows 7 had finally surpassed that of Windows Vista. 14.46 percent of Internet users are using Windows 7 and 14.34 percent are using Windows Vista. Windows XP, is at 61.9 percent which is amazing because Windows XP is nearly 9 years old.

Apple’s Mac OS X has a respectable 5 percent for the desktop version of the OS.

Via: Techcrunch

Like many other anti-virus/internet-security programs, when you first download the software from BullGuard’s website, all you are downloading is a small downloader. Once you run it then you download the actual software, so you will need internet access through the entire process.

The website is well designed and easy to navigate. Getting and installing the software was quite easy. The download time will depend on your internet connection, of course. The initial downloader takes no time at all, and should be very quick over most connections. For me, and I recommend this, I waited until I had downloaded the initial installer before removing my current anti-virus program. Once I had the downloader, then I uninstalled the old one, and rebooted. After the system was back up, I then ran the BullGuard downloader, which downloaded the full installer, and began it’s installation. The installation itself took approximately three minutes, then it required a reboot. During the installation itself it asked no other questions. Start to finish in no time at all. After I rebooted, it then asked for me to create an account. No big deal, I’ve tried others that do the same thing. I only had one issue with this part, and that was the user name. I have a common user name that I use for such items, but when I tried to use it, I was told an e-mail address is required. Granted BullGuard points that out to you, but not till after you have made the mistake. Again, not a big deal, but I would suggest they add that to the initial text. Once I had the information correctly in, BullGuard was installed and ready to use.

I then went onto other things, writing this article for one. I did not notice any significant sluggishness in the system that I’ve noticed with other anti-virus programs, and even more so in Internet Security packages. Response time seemed quick and the system seemed as responsive as ever. As I’m typing this I am noticing pop-ups telling me this program or that program has been granted access to the internet. It tells me the name of each program that it grants, all the normal items so far. The pop-ups do not require any intervention on my part, and vanish fairly quickly. They seem to be a FYI more than anything else, which I like. This tells me: one – that it is doing it’s job, two – what it’s doing it with, and three – I don’t have to explain to it that these are normal programs.

As you can see I was pretty impressed, that was until I closed out of this word processor. I then noticed a pop-under had come up. Not a big deal, it was the backup feature of BullGuard asking if I wanted backup my files. Fine, I liked the fact that it had popped into the background and waited for me to attend to it. What I did not like was when I tried to close it, it did not seem to want to close. So I tried opening something else, and it would not open. So I rebooted the system. Upon reboot I noticed the system was very sluggish, and I was having difficulty accessing anything. So, I thought okay, obviously I jumped the gun a little bit with my praise. I decided I’d let the system wait, I had an errand to run anyway. So I left the system on and left the house for about two hours. That should give it plenty of time to work out whatever it had to do. When I got back, it still seemed sluggish and unresponsive. I rebooted again, now I was determined to get this software back off my machine and back to my previous programs, I’d had enough of this. Well, as it rebooted BullGuard popped up with a couple of infections it had found, which it promptly removed. At that point the system began functioning even faster that it had before I started. Apparently I had an infection that my previous anti-virus had never found. Here I was ready to trash the whole thing, when BullGuard was simply doing it’s job. Okay, I went back to being fairly impressed by it.

I then ran a full scan and found a few more infections that had not been picked up before. Going through the software, everything seemed easy to find and use. In closing, I must admit that BullGuard is a rather formidable anti-virus and internet security product. In the end I was most impressed with it’s performance and recommend it highly.