Spam-Aware is one of the leading freeware anti-spam programs available today. If you are constantly bombarded by spam in your mailbox its time to get some protection above and beyond the standard stuff provided by your mail client and ISP, a third layer of protection is often the key to eliminating the maximum amount of spam.

Overview

Firstly don’t confuse SpamAware with Spam-Aware, the hyphenated version is shareware and will cost you a pretty penny. SpamAware is 4.41MB in size and quick to install once downloaded.

SpamAware is a mail client plugin and built exclusively for MS-Outlook and Outlook Express, making it perfect for a large proportion of Windows users. SpamAware is built on SpamAssassin and uses it to rate your new mail and what action to take. The action the program takes is based partly on user settings – so control is by no means out of your hands. The program notably supports Black- and Whitelist filtering and Bayes.

Functionality

The program is very easy to use and integrates very well with Outlook – the setup is very quick and we had it working in a few minutes. We noticed a marked reduction in Spam but not a total halt. This is certainly a four star program and falls just short of brilliance.

Downside

We did find the program to be a little slow – this is probably because it checks public blacklists. If you have a very slow internet you may find this to be a big factor.

EasyEncipher is a brilliant freeware encryption tool, if you value your privacy this program is for you! Information is today’s most valuable resource, just because you are a home user doesn’t mean your valuable information doesn’t deserve protection.

Download and Installation

The program is very light weight (only 715kb) and is very quick to download and install.

Features

The program features 32 bit encryption and can encrypt any file, text or folder on your computer. Encryptions are fast and of a very secure level.

They are carried out using the following:

• Highly optimized assembler core engine and Blowfish
• 3Way
• Gost
• IDEA
• Skipjack
• Cast 256 algorithms

A wide array of options are provided allowing the user to perform all the encryptions desired in one session – we found this particular feature to be extremely useful. We also enjoyed the save and continue feature which allows unfinished tasks to be saved and restarted.

Conclusions

EasyEncipher provides fast and efficient freeware encryption in an appealing and easy to use package, it’s possibly missing a scheduler function but this is by no means a large oversight - all in all a great program and recommended download.

If you’ve ever deleted an important file by accident you’ll know that sinking feeling very well. That doesn’t have to be the end of it – with file recovery software its possible to get files back. PC Inspector File Recovery is an advanced data recovery program that supports the FAT 12/16/32 and NTFS file systems.

Download and Installation

The program is on the larger side and comes in at a little over 5MB. The download is direct and pretty quick – the installation is easy.

First Impressions

PC Inspector has an attractive and easy to use layout with a few essential task options.

The program boasts the following features:

• Automatic partition detection even with a damaged boot sector
• File recovery includes original time and date stamp – stamps aren’t refreshed
• File recovery without a header entry present
• Special Recovery Function
• Supports the following file extensions: ARJ AVI BMP CDR DOC DXF DBF XLS EXE GIF HLP HTML HTM JPG LZH MID MOV MP3 PDF PNG RTF TAR TIF WAV ZIP

Great Advantages

The program supports both FAT32 and NTFS and provided extremely thorough file recovery in testing.

Downside

Hard drive scans can be a little timely – but who’s complaining when it gets your precious data back!

The Internet can be a dangerous place for your computer and personal information, Comodo Personal Firewall is a firewall program that protects you and your computer from attacks from hackers, data thieves, Trojan horses and all malicious software in general.

First Impressions

The Comodo download and install is quick and easy, at first glance the program is far more attractive than many of its other freeware personal firewall counterparts.

The program offers the following features:

• PC Magazine Online’s Editor’s Choice award
• Complete PC security against both internal and external attacks
• Blocks access to all malicious software
• Complete lock down of personal data preventing theft
• Delivers a complete solution for online security in one package

System Requirements

Comodo has some Windows backwards compatibility and can run on Windows 2000 and XP – you’ll need at least 64MB of RAM and 32MB free hard drive space.

Functionality: Using Comodo

I found Comodo easy to use and no hassles – the features it offers are right up there with the best freeware firewall programs. It has useful additional features such as the ability to recognize safe programs and can block malware style leak tests. The only downside of this awesome freeware firewall is that it takes some work setting it up, this is very similar in many other firewall programs. Once you’ve forged through the initial bombardment of pop up windows and the program has you figured out gives no other hassles.

Malware is notorious for installing itself on Internet Explorer, users often innocently click on well disguised links and downloads and land up with browser toolbars and other add-ons. These browser attachments can cause IE to crash and are a massive annoyance to any user. Toolbar Cop is a useful freeware program used to get rid of those annoying malware toolbars, tool bands, icons and other malicious objects that attach themselves to Internet Explorer.

First Impressions

While there is a little information on the author’s site the program has to be downloaded from one of a few big freeware sites like Softpedia. Once I was on one of those sites the download was quick and easy – only 60k. The install is just as quick and easy.

The program has a very simple and easy to understand interface as can be seen in these screenshots.

What the Program Does

Toolbar Cop allows for more advanced Windows users to completely remove all tool bands, Toolbar icons and Browser Helper Objects (BHOs) from Internet Explorer. The program has the option to disable BHO’s, remove them and prevent them starting up with IE – these range of options certainly add to the programs usability.

Beyond these functions the program also displays a sort of status report – all know details regarding installed toolbars, context menu extensions and toolbar buttons. From this status report it is easy to take action and remove them.

Missing Features

We have mentioned the program is for advanced Windows users for a reason – there is no undo or redo function. If you make a mistake there is no turning back. If you are a new Windows or IE user this is perhaps not the program for you.

Conclusions

This simple Malware removal program is easy to use and gets the job done with no effort – if your version of IE is clogged up with toolbars this is a highly recommended freeware download.

SpamFighter is a community based spam filter system. It works by not only filtering spam according to what you mark as as spam, but also the emails the entire community as a whole flags as being spam. This means you don’t have to spend time training your spam filtering software before it can actually filter out spam properly for you.

Using SpamFighter

SpamFigter seamlessly integrates into Microsoft’s Outlook. Once you have installed it, a small SpamFighter icon appears in Outlook, letting you know that it’s started working.

Free and Paid Versions

The creators of SpamFighter had a very clever strategy. They made a light weight version of their spam filtering software and made it free. As an added bonus they collect all the spam information from millions of users, and can make their pair for spam filter, really great. It’s a clever strategy, and in the end it means every wins to some degree.

Performance

As you can expect, SpamFighter works very well and the great thing is that it works right away. It has a very high accuracy. It doesn’t often misclassify an email as either spam, or not spam.

Conclusions

All in all SpamFighter is a great product that’s also backed by a great idea of involving an entire community into the spam filtering fight. Personally I’d prefer the whole project if it were run by a non profit group, but that may be asking a bit much.

Clearly the biggest flaw with SpamFighter is that it only works with a single email client – being Outlook.

Despite these disadvantages, as a whole I have to recommend SpamFighter, it gives some of the best spam filtering results available, and it is after all, free.

ClamWin is a freeware anti-virus program for Windows; its effective protection is provided by graphical interface with the Clam Anti-Virus engine. The program is quick and easy to download and install, providing any windows computer with virus protection in minutes.

Program Features

• Ability to schedule regular virus scans
• Excellent detection rate for both viruses and spyware
• Integration into the windows explorer menu for quick scanning from anywhere in Windows
• Ability to addon to Microsoft Outlook to automatically scan and remove attachments if found to be infected

What’s’ Missing?

ClamWin doesn’t have a real time scanner – this is a major flaw in the software. Most competing packages such as avast! and AVG do offer real time protection. ClamWin is still under development so it’s possible this missing feature and any other potential flaws could be addressed in the near future.

What’s Really Great About the Program?

Big anti-virus programs like Norton tend to use lots of memory and drastically slow already underpowered computers. CalmWin uses very little resources – you shouldn’t notice any difference in your computer’s performance. Finally ClamWin also runs very well as a server package, this extendibility beyond the home computer makes the program quite versatile.

Whether you know about it or not, your internet history is stored on your computer – anyone with a little know how can view your entire history. If you value your privacy its essential to remove all history related files, Internet Sweeper is a program that makes this effortless and secure. Internet Sweeper is a freeware program that erases your complete internet history, taking care security and file build up issues.

What Does it Do?

Internet sweeper erases every facet of your internet history, this includes the following:

• Cache
• History
• Cookies
• Urls
• Messages and alerts
• Temporary files
• Index.dat files
• Recent documents
• Find documents
• Search assistants
• Find computers

What Platforms is the Program Compatible With?

This Windows based program is backwards compatible and works with 95 to XP. In addition Internet Sweeper supports all major browsers including I.E., Netscape, Opera and AOL.

How Does it Perform?

The program was quick and easy to download and install. It’s simple interface is easy to use – it worked efficiently and I didn’t have any issues.

R-Firewall is a firewall that protects both the integrity of your PC, and the security of your private data. It works by blocking certain applications from sending out data over the network that it thinks should be doing so. It also stops malicious traffic from ever getting to your PC.

Configuration

R-Firewall is one of the few programs that actually allows you to create several different firewall profiles. This is great for users who use their computers in different situations, over different Internet connections.

Setup and Configuration

R-Firewall features a very nice, easy to use interface. You can set up firewall rules, opening and closing specific ports on your computer to network traffic.

Tests

R-Firewall did not perform very well in tests. It leaves several ports open to attack, meaning that you can’t assume your computer is completely secure when you’re using it. R-Firewall also tends to block legitimate programs way too often. These include email clients, browsers, online games, etc.

Conclusions

R-Firewall just has too many bugs to be considered a viable, and reliable firewall. There are other, better firewall programs available. I recommend you use one of them rather.

Deleting information off your hard drive using the simple delete function in windows is not secure. It’s possible for data to be recovered and pieced back together. If you store sensitive information on your hard drive and want to make sure it’s really erased properly you need additional software power. Eraser is a highly advanced freeware security tool that can completely delete sensitive data off your hard drive.
How it works

Instead of deleting a file once as windows would, Eraser removes sensitive data by deleting it several times using carefully selected patterns. The patterns used to overwrite files have been developed using Peter Gutmann’s research on memory and ensure that even the smallest magnetic reference to the data is completely removed from your hard drive. The program also makes it possible to define your own method; I didn’t give this a try and was quite satisfied with the default method.

Eraser Provides Three Easy Ways to Overwrite Data:

1. Drag and drop files to the on-demand eraser
2. Right click on an Explorer file extension and select erase from the popup menu
3. Use the integrated scheduler to overwrite unused disk space at a time you set

In Practice

The download and installation of the program is quick and easy, the program is backwards compatible with Windows and works with 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Windows 2003 Server and DOS – which is pretty impressive. It’s a good idea to setup the scheduler to run at a regular interval, perhaps once a month. Set it up to overwrite unused areas of your hard drive.