MakeUseOf » portable

ClamWin, An Open-Source Anti-Virus Solution For Your PC [Windows]

Jessica Cam Wong — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 02:30:39 +0000

New online threats emerge every day, attacking corporations and consumers alike. These potentials threats aren’t disguised just as links or emails anymore. They could be coming for your personal information in all sorts of ways. And we’re making it easy for hackers when we post personal stuff on Facebook and Twitter.

There are a lot of things you can do to protect yourself. You can educate yourself on new potential threats, read on how to keep your computer secure, and what security software doesn’t protect, and obtain the best tools for the job, whether they are anti-virus programs or extensions.

Here, I’ll be taking a look at ClamWin, an open-source anti-virus program that’s been around for a while. Should you get it? Read on to find out.

Getting ClamWin

ClamWin is an anti-virus program based on the only open-source anti-virus solution in the market, Clam AV, which is a toolkit initially designed for UNIX.

As you can probably tell by the name, ClamWin is available as a download for Windows machines only. You can download the installer here, which is almost 40MB, or you can also try the portable app for anti-virus protection on the go.

If you’re wondering about which version to go with, I’m using the portable version 0.97.3 for this review. This latest release has improved bytecode signature matching, in addition to the reigning features that characterize this anti-virus – virus scanner, scanning scheduler, automatic virus database updates, and integration with Windows Explorer and Microsoft Outlook.

If you’re using the installer, be aware that the Ask toolbar might be offered during the installation. Make sure you read what the checkboxes are offering before you click Next. I didn’t see any such thing during the portable application “installation”.

Launching ClamWin

When you first launch ClamWin, you’ll likely need to download the built-in database of viruses.

Doing so will just take a few seconds if you’re connected to the Internet.

Once ClamWin has finished updating its Database, you can see the main window where you’ll have the options to set your preferences, update your virus definition database once again, scan programs currently running in memory and finally, scan specific files or directories.

Running Memory Scan

Selecting this option allows you to scan the programs that are currently running in memory. If you’re as paranoid as this author, t’s probably a good idea to update your virus definition database before running your scans.

Unless you’re running Photoshop, Mozilla Firefox, and many other resource hogs, this scan should be completed in a couple of minutes. Mine took just over 3 minutes and scanned 28 processes in memory.

Running File Or Directory Scan

In the main window, there will be a directory browser where you can select a whole drive (e.g. your C drive), specific folder or even a file to scan.

Depending on what you chose, this scan can obviously last a while. When I was running a scan for my D drive, ClamWin was also working really hard, using almost 109 MB of RAM. Not that it’s a bad sign, but it’s probably a good idea not to multi-task on your PC while you let a scan run through an entire disk drive. After a scan is finished, you can see the report right after, save it or access it in the main window menu.

If a virus is detected during the scan, there are three options you can choose from in the Preferences: Quarantine it, report it, or remove it.

If you’re particular about your scans, you can also filter files to be included or excluded from the scan in the Preferences. You can also limit a file size to scan or not, and also whether to extract files from zipped files in the Preferences window.

If you installed ClamWin instead of using the portable version, you’ll be able to schedule scans right in the Preferences window, increasing security for your PC.

If you’re using the portable version and wish to schedule scans, you could always use Windows Task Schedulerand clamscan.exe which should be under ClamWinPortable/App/clamwin/bin.

ClamWin shines for being an open-source anti-virus program with file and directory scanners, scanner scheduler, automatic downloads of virus databases and more. It does lack a real-time scanner, which could be a big con, but for basic protection and its price, it’s a great product to have on your PC security arsenal.

Have you used Clam AV or ClamWin? Share your experience in the comments section below!

4 Little-Known And Portable Browsers That Should Be On Your USB Drive

Craig Snyder — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 02:30:26 +0000

Your browser is the centerpiece to your internet experience and keeping it nice and portable is an awesome luxury. While PortableApps.com does a great job of bundling our most popular software together into portable, auto-launching applications, I tend to avoid the packages because I often install my portable applications within Dropbox. A lot of portable applications, typically designed for USB drives, don’t mesh well with Dropbox. I’ve found some that do, though.

You may not have heard of a couple of these browsers, but each and every one brings a unique benefit to your portable arsenal. Don’t let the fact that you may not have heard of them stand in the way of finding your new favorite browser.

Avant Browser

We’ve already covered a nice and in-depth review of the Avant browser, but it’s time to rehash the software now that an official portable version is readily available on their official website.

Avant is like a souped-up version of Internet Explorer. One of the main differences is how well Avant handles Flash, in comparison. Avant is only a little slower than the current Firefox build, which puts it plenty ahead of IE’s speed. It’s also got a ton of features built in, like ways to disable on-page sound, scripting, and animations right out of the box.

You can download the official portable version here.

Pale Moon

What Avant is to Internet Explorer, Pale Moon strives to be alongside Firefox. Pale Moon is an alternative, slim-downed version of the Firefox browser that is built on Firefox’s official source code. The browser has been around for years and has been proven to use less memory than the original Firefox without the user being able to notice much difference alongside the powerhouse browser that Mozilla has on their hands.

You can download Pale Moon’s official portable release from this page.

Browzar

Browzar has a distinct advantage over the rest on this list in respect that the official build of the original browser itself is portable. Browzar leaves an incredibly small fingerprint and is one of the most secure and easy-to-use browsers that I’ve used right from a flash drive.

While it does lack somethings in the features category, Browzar can’t be beaten when you’re looking for something to jump on and jump right off with. Browzar will even clear every single bit of sensitive, session-specific data after closing.

You can download it here.

Opera@USB

I decided to save the best for last. While Opera may already be my favorite official browser in the first place, it is not the Opera team who developed this third-party portable port. Nonetheless, it’s flawless. It’ll even update alongside released Opera versions and still maintain it’s portable status.

Other than that, there’s really not too much more to explain about Opera@USB. It is simply Opera in a portable package. Give Opera a shot just for a few days and I promise you’ll start to fall in love a little. You can click here to download Opera@USB.

Though unheard of and maybe even a little obscure, these portable gems will help put your flash drive on the right track. If you enjoyed this list, check out 100 other portable applications that you may enjoy. Shoot me a line about any of these in the comments.

Live USB Install Puts Linux On Your Thumb Drive With Ease

Justin Pot — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 19:31:34 +0000

Boot one of over a hundred Linux distros from a USB disk. With Live USB, software you can run on both Windows and Linux computers, it only takes a couple of clicks to make your USB disk a bootable Linux disk. The live CD just might be the most useful tool in any geek’s arsenal – we’ve pointed out 50 uses for live CDs in the past and plan on showing you many more. As time goes on, however, CD drives become less common. That’s why booting from a USB drive is useful: it works on notebooks and other devices without optical drives.

Linux Live USB Creator, a similar program, can help create live USB drives, but it only works on Windows. Live USB Install works on both Windows and Linux, and is incredibly simple to use. Just pick which version of Linux you want to use and which drive you’d like to install it to. Your software will be downloaded and installed, and you will soon be able to live a contented life involving the booting of Linux from a USB disk.

If this sounds complicated, don’t worry: it isn’t. Your disk will be up and running in no time.

Using Live USB

The interface couldn’t be much friendlier, inviting you to pick what version of Linux you’d like to install. If you’ve already downloaded an ISO file, great. You can point Live USB towards it to create your live USB disk. If you already have a Linux CD, that’s also great – you can use that as a source too.

If you don’t have either though, you can simply click a version of Linux and Live USB will download it for you. You’ll need to scroll through a rather long list to do so:

Not sure where to start? Ubuntu, Fedora and Linux Mint are all good options if you’re looking for a general Linux experience. You’ll also need to pick which version you want. Not sure what this means? Just pick the most recent version, because that’s probably what you want.

Once you’ve figured out what you want to install, it’s time to figure out where you want to install it. Insert your flash drive and pick it from the menu:

If you can’t see your drive, hit “Refresh“. It will show up.

Persistent Installation

You can, if you want, create a “persistent” installation of Ubuntu and other Debian-based distributions. What does this mean? Software you install and documents you create after booting this thumb drive will stay on your thumb drive. It’s a virtual computer on a drive!

Download Now!

Ready to try this out? If so, head over to the Live USB download page. You’ll find a DEB package there for Ubuntu and source code for other Linux distributions. You’ll also find the Windows download.

Conclusion

This program is easy to use and works well. I plan on using it to try out a variety of Linux distros in the months to come.

But, as always, I want to know – how did this program work for you? Fill me in the comments below; I’ll be around to answer questions.

How To Transfer Your Xbox 360 Profile & Other Data To A USB Flash Drive

Tim Brookes — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 21:30:09 +0000

Did you know that you can use any USB drive that has a capacity between 1GB and 16GB as a memory unit for your Xbox 360? Once formatted and prepared you can transfer profiles, game saves and other files from your hard drive onto your new memory unit.

There’s a variety of reasons this might appeal, with the obvious being easily portable profiles and saves. If you’re visiting a friend for a night of games or living in a house with multiple consoles, a portable memory stick you can carry around suddenly appears quite useful.

Best of all this takes virtually no time to do, and all you’ll need is a flash drive and your console.

Preparing Your USB Stick

This walkthrough will focus on moving your profile to a USB stick so you can login to Xbox Live, play games and earn achievements (as well as being able to re-download all content tied to your account). Don’t forget you’ll also need your save files if you want to continue your progress, unless of course you’re playing a multiplayer game that stores progress in the cloud.

Luckily the Xbox 360 takes much of the pain out of preparing your new memory unit and transferring data, though it is not possible to copy game saves and profiles – only move them. As your USB device will be detected as an Xbox 360 memory unit there’s no need to specify folders or destination paths, just choose transfer and go.

First of all make sure that the flash drive you choose doesn’t contain any important files or folders as all data on the drive will be lost once your Xbox has formatted it. Once you’ve checked out the drive, insert it into one of the USB slots on the front of your Xbox.

Turn on your console but don’t sign in – you’ll need to be offline in order to transfer profile data after all. Select My Xbox from the vertical menu and scroll all the way to the right hand side where you can choose to modify your console’s preferences. Within this settings menu choose Memory, and your currently connected devices will be displayed, including an as-yet unprepared USB drive.

Select the USB option and your console will report that the USB device has not yet been configured for use with an Xbox 360 and you’ll need to configure it. Agree to the configuration tool and choose Configure Now. Once complete your USB stick is ready to go.

Transfer & Access

Back to the Memory menu and choose Hard Drive (assuming your main data is stored on the hard drive, which it usually is) to reveal your data. Profiles are stored in the Profiles folder and game saves appear underneath game content in Games. When you’re ready to copy something (you’re going to need your profile in order to play any of those saves, so best start there) choose Transfer.

In your Storage Devices list you should now see the USB drive listed as a Memory Unit. You are now free to transfer anything you like, provided you’ve got the space. Profiles can easily be copied quickly, but game saves will take longer as you will need to visit each game entry and extract the relevant file.

Your USB stick will now allow you to log in to Xbox Live from any console once you have plugged it in. Whilst your profile (and any other information) is on this USB stick you cannot login without it.

Should you decide you need that USB stick back or you intend on using the same Xbox for a while then you can always transfer your content back. This is essentially the same as your initial transfer, only in reverse. Instead of transferring from your hard drive, transfer from your USB memory unit to your Xbox 360 hard drive. Game saves can get a little trickier here as you don’t want to overwrite any previous progress, so take care while overwriting files.

If it all goes wrong (you lose your memory stick, for example) then you can always recover your gamertag via the Xbox menu (hit the Xbox button and select Recover Gamertag).

Conclusion

That’s pretty much all there is to taking your profile, subscription and saves with you. Soon Microsoft will introduce cloud saving, which will inevitably make the whole process that little bit simpler, too!

Have you tried this? Do you use your USB stick all the time? Has this helped you out? Let us know in the comments.

Take a Screenshot & Upload To Your Site In One Step With UpScreen [Windows]

Ryan Dube — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 18:31:38 +0000

When you’re an online writer, you really have to spend a lot of time taking screenshots. This need also extends well beyond the online writing world. Maybe you need to create a web-based manual for work and you need to capture screenshots for it, or maybe you are a teacher trying to create an online how-to guide for your students to use at home.

There are a lot of important reasons why people need to take screenshots and then upload them to the web for online publication. Here at MUO, I think we’re really covered the gamut when it comes to screenshots, such as Ben’s list of the 4 best screenshot and screencast tools, Ann’s list of tools for high quality screenshots, or the list of Chrome snapshot plugins by Simon.

Believe it or not, there is another tool that you may want to consider if you want to shave even more time off your screen capturing efforts. Imagine being able to hit a couple of keys, draw a rectangle on your screen, and then have that area captured and automatically uploaded to your website or blog? In almost a single step you’ve cut four or five steps from the typical screenshot process. This is possible by using a cool little app called UpScreen.

One Quick Setup For Fast Screenshots

UpScreen is just an executable file. Download it and place it wherever you want to launch it from. The first time you launch the app, you’ll need to set up where the screenshots will get uploaded to via FTP.

If you can, stick to using “www” in front of your domain rather than “ftp” so that the preview window, which I’ll show you in a bit, will work correctly. So long as you list port 21 the server will know to access the FTP account. Ideally, you should create a special FTP account for this purpose. In this example I created an FTP account and assigned it to an “auto” folder inside the wp-content/uploads/ area of my blog.

If you do assign the FTP account to a subdirectory structure inside the “public_html” directory, you’ll have an opportunity in the next step of the setup to tell the application what that directory is. Make sure you type the right one so that the preview feature of the screenshot app works right.

Now, when you run the application, you will see crosshairs show up on the screen. You can now draw the area that you want to take a shot of, and the application will capture it and upload it. But if you would rather take a full screenshot or check your FTP settings, right-click anywhere on the screen and you’ll see the menu appear.

Options is where you can re-configure FTP settings if you want to, or you can alter what image format you want the screenshots saved to. The five characters refer to the 5 random characters assigned to the screenshot name. You can assign more characters if you think you’ll be taking lots of screen captures over time.

To take a screenshot, just draw the rectangle as shown below. A gray box will appear over the area that you’ll be capturing as a new image.

The moment you release the mouse button, two things happen at once. First, the application captures the screenshot of the area you assigned. Second, it immediately connects to your FTP host account and uploads the file. That’s it! All of those ftp/upload steps are erased when you use UpScreen to do your screen captures.

The screenshot I captured above is a screenshot of a Firefox window that I had open, which was displaying an image on my website. UpScreen took a snapshot of the area of my Firefox window that I had boxed, uploaded it to my website, and then displayed a preview of the snapshot as shown above. Now all I have to do is use that image link anywhere in my blog posts that I like.

Now, all this is well and good, but what good is it to have an executable you have to keep launching in order to do screenshots? The solution for this is to assign a hotkey to launch the app whenever you want to do a screenshot upload. There are lots of ways to create HotKeys in windows – I prefer to use the WinHotKey app.

Here, I’ve defined Control-U as the hotkey to take a snapshot using UpScreen. That’s all there is to it.

A few final things you should know about Upscreen – taking a full desktop screenshot is as simple as running the app, right-clicking, selecting “Full Screen” and then double-clicking anywhere on the desktop.

Here is my full desktop snapshot instantly uploaded to my website using UpScreen. This procedure took me just about 5 seconds and it was instantly on my site.

You can also take a quick snapshot of a single window by double-clicking on the title bar of that window. UpScreen will capture the window, upload, and then display a preview of your uploaded picture in your web browser.

UpScreen is good for anyone that does a lot of screenshots, but it’s really worth its weight in gold if you do a lot of “how-to” articles that require constant screenshots. The ability to cut several steps out of the process can really save a lot of time in the long run.

Give UpScreen a shot and see if you find it as convenient as I do. What do you like about it and what would you change? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.