Webroot SecureAnywhere Internet Security Complete review: Protection needs improvement

Webroot SecureAnywhere Internet Security Complete ($52 for one year of protection on up to five PCs) offers an intuitive interface, very fast system scans, and a mobile security component. Unfortunately, it falls short where it counts: protection.

In our real-world (zero-day) tests, Webroot blocked just 82 percent of Web and email threats and unknown viruses—a comparatively weak showing, considering that half the suites in our roundup nailed all of them, and two others stopped 98 percent of the attacks.

Webroot did a better job of protecting against known malware (arising within 30 days of the testing), successfully blocking 99 percent of attacks. Microsoft Security Essentials blocked just 93 percent of known malware attacks). However, most of the other security suites in our roundup successfully blocked 100 percent of known malware attacks.

Webroot's polished, touchscreen-friendly interface is one of the highlights of its suite.

Webroot SecureAnywhere was overzealous in denouncing benign files as security risks, too. In our usability tests, the program flagged five legitimate programs (out of thousands tried) as dangerous.

Performance is a bright spot: Webroot SecureAnywhere earned a score of 0 on this measure, meaning that it won’t add any discernable time to your PC startups and shutdowns.

Once you’ve input your product keycode, installing Webroot SecureAnywhere becomes a one-click process. The main window is attractive and easy to understand at a glance. The entire window tints green if you’re protected, orange if you’re semi-protected, and red if you’re unprotected. In case that approach is too subtle for you, Webroot also posts a large banner that can be green, orange, or red, as well as a green checkmark, an orange exclamation point, or a red ‘x’ to reinforce your protection level.

The main window is divided into three sections. A white box under the protection-status banner shows scanning and subscription stats. Underneath that is a message and alert box with a quick link to Webroot’s online support site. To the right are several feature menus that you can tap to expand and gain access to some settings.

The clean, touchscreen-optimized interface is full of tappable buttons, tiles, and toggles. Clicking the Advanced Settings button will take you to a slightly less touchscreen-friendly menu. Webroot uses minimal jargon to explain most of the settings and features, and the menu is thoughtfully organized to make finding things easier.

If you have lots of PCs to protect, you’ll appreciate Webroot’s pricing structure, which covers up to five PCs for a year for $52.

Webroot is a breeze to install and it’s fairly user-friendly, but its protection falls a bit short of the competition’s. And when most of the suites we tested turn in fantastic performance, good just doesn’t cut it.

Sarah is a freelance writer and editor based in Silicon Valley. She has a love/hate relationship with social media and a bad habit of describing technology as "sexy."
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Sage 50 Complete Accounting 2013: Advanced Accounting Tools for Small Business

At $369 for a single user ($669 for three licenses, and $899 for five), Sage 50 Complete Accounting 2013 isn't the cheapest way to keep your small business's books. But if you are well versed in accounting practices and want to implement your own preferences where choices are available, Sage 50 Complete provides all the controls you could wish for.

Even if you've never studied accounting but are eager to learn, Sage 50 may be worthwhile for its extensive documentation and tutorials. They won't turn you into a CPA, but they can help you learn a lot of the basics.

A descendent of the package formerly known as Peachtree Complete, Sage 50 Complete 2013 comes with its own database, which can make installation tricky: My first attempt to install the program was cut short by firewall issues that Sage acknowledges in its help pages (and offers workarounds for). In my case, installing several Windows updates appeared to solve the problem, but your mileage may vary.

Sage gives you the option of setting up your books for either cash or accrual accounting. Once installed, Sage 50 Complete immediately displays its serious accounting credentials in a setup wizard that asks questions you don't get from some competitors--for example, whether you want to post transactions in real time or in batches, and whether you prefer to use cash or accrual accounting (with cash, you record transactions as you receive payments or spend money; with accrual, you record sales whether you've received payment or not, and you record expenditures as you commit to them).

Once setup is complete, you see a pleasing interface with lots of useful navigation aides. The first screen to appear is one of several general-topic pages that show a collection of related tasks in flowchart format, or simply display information. The Business Status page, for example, assembles an overview of your finances that uses widgetlike boxes to show your year-to-date revenue, key account balances, a list of bills you owe, a list of customers who owe you money, and a pie chart showing aged receivables--balances due based on how long they've been owed. You can customize the page by adding or removing these widgets.

Other general topic pages (accessible by clicking on entries in a left navigation bar) cover customers and sales; vendors and purchases; employees and payroll, banking, and system settings--and you can make any one of them the default start screen. Underneath the topic page tabs, Sage also puts a customizable shortcut list in the nav bar to help you jump immediately to a specific ledger or task from any category. The default list includes links for creating an invoice, entering received payments, paying bills, viewing customer and vendor lists, searching for a specific transaction, and making a general journal entry.

Inventory management tools have been a strong feature this software from the days when it was called Peachtree Accounting.Since its Peachtree days, Sage 50 has earned a reputation for superior inventory management features, and rightly so. It's the only one of the top desktop packages we looked at to offer the full range of cost-basis options for evaluating inventory: average cost, Last In First Out (LIFO), First In First Out (FIFO). In contrast, QuickBooks Pro 2012 supports only the average-cost method.

The 2013 edition expands the inventory analysis capabilities of Sage Business Intelligence, the tool that integrates with Microsoft Excel (2003 or later) to move data into spreadsheets for advanced forecasting and other tasks. The new template joins an already impressive collection of templates, all customizable and easy to link to Sage 50 data.

Other innovations include the ability to reconcile accounts (by changing back entries) without having to change accounting periods; the ability to deactivate multiple vendor records based on a cutoff date for activity (previously you had to get rid of one record at a time); and improved batch check-printing for Accounts Payable and Payroll (you can now print long descriptions on a blank sheet of paper, and the program can eliminate numbers for voided checks), which helps you avoid wasting preprinted checks.

On the downside, Sage has made it more difficult to manage payroll without enrolling in one of its subscription-based payroll add-on services. Previously, you could manually update tax tables and then run payroll calculations in the program. Now, without a service, you must perform payroll calculations outside of the program and import the results--a time-consuming workaround, to say the least. The cheapest payroll service (which generates W2 forms at year's end but doesn't support e-filing) costs $270 for the 2013 fiscal year; alternatively, you can pay $380 to cover the rest of this year and next year. Either way, this expense practically doubles the cost of the software.

Sage 50 also comes up a bit short for people who want to switch from another program. Basically, you have to export your data to an Excel spreadsheet and then link fields manually to their Sage 50 equivalents to do any kind of data import--tasks that might discourage prospective QuickBooks refugees. Sage has yet to deliver a companion mobile app for Sage 50, though it does offer one with its payments service. (The U.K. edition does have an iOS app.)

If you're in charge of a growing business and aren't afraid to hear or learn accounting jargon that may stand you in good stead going forward, Sage 50 Complete Accounting 2013's power and versatility make it worth its admittedly high cost.

This review is part of a roundup of accounting software. You can read the introduction to the story and find links to the other products we reviewed here.

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Buffering Too Slow? Watch Videos When They're Complete With Video DownloadHelper

If you ever found yourself repeatedly starting and stopping an online video clip because it wouldn't buffer fast enough or felt that Flash was slowing your browser down to a crawl, you should try Video DownloadHelper for Firefox.

Video DownloadHelper contains YouTube-specific features for fine-grained control over downloaded video quality.Video DownloadHelper is a free add-on, and it has been around for years. With almost six million downloads and over 3,000 reviews giving it an average of over four stars, this is one of the best ways to download videos off YouTube, Vimeo, and a slew of other video-hosting websites.

When you first install Video DownloadHelper, it takes you to an "installation successful" page. This is one of the more disappointing parts of the user experience: The page features sketchy-looking banners offering a "free scan for hidden PC errors" and a large button leading to a ranked list of video sites, many of which are adult-oriented. In other words, the best thing you can do as soon as Firefox restarts after the installation is close that tab and pretend it was never there. Just as you wouldn't judge a book by its cover, try not to judge Video DownloadHelper by its website.

What that success page should really contain is a quick tutorial showing how to use Video DownloadHelper. This is not trivial: Video DownloadHelper used to have a menu item, as well as an optional button in the status bar. The menu item is still there, but the menu itself has been hidden in recent Firefox versions, leaving only an orange Firefox button at the top-left corner of the window. The status bar has also been axed, replaced with an "add-on bar" that is hidden by default. This makes getting to Video DownloadHelper tricky at first.

The secret is to go to a webpage with a video, start playing the video, and right-click anywhere on the screen. You should now see a DownloadHelper entry in the context menu, featuring lots of options. This has a sub-menu labeled Media, only visible once you start playing the video, which lets you easily download the current video to disk. If you're on YouTube, you even get to pick what quality you'd like to download. The DownloadHelper menu also lets you access a rich Preferences dialog, but the add-on works just fine with the default settings.

Downloads are done via the browser's built-in download dialog. Once you begin a download, you can close the video's tab--the download happens in the background, no Flash involved. The video files you get can be played with any modern media player, such as VLC or SPlayer. Even with the same resolution, watching a video file locally feels better: You can play and pause using your keyboard's media keys, there's no buffering involved, and you don't have to read the comments.

Video DownloadHelper is a valuable tool, especially if you're on a slow connection. It takes a little bit of getting used to, but if you enjoy watching videos online, it can certainly add to the experience.

--Erez Zukerman

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