Sunday, April 25, 2010

GoDaddy Go

Today I moved my web hosting to GoDaddy in Scottsdale AZ. Hurray!

When I set up my web site back around 1996 my domain was registered with Network Solutions and hosted at Internet Now in Tempe; my ISP was CompuServe for dial-up. Seems like such a long time ago. . .

Fast forward to the 21st Century: I moved registration from Network Solutions to GoDaddy; Internet Now went thru several name changes; best of all, Cox high-speed Internet. Ah, the good life. . .

I decided to look at GoDaddy for web hosting, and even their most basic plan had 10 GB of space on a Windows box for $4.99 month-to-month, so I took the plunge. The transition was very simple, they provided excellent directions for uploading the files & switching the name servers.

This is of course only "day 1" but I am very pleased with the results.

Sunday, April 04, 2010

ClamWin anti-virus

Continuing my testing of the ClamWin free AV as an alternative to AVG. After good results with Win 2K and Server 2003, I decided to convert my ThinkPad with Win XP Pro from AVG 8 to ClamWin.

The uninstall of AVG and install of ClamWin went well, with one exception - the Windows XP Security Center does not recognize ClamWin, so the red security icon appeared in the system tray to notify me that Windows could not find any anti-virus software. That can be set to ignore, but hopefully some day the ClamWin folks can provide a hook so Windows will recognize it.

Monday, March 29, 2010

Time is running out

If you are using AVG anti-virus and still on version 8, you have no doubt seen these messages numerous times, urging you to move to version 9.

My own tests of version 9 showed it to be even more resource-intensive than version 8, but after a quick search at SourceForge I found ClamWin which is a free open-source virus scanner. So far the results have been favorable.

I am running Windows 2000, XP Home and Pro, and Server 2003, and ClamWin is compatble with all of those OS's. ClamWin runs a single Windows process ClamTray, as opposed to four processes with AVG (avgnsx, avgrsx, avgtray, avgwdsvc) and it includes integration with Internet Explorer and Outlook.

At this point I have ClamWin running on the Server 2003 and Windows 2000, and I plan to start testing on the XP machines in the near future.