This is probably going to be a lead in for a double post, one informational, one argumentative.
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Originally Posted by BlackCatXIII
Can anyone point me to a good rss program and irc program.
Thanks in advance  |
For RSS, I have found basically 3 programs that are decent enough to use. I just went through switching RSS readers a few weeks ago to one that satisfied certain requirements: not buggy, is still currently under active development, secure*, and doesn't leave a huge memory footprint with huge #'s of items in a feeed**. I ended up going with Sharpreader and its pretty good. Missing a few features though.
1)
Sharpreader (Free) (Semi-active dev) (Secure) (Seems to be the preference of a few majors Developers too.)
2)
Greatnews (Free) (Semi-active dev, secure?)
3)
Feeddemon (30 day trial, then pay) (Fully Active dev) (Secure) ***
*Secure means that they have patched the internal RSS browser to run in the internet zone and not the local zone or similar to prevent rss attacks.
**I have a few feeds that I want to keep backups of and thus have 10000+ items. Feeddemon chokes HEAVILY on these. For things under 1000 or so, it works fine though.
***I used Feeddemon for the longest time and then wanted to upgrade. The problem is the new version REQUIRES integration with newsgator AND phones home. The program is still a really great RSS Program but these were two features that I definitely did not want. There is also a cap of 19999 items and it's memory usage shoots through the roof on anything over 5000 or so. There are also some very weird bugs.
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Originally Posted by NoSanninWa
Now, I've got a question: Can anyone recommend good Firewall and Anti-Virus programs for me? While I would prefer free or cheap programs, what I'm really interested in are programs that have minimal system overhead. Are there such programs that will do the job well, without slowing my system or eating up resources? It would be worth paying for such programs if they worked well. Unfortunately the market leaders have turned into bloatware and other programs seem to have other problems.
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Firewalls:
If you can still find a copy of it, Kerio Personal Firewall 2.1.5 (aka 2.15) (The last one before it became bloatware.)
Upsides: Free license, low memory foot print, very advanced control over the firewall.
Downsides: There are a few security holes (DOS only, no remote), minor issues with some setups, and it is 5 years old and out of development.
Anti-virus: They all are basically the same amount of suck somewhere. The best three (IMTSO) (plus one) are basically:
AVG: It's free, it works, decent detection rates.
Kaspersky: You have to pay for this one but it has the highest wild detection rate I saw. On the few systems that I saw it, it was pretty small memory wise.
F-secure I am going to recommend this one based on a handful of experiences and based on what they are producing. Its pay, but the few systems I saw it on, it had a pretty low memory footprint, was decently fast, and got most things. The thing is, they are the ones with new heurestics and rootkit detection in their latest version which sounds like it will increase their wild detection rates by a lot.
+1: If you happen to go to a school that has Norton Corporate, that is one of the best engines out there but the detection rates can be sucky.