FOUR Free Alternatives To Adobe Reader Malware Magnet

From: Bill Mullins

FLASH – A critical vulnerability (March 14, 2011), exists in Adobe Reader, as well as Flash Player and Acrobat. But don’t worry, Adobe will address this issue during the week of March 21, 2011. (OK, enough sarcasm).

If you’re shaking your head and wondering if you’ve heard this before – you can stop wondering. The date might be different; the vulnerability might be different, but you have heard this before – unfortunately, not once before, but often.

The graphics below (courtesy of Secunia – the developers of Secunia PSI), convincingly illustrate why Adobe Reader is considered one of the most hacked pieces of software.

Month by Month (so far) in 2011
The “Month by Month” graph below shows the number of issued Secunia advisories affecting Adobe Reader 9.x on a month-by-month basis.

Read the rest at http://billmullins.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/four-free-alternatives-to-adobe-reader-malware-magnet/

Reliability and Service: Technology’s Most (and Least) Reliable Brands

From PCWorld.com

When you buy a new PC, camera, printer, or TV, you want a dependable device from a manufacturer that’s committed to supporting its customers. We asked 45,000 readers and found out which companies you can really trust.

Every year, consumers purchase millions of computers and peripherals. And every year, millions of those devices break down.

For anyone who plans to buy a piece of hardware, the overall reliability of a vendor’s products and the quality of its service are important considerations. Unfortunately, much of the information that people use in deciding which product to buy is fragmentary and anecdotal–not the kind of data you’d want to base a three- or four-figure decision on.

To obtain some hard data about which vendors have done the best job over the past year, we recently polled approximately 45,000 visitors to PCWorld.com, asking them about the mechanical soundness of their tech products–laptop PCs, desktop PCs, HDTVs, digital cameras, and printers–and about the quality of the tech support they received when those products required service. For similar evaluations of smartphone vendors, see “The Smartphones You Can Rely On.”

Perhaps the most surprising thing about our most recent survey results is how closely consumer opinions about reliability and service this year match those we reported last year.

Read the rest at http://www.pcworld.com/article/187407/reliability_and_service_technologys_most_and_least_reliable_brands.html

The Tech Brands You Can Trust

From: PCWorld.Com

Every year PCWorld polls its knowledgeable readers to see which companies are providing the best tech support and service. The results of our latest exclusive survey of 79,000 tech aficionados reveal some welcome improvements and some familiar shortcomings.

Device manufacturers spend billions each year on designing, marketing, and advertising their products. That’s what they need to do to get you to the counter to buy.

But how many of them are willing to spend the money it takes to ensure that their products hold up after the sale has been made, and to service the product if it breaks?

Those are important questions for customers to ask before they buy–and the key questions of our annual Reliability and Service Survey. Each year we survey thousands of our readers to find out which hardware manufacturers have the best–and worst–product reliability and customer service and support.

This year’s response was unprecedented: 79,000 of you rated the tech products you use. With such a large pool of survey data, we learned a great deal about the companies that make laptops, desktops, smartphones, HDTVs, cameras, and printers. Here’s the mile-high view of what we found.

–Put simply, products made by Apple, Asus, Brother, and Canon are typically reliable and well supported.

–Products made by Dell and Hewlett-Packard often aren’t, especially if you’re a home user.

–Laptops are slightly more reliable than before, and have fewer serious problems than desktops.

–Business PC customers are generally more satisfied than their consumer counterparts.

And there’s much, much more.

After you read this article, you may want to jump to PCWorld’s Facebook page, where readers can add their own stories of product reliability and vendor service.

Read the rest at http://www.pcworld.com/article/211074/the_tech_brands_you_can_trust.html

The Easiest Way To Move Your iTunes Library To An External Drive

From: MakeUseOf.com

Storage space is one of the biggest problems for laptop users. You can run out of those bytes in no time at all, especially if you fill your laptop with multimedia files like music and movies – the types of files that you keep and manage using a multimedia manager like iTunes.

A quick look at the folder sizes inside my MacBook hard drive shows that the iTunes folder occupies a large area on that near-full storage space. To regain some room to breathe, I decided to move my collections to an external drive.

If the problem is only moving everything inside the iTunes folder to the external drive, a simple cut and paste would solve it. The trick however is to keep everything intact. Nobody wants to re-fill hundreds (or thousands) of song information, re-assign all the ratings, re-paste all lyrics and re-hunt for the cover art. The only thing that should be different after the move is the location.

Read the rest at: MakeUseOf.com