Wednesday, 28 January 2015

10 Best Antivirus Software in 2014 that Safeguard Your PC

The web is an extremely dangerous place as you may sometimes have to deal with so many unwanted things like hackers, spyware, phishing sites and viruses. Because of these anti social elements in your PC, you need to have reliable and efficient antivirus software to keep your data safe.

Most users are unaware of the viruses that can damage systems. However, its something that you can be quickly eradicated if you are keen to maintain your PC’s health.
The virus is similar to the common cold which silently makes its way through the masses. They often slow down any application processes and can have a damaging effect on your CPU usage. Thankfully, there is an array of antivirus software that can protect your system from undergoing disaster.
Here we have the best antivirus software in 2014 that can ensure maximum security and minimal data loss.

1. Bitdefender Antivirus Plus

BitDefender Antivirus box
Bitdefender antivirus Plus has been acknowledged the best antivirus program of 2013. It has exhibited excellent scores in lab tests performed independently. It has great phishing protections and avoids of transmission of personal information. New Wallet can manage private data and passwords. Safepay hardened browser safeguards all financial transactions. It scans your system for threats and even your Facebook profile.

You can, however, face some difficulty installing this program on systems that are infected with malware. Also, there is a limitation on the management of wallet password. The “Plus” in its name refers to an outstanding collection of relevant and effective security tools.

2. Norton antivirus 2014

Norton Antivirus Box
Norton Antivirus 2014 can handle all your critical corrupted files. The installer can rectify certain problems. It’s very effective at antiphishing, exploit blocking and malicious URL blocking. The program displays great score with respect to malware clean up. It can be easily installed and used. You can have admittance to free customer support at any given hour.

Elaborate testing done by German-based AV Test Labs have found that Norton Antivirus heads the list with respect to usage, ability to safeguard your system against malware and the potential to disinfect PCs that are already infected.

3. Bullguard Antivirus

Bullguard Antivirus Box
BullGuard Antivirus program has great early-detection features, a phenomenal interface and impressive customer service, which makes it stand out. It has been designed to recognize and eradicate a wide ambit of spyware, viruses, Trojans, rootkits and worms.  It continuously scans your PC’s memory and disk for signs of viruses. It can also provide protection online and keeps your inbox absolutely clean.

The fundamental interface can be easily comprehended and is user-friendly. It checks for latest updates against any kind of new threats every two hours.

4. Panda Cloud Antivirus (Free)

Panda Cloud Antivirus
Panda Cloud Antivirus is a free software program which can be used with other security tools without any difficulty. It’s a lightweight tool which is small and simple. Since it’s a free version, there are some important features missing in it. For instance, the paid version provides protection at public wifi networks.

Independent testing has shown that the free version is very much capable of protecting your PC, with the latest report of AV Test awarding a certification to the software.

5. Kaspersky Antivirus

kaspersky Anti-virus box
Kaspersky Antivirus forms the backbone of your system’s antivirus security system, functioning effectively to deliver the speediest and most reliable computer spyware and virus protection in the globe. It can easily detect new threats and stop them from infecting your PC.

You can set your options and allow the program to safeguard your computer without having to constantly monitor it. It has real time security as you use the internet, communicate via IM or email, and download and open files.

 6. G Data Antivirus 2014

75-g-data-antivirus-box
G Data Antivirus is an excellent program which backs a high degree of security and is user-friendly. It protects from a wide number of threats-both online and offline which includes phishing scams, adware, dialers, trojans, malicious scripts, worms and rootkits.

The software scans outbound email for malware or viruses. It isn’t the fastest; however, the scanning speed of 10.6MB/sec, which is more than adequate. It uses two scanning engines, but won’t take twice as long compared to additional security software.

G Data Virus has all the essential tools to protect your system along with a healthy dose of additional features.

7. Avira Antivirus (Free)

Avira Antivirus
Avira Antivirus is a free software that provides two basic areas of protection. It has a robust antivirus engine (rated high by various independent labs), which monitors your PC constantly, identifying and removing threats. If you plan on installing the Avira toolbar, you can also get certain web tools, such as anti-phishing tool, social network protection and adblocker.

The drawback of this software is that the interface is a little complex, with the program having more impact on the performance on your PC compared to other tools. Despite this, Avira Free Antivirus has a great potential to protect your computer.

8. F-Secure Antivirus

f-secure Anti-virus box
F Secure Antivirus is a great antivirus software tool as it’s streamlined, speedy and highly effective. It has integrated security features and  advanced protection technology which protects your computer from viruses or other malware. As far as performance is concerned, F Secure heads the list according to AV Test. AV Comparatives has also awarded it with an advanced A+ rating.

The software uses proactive, heuristics protection against what is known as zero hour threat which are unrecognized by the present virus signatures. You can also scan a specific folder or file by simply right clicking on it. Technical support of F Secure Antivirus can be reached any time of the day all through the year either by email or phone.

9. ZoneAlarm Antivirus (Free)

ZoneAlarm
ZoneAlarm Free Antivirus has its antivirus database revised daily which can leave you exposed to dangerous latest threats. However, the commercial version has updates every hour. The software has lots of functionality and has been certified as an antivirus engine by AV Test from Germany.
The database update indicates that it won’t be your very first option; however, if you want an antivirus and firewall tool from ZoneAlarm, this could be the best bet.

10. Vipre Antivirus

vipre antivirus antispyware box
Vipre Antivirus, a product of GFI software, which can be easily installed and performs scans effectively. It protects your machine against spyware and viruses. In addition, it maintains security during sessions of instant messaging and emailing. The antivirus software scans items like USB thumb drives and its technical support provides good assistance to its users.


During the installation process, Vipre Antivirus eradicates conflicts with additional security programs. Following installation, the software scans to find any pre-existing malware so that it can remove the threats. It can also identify threats that enter with removable media.

Download your WhatsApp Contacts

You can now use the WhatsApp messenger on your Mac or Windows PC provided you have the WhatsApp app running on a mobile phone that is not an iPhone. Go to web.whatsapp.com on your desktop, scan the QR code on the screen with WhatsApp on your phone and you can instantly send or receive messages to any of your WhatsApp contacts from the computer.

WhatsApp supports desktop notifications in Google Chrome so you can read your messages even if the WhatsApp web app is open in some background tab. The other benefit is that you can send pictures from your desktop or the DSLR SD card without having to transfer the bulky file to your mobile. There’s no support for sending audio or video files though. The other limitation is that your mobile phone should be connected to the Internet for you to use WhatsApp on the web.

WhatsApp Address Book

If you right-click on the profile picture of any WhatsApp contact, you’ll get a link that looks something like this;
https://web.whatsapp.com/pp?t=s&u=919760008596

Here the blue string represents the phone number of your contact with the country code while the red string (t=s) represents the size of the picture thumbnail. If you replace t=s in the URL with t=l, you’ll get the bigger version profile picture of that contact.

Save your WhatsApp Address Book Locally

The WhatsApp app on your mobile phone does not offer an option to download the profile images nor is there an option to export your WhatsApp Contacts for uploading into other address books like Google Contacts or LinkedIn. However, the contacts data can be easily extracted, or rather scraped, from the WhatsApp website in less than a minute with the help of a bookmarklet.

WhatsApp Contacts

To get started, drag the WhatsApp bookmarklet to the toolbar of your Google Chrome. Next open web.whatsapp.com on your computer, wait for the website to load and then click the bookmarklet in the toolbar. You can either choose to have a CSV list of your WhatsApp contacts or create a print-ready addressbook of your WhatsApp network. This will have the high-res profiles pictures, the names and the telephone numbers of all your contacts.

The WhatsApp image URLs are session-based and thus cannot be shared. You can however press Ctrl+S or Cmd+S on Mac to download the entire web page created by the bookmarklet and it will permanently download the profile pictures to your computer as well.


The WhatsApps app UI itself is written in React, a JS library from Facebook. If you are curious to know how the bookmarklet works, see the annotated version.

Find How Many “Eggs” Follow you on Twitter

When you join Twitter, it sets your profile picture as a colored egg but for people to take you seriously, you replace that egg with your face. This is the first rule of the Twitter book but some users aren’t paying attention. Maybe they are too lazy to change the avatar, maybe they want to stay anonymous or maybe they are bots and fake users created by spammers who “sell” Twitter followers.

Twitter Eggs
This week, I set out to count the number of eggs that follow me on Twitter and results were surprising. It turned that out of the 53k users who follow me, around 15% of the followers have eggs as their avatars. Most of these “egg” profiles have never tweeted, their Twitter bio is empty and they have followers in single digit. All big hints that these profile are boosting your “follower” count but not actually reading your tweets.

You can click here to see the full Twitter eggs report.

Find & Remove your Egg Followers from Twitter

If you are curious to know how many eggs follow you on Twitter, here’s a Google Script that will help. It will read your Twitter followers and if any of them have eggs as a profile picture, it will log an entry into a Google Spreadsheet. Here’s how you can get started:
  1.  If you are getting an error that “there are currently too many people viewing this file” error, try this mirror.
  2. Replace technewsyetu@blogspot.com with your own email address (the report will be sent here) and technewsyetu with your own Twitter handle.
  3. Go to the Run menu and choose Step 1 – Authorize. The script will ask for certain permissions and you need to choose Accept  at the authorization prompt.
  4. Open the Run menu again and choose Step 2 – Run to initialize the script. That’s it.
You can now close the Google Script window. The script runs in the background and it will send you an email once it has extracted all the eggs from your Twitter account. This is an open-source Google script that uses the Twitter API to get your followers.
Google Script for Twitter

Thou shalt not have an egg image as your default avatar in Twitter.

Wondering how the script finds the egg profiles? No, it doesn’t do any magic image matching, it merely looks at the URL of the Twitter avatar – it there’s the word “default” in the URL, it means the underlying image is that of an egg. Simple.