Auslogics Blog

The holiday season has finally arrived. This time of year is wonderful and special for everyone – it’s the time to be with your family and friends, have fun, give and receive presents, and even make dreams come true! And of course it’s the time of Christmas sales.

We at Auslogics are also having a Christmas sale and we offer you a 25% discount on Auslogics BoostSpeed 4.5 and Auslogics Antivirus! Getting your discount is easy – all you need to do is enter the discount code CHRISTMAS2009 when purchasing. Hurry up – this offer ends on the 1st of January 2010!

Speed Up and Protect Your Computer

Computer security, speed, and performance are the top three concerns of every user. Everybody knows how easily computers get infected with viruses and spyware, and how quickly they become sluggish and even start freezing up. Our team understands how important it is to have a secure, fast, and efficient computer – that’s why we’ve developed Auslogics Antivirus and Auslogics BoostSpeed.

Auslogics Antivirus is one of the most comprehensive antiviruses available on the market. Reliable and feature-packed, it will protect you from viruses, trojans, spyware, identity theft, and other known and unknown threats. It can also operate in Safe Mode to remove resilient viruses. Auslogics Antivirus has lots of customization options and can run in two special modes – Laptop Mode and Game Mode. Like all Auslogics’ products it’s fast, very easy to use, doesn’t affect computer performance, and has sleek Windows 7-style user interface.

Auslogics BoostSpeed is a comprehensive system maintenance tool. It will ensure your computer is fast and optimized for best performance, protect your privacy by erasing traces of Internet activity, wiping free disk space, and erasing files beyond restoration. It will also advise you on which Windows services are safe to disable and will let you easily apply dozens of useful tweaks that will make your computer run fast and smooth.

And now you have the chance to get one or both of these products with a 25% discount if you buy them before the 1st of January 2010! Click here to get Auslogics BoostSpeed 4.5 and here to get Auslogics Antivirus. Don’t forget to enter the discount code CHRISTMAS2009.

Happy holidays!

Defragmenting disks is a very important part of computer maintenance, because badly fragmented hard drives can make your PC slow and unreliable. That’s why you need to defrag regularly. The easiest way to do it is to schedule defrag to run once a week. It’s best to schedule defragmentation for the time when you are not using your computer, so that it won’t interrupt your work.

But what if you keep forgetting to schedule defrag or it keeps annoying you by starting up when you are in the middle of something? The answer is to use defrag screensaver. It will start automatically when your system goes idle, so your work will never get interrupted by defragmentation again.

Auslogics Disk Defrag Screen Saver is a useful tool that defragments your hard drives in screensaver mode. It’s fast, very light on system resources, and looks fantastic.

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Part Two

In my previous post I’ve used Auslogics Antivirus as an example to show you some basic ways to configure your antivirus software for maximum performance. Today I’m going to tell you how to fine-tune Auslogics Antivirus, so that it becomes even faster and lighter on system resources.

1. Tune-up Real-time Protection

All antiviruses offer real-time protection. This means that everything that happens on your computer is monitored and analysed by your antivirus. But keep in mind that your computer performs thousands of operations every second and there is nothing suspicious about most of them. Basically, there is no need for your antivirus to scan everything all the time. So why not disable functions that are not needed.

First of all let’s configure real-time protection so that it doesn’t scan everything. To do that:

1. Open Auslogics Antivirus
2. Click on the Antivirus tab and then go to the Shield tab
3. 

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On Thursday, 3 December,  Avast had a bad false positive issue. They’ve released an update that mistakenly flagged hundreds of innocent files and applications as the Win32:Delf-MZG (or in some cases Win32:Zbot-MKK)Trojan. According to Avast blog post, amongst mistakenly marked files were programs from Adobe, Realtek, various media players, sound card drivers, etc. Our customers told us that Auslogics BoostSpeed was one of the falsely marked programs as well.

We would like to assure you that our software doesn’t contain any malware or spyware.

The erroneous avast! update was fixed the same day. Users who updated their avast! antivirus after 6 a.m. GMT on Wednesday shouldn’t have experienced any problems.

Part One

This day and age it’s absolutely crucial to have good antivirus software installed on your computer to protect your operating system and your personal data. Developers offer us dozens of solutions, all of which have extensive functionality and loads of features and options. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But there are a couple of drawbacks -  most antiviruses are pretty heavy on system resources when using default settings and not very easy to configure to fit your particular needs. As a result, a lot of people get so frustrated, that they either disable or uninstall their security software. Then they catch numerous infections and have to deal with the consequences.

Luckily, there is a better solution. Most antiviruses allow you to configure them to your liking. In this post I’m going to describe the best ways to configure and optimize Auslogics Antivirus, but you can use my advice to configure pretty much any antivirus software.

1. Choose Advanced User Interface Mode

First of all you’ll need to switch the user interface to Advanced mode. That way all customization options will become available. To choose Advanced mode:

1. Find Auslogics Antivirus tray icon (red triangle) and right-click on it
2. Go to Basic Setting
3. Find and select Advanced Mode
4. 
5. Click Apply and click OK

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The holiday season has arrived for many people from different countries and cultures of the world. This time of year is wonderful and special for everyone – it’s the time for having fun, being with your friends and family, giving and receiving presents, and even making dreams come true!

For me, giving presents is just as exciting as receiving them. And what fun it is to shop for gifts, knowing that they will bring happiness and joy to your loved ones!

I’m pretty sure that you will do at least some of your shopping online. It’s not a secret that online retailers offer great deals. But at the same time there is always a potential danger of your money getting stolen by shifty dealers, scammers, and spammers.

OK, so maybe some of you don’t mind giving a couple of hundred dollars to thieves. However, it would be much better to donate that money to charity.

If you want to protect yourself from online fraud, then read on! Here are five simple tips that will help you shop online safely.

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Today we have some exciting news – the all new Disk Defrag 3 is out of beta. Auslogics Disk Defrag is not just a simple defrag utility – now it’s a fully featured disk optimizer. The new version has features that beat paid analogs, has new Windows 7-style user interface, and is even faster than before. And it remains absolutely FREE.

What’s New?

1. Free Space Consolidation

Simple defragmentation only defrags files and not free disk space. This means that free space is scattered all over the disk. When new files are created, Windows fills those small free space fragments in. The more fragmented the free space is, the more fragmented new files will be. Disk Defrag 3 consolidates free space into a large contiguous block, so that there are no “holes”. This technology effectively prevents file fragmentation and speeds up disk access.

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Every time you connect to the Internet, browse websites, download files, read emails, do online banking and a number of other things you can potentially get bombarded with viruses and spyware, or become a fraud or identity theft victim. That’s why it’s so important to keep your computer fully protected.

Auslogics Antivirus is one of the most comprehensive antiviruses available on the market. Reliable and feature-packed, it will protect you from viruses, trojans, spyware, identity theft, and other known and unknown threats, and can also operate in Safe Mode to remove resilient viruses. Like all Auslogics’ products it’s fast, doesn’t affect computer performance, and has sleek Windows 7-style user interface.

Let’s have a look at what it has to offer:

1. Real-time Protection

Auslogics Antivirus offers constant real-time PC protection. It scans all accessed files, emails, web sites, and IM chats for possible threats and blocks any attempts to modify system files. The program uses both heuristics and a virus/spyware database to provide maximum protection. Its Active Virus Control feature protects from new threats by analysing the activity of all running applications.

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We are happy to present you the new Auslogics Disk Defrag 3^beta! We call it “new” because Disk Defrag 3^beta is not just a defragmenter but a fully featured disk optimizer. We’ve supplied it with advanced techniques of disk optimization that only paid analogs have. With Disk Defrag 3^beta you can replace regular data files from the MFT Reserved Zone, consolidate free space and optimize system files placement. Let’s have a closer look at how these optimization techniques may affect your PC performance.

System files smart placement

Commonly used by Windows, system files may be scattered all over the disk and intermixed with data files. Disk Defrag 3^beta arranges system files by defragmenting and moving them to the faster part of the disk.  This minimizes the time needed for HDD to access system files and improves overall computer performance.

Free space consolidation

It is not a secret that a simple defragmentation leaves the free space on the disk highly fragmented. It means that there are many free space «holes» all over the disk. Windows fills in those free spaces with newly created or extended files. The more fragmented the free space is, the more fragmented new files will be.

Disk Defrag 3^beta merges all those free space «holes» into a large contiguous block during optimization process. This allows the file system to create new files without fragmentation. As a result, free space consolidation dramatically reduces further disk fragmentation.

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Working on your computer means that there are several applications and files open, hundreds of processes and services running, not to mention disk activity, RAM and CPU usage, and Internet traffic. It’s very important to be in total control over everything that is going on, especially if you are concerned about computer security.

Of course, you can use the built in Windows Task Manager. However, it displays only a few applications and processes running on your PC. And it doesn’t show Windows services at all, despite the fact that services you never use take up a lot of RAM and can slow down your PC.  Windows Task Manager doesn’t provide any process descriptions, so it can be difficult to understand why those processes are there and what is their functionality.

Auslogics Task Manager is a brand new free Windows Task Manager alternative. It provides comprehensive yet easy to understand information about running applications, processes, and services, as well as disk activity, CPU, RAM and Internet traffic usage.

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