[vip_students] Editorial:Don't pay for software you don't need , Partt 1
- From: "\(NCBI\) Paul Traynor" <paul.traynor@xxxxxxx>
- To: <vip_students@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 5 May 2011 14:33:27 +0100
If you've moved to Windows 7, there's a raft of software , entire
categories of software , that you simply don't need.
Why pay for it?
Many people write to ask me for recommendations about antivirus software, or
utility programs, or Registry cleaners, or backup programs. They cite
comparative reviews , even articles that I wrote a few years ago ,
debating the merits and flaws of various packages. Time and again, I have to
tell them that all the information they know is wrong. On second thought, I
guess the accumulated knowledge isn't so much wrong as obsolete.
The simple fact is, if you moved up to Windows 7, you wouldn't need a lot of
that stuff , and the old reviews are just that. Old reviews.
I'm considered a heretic in some circles because I have extreme views when
it comes to installing software on my Win7 machines. Even if I don't have to
pay for it, I don't want a new program unless it solves a specific problem
that bedevils me. And as for paying money for old packages , even good old
packages , sorry, but I won't do it. I recommend that you don't, either.
In this column, and my next two columns, I'm going to lay it on the line ,
point out what you don't need, in my considered opinion , and try to save
you a bunch of money. Senior Editor Fred Langa disagrees with several of my
recommendations, as do many other knowledgeable people in the industry. Fred
and others will present their counterpoints as the series develops, in
articles here in the newsletter and in the Lounge. Should be an interesting
meeting of the minds.
This week, I'd like to inflict on you my personal biases concerning four
different groups of Windows software: antivirus, defraggers, backup
programs, and Office productivity software. I look at all four specifically
from a Windows 7 point of view. XP's a whole different kettle of decade-old
fish.
Here's the dirty truth behind four big-time software industries , what you,
as a Win7 user, need to know, to save yourself a ton of money and many, many
Excedrin-size headaches.
Paying for antivirus doesn't improve protection
I've been recommending free antivirus software since the second edition of
Windows XP All-In-One For Dummies, nearly a decade ago. I've drawn the wrath
of many a player in the billion-dollar AV industry, but I still say there's
absolutely no reason at all to pay for antivirus protection.
Back in XP times, I recommended AVG Free, Avira, ESET's NOD32, and the like
, many of those products were, and still are, free for personal use. That's
changed. Starting with the second edition of Windows 7 All-In-One For
Dummies, I've stopped recommending any third-party antivirus software. Why?
Because Microsoft makes a first-rate AV product that's absolutely free for
anyone with a genuine copy of Windows. It's also free for organizations of
10 or fewer people.
Microsoft Security Essentials (download page)
<http://WindowsSecrets.com/links/osif35v55grod/9c9874h/?url=www.microsoft.co
m%2Fdownloads%2Fen%2Fdetails.aspx%3FFamilyID%3De1605e70-9649-4a87-8532-33d81
3687a7f> goes in easily, runs quietly, needs no tending, and catches as
many infectious programs as any of the big-name antivirus products. And it's
free. Fred Langa has a full description in his May 6, 2010, Top Story
<http://windowssecrets.com/top-story/the-120-day-microsoft-security-suite-te
st-drive/> , "The 120-day Microsoft security suite test drive."
I've heard all the arguments against Microsoft Security Essentials. Yes,
it's like asking the fox to guard the chicken coop. But in this case, MSE's
one fine fox.
MSE doesn't catch all the nasties, all the time. No AV product does. If you
shoot yourself in the foot and wittingly install a rogue anti-malware
program, for example, MSE may not keep you from pulling the trigger. In
desperate situations, you may need a special-purpose program such as
Malwarebytes
<http://WindowsSecrets.com/links/osif35v55grod/b9e817h/?url=www.malwarebytes
.org%2F> to cleanse your system. But for everyday use, MSE works as well as
any of the big-name, expensive, constantly money-grubbing packages. Get rid
of 'em.
The only downside to installing MSE? You have to figure out how to
completely remove the antivirus program you have now. Good luck.
You don't need to defrag your drives any more
I've written hundreds of pages about hard-drive fragmentation. Because of
the way Windows stores data on a drive and reclaims the areas left behind
when deleting data, your drives can start to look like a patchwork quilt,
with data scattered all over the place. Defragmentation reorganizes the
data, plucking data off the drive and putting files back together again,
ostensibly to speed up hard-drive access.
Although it's true that horribly fragmented hard drives , many of them
hand-crafted by defrag software companies trying to prove their worth , run
slower than defragged drives, in practice the differences aren't that
remarkable, particularly if you defrag your hard drives every month or two
or six. (Note that you should never defrag a solid-state drive.) In
practice, even moderately bad fragmentation doesn't make a noticeable
difference in performance, although running a defrag every now and again
helps.
With Windows 7, you don't need to run a defrag. Ever. Windows runs one for
you, by default, one day every week at 1:00 a.m. You can double-check to
make sure that your machine's running defrags automatically: click Start,
All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Task Scheduler. On the left (see
Figure 1), navigate to Task Scheduler Library, Microsoft, Windows, Defrag,
and look for the ScheduledDefrag activity.
Win7's standard scheduled
defrag<http://download.windowssecrets.com/images/wsn/W20110505-TS-ScheduledD
efrag2.JPG>
Figure 1. By default, Windows 7 runs a scheduled defrag once a week at 1:00
a.m.
To see when your hard drives have been defragmented, choose Start, All
Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Defragmenter. The Disk
Defragmenter dialog box tells you when your drives were defragged and how
badly they were fragmented at the last calculation point. From that dialog
box, you can manually inspect your drives and run a defrag, if you feel so
inclined.
Some companies would have you believe that their defraggers work better than
Microsoft's. I say pshaw. (That's a technical term.) I've never seen any
perceptible difference between MS and for-pay defraggers on a real-world
Win7 machine, properly configured. Defraggers are just a waste of money.
Drop your old backup program and use Win7's
I'm going to get howls over this one. In my opinion, if you have Windows 7,
you have all the backup horsepower you need.
Windows XP's built-in backup program didn't. Didn't back up, that is.
Something of a shortcoming for a backup program, eh? Vista's worked better,
and Win7's works well.
Windows 7 has full support for four different kinds of backups:
* Shadow copies, also known as previous versions. Win7 maintains
snapshots of your data files, taken every night around midnight. I'm amazed
that more Win7 users don't realize they already have most of the vaunted Mac
"Time Machine" features, built into Win7. To see the previous versions of
your data files, click Start and then Documents. In Documents, navigate to
the file that you'd like to resurrect. Right-click on the filename and
choose Restore Previous versions. You see all of the stored shadow copies of
that particular document, and it's easy to restore them.
* Data backups Setting up data backups is amazingly easy, although
there's a little trick. If you're running Windows 7 Professional (or
Ultimate) and you have a network, you can put your data backups on a network
drive. To do so, click Start, Accessories, Getting Started. Click Back up
your files, and follow the instructions. If you're running Win7 Home Premium
or you don't have a network, your best bet is to buy an external hard drive
for backups. (Two-TB drives cost about a hundred bucks.) Plug the external
drive into a USB port, choose the Use the Drive for Backup option, and
follow the instructions.
* System restore points Just like Windows XP and Vista, Win7 has tools
to set up, manage, and use system restore points. See Microsoft's FAQ
<http://WindowsSecrets.com/links/osif35v55grod/1bb2f3h/?url=windows.microsof
t.com%2Fen-US%2Fwindows-vista%2FSystem-Restore-frequently-asked-questions>
for details.
* "Ghost" system images Windows 7 also makes it easy to make a copy of
your entire hard drive, a so-called image backup or ghost. To ghost your
hard drive, click Start, All Programs, Accessories, Getting Started, Back up
your files. Then in the upper-left corner, click the link to Create a system
image.
Win7 makes shadow copies and data backups automatically, following the
instructions you give when you first run the backup programs. It's easy,
fast, and built into Windows. Of course, you need to figure out how often to
run the backups, how to create full ghost images, and how to find and
restore the right backups, but all of the pieces are there , and they don't
cost a penny.
There are some situations in which you might want to pay for backup
software. If you have several computers on a network and want to back them
all up to one single location, a Windows Home Server or Network Attached
Storage box with integrated Windows backup software may be better than
backing up each machine individually. Cloud-based backup is good and getting
better. But for most people, Windows 7's backup software does everything
they need.
By the way, when Windows 8 starts gathering steam, you're going to see a lot
of marketing puffery about Microsoft's new "History Vault" , which many
people are already comparing to the Mac's "Time Machine." When you see the
new, whiz-bang demos, remember: Windows 7 already has shadow copies, fully
incremental data backups, and all of the glue to get them together. The user
interface isn't particularly snazzy, but all of the pieces are already
there.
OpenOffice is not a slam-dunk replacement
Whenever somebody asks me, "Why do you recommend Office when OpenOffice does
everything for free?" I have to cringe. It's true that Microsoft Office is
enormously expensive. It's also true that good, but not great, alternatives
exist , including Google Docs, among many others.
There are two substantial problems.
First, as much as I would love to recommend a free replacement for Word,
Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook, the simple fact is that the free alternatives
aren't 100-percent compatible. In fact, for anything except the simplest
formatting, and most basic features, they aren't compatible at all. Even
Microsoft's free Office Web Apps
<http://WindowsSecrets.com/links/osif35v55grod/babc91h/?url=office.microsoft
.com%2Fen-us%2Fweb-apps%2F> don't come close to the real Word, Excel, or
PowerPoint. If your needs are modest, by all means explore the alternatives.
But if you have to edit a document that somebody else is going to use, and
it has any unusual formatting, you may end up with an unusable mess.
Second, many people don't realize it, but OpenOffice.org isn't the same
organization it used to be. There's a long, sordid story involved, but give
or take a twist, it goes something like this. Once upon a time, a company
called StarDivision built an office program called StarOffice. Sun
Microsystems bought StarDivision in August 1999 and, about a year later,
released the StarOffice source code, turning it into the open-source product
known as OpenOffice.org. Sun continued to support the OpenOffice.org effort
by employing many of the developers; Novell, Red Hat, IBM, Google, and other
companies also loaned their employees to the effort.
Then Oracle bought out Sun and started to do some not-very-funny things with
the OpenOffice.org effort. Oracle tried to sell a variant of OpenOffice.org.
Oracle yanked the free ODF plug-in that allows older versions of MS Office
to read OpenOffice docs and slapped a horrendous price on it. There was a
very nasty falling out, with dozens of key OpenOffice developers very
publicly lambasting Oracle and then forming a new organization called
LibreOffice. The LibreOffice folks forked the code and have, at this point,
released two new minor versions that are not associated with OpenOffice.org
or Oracle.
As reported in an April 21 InfoWorld story
<http://WindowsSecrets.com/links/osif35v55grod/482bf7h/?url=www.infoworld.co
m%2Fd%2Fthe-industry-standard%2Fin-oracles-fight-open-source-the-good-guys-w
on-time-530> , Oracle announced that it's going to hand over the OpenOffice
code to "a purely community-based open-source project." That project hasn't
yet been identified, and it isn't clear whether LibreOffice will absorb some
or all of the code.
For all of those reasons, OpenOffice.org isn't a real or good alternative to
Microsoft Office right now. So if you're looking for a way to avoid paying
for Office, be assured that you aren't alone in the search. But the
situation's still too murky for me to make any good recommendations yet.
Part 2 next week.
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