AVG Internet Security 2014 review: a decent, lightweight antivirus suite

AVG Internet Security 2014 ($55 for one year of protection on one computer) is a decent security suite that gives adequate protection and adds little weight to your system. In our real-world testing scenario, the suite protected against 98 percent of all unknown (zero-day) attacks. It did an even better job of protecting against known malware, repelling 99 percent of those attacks. Still, half of the ten security suites in our roundup blocked 100 percent of zero-day threats, and all but three blocked 100 percent of known malware attacks.

AVG did well in our usability tests, not flagging any legitimate software or websites as dangerous. With a performance score of 3, it adds very little drag to your system.

AVG’s installation process asks you to choose a language, agree to license terms, enter your product key, and choose an express or custom install before getting down to business. It doesn’t ask to install any extra software (such as toolbars or browsers) or to change any settings (such as your homepage), however, so you should be able to click through these screens in a matter of seconds.

AVG's advanced settings menu is definitely for advanced users.

Compared to the other security suites in our roundup, AVG’s main screen looks a little cluttered. At the top of the screen it displays a large banner that’s green if you’re fully protected and red if you’re not. Under this banner are five large green tiles: Computer, Web Browsing, Identity, Emails, and Firewall. Each tile displays a warning if you are not secure.

Below this first line of tiles are five more tiles, slightly smaller and in teal: Fix Performance, Mobile Apps, Tablet Apps, Driver Update, and More from AVG. Two more tiles, in light teal, appear beneath those, containing buttons for scanning your system and checking for updates. Finally, the bottom of the screen hosts a white banner that lets you know how many days of protection you have left, depending on your subscription status.

This array of tiles makes AVG’s main screen seem a little overwhelming, and there’s no quick and easy way to get to the settings menu, either. The Advanced Settings area, which isn’t touchscreen-friendly, is indeed mostly for advanced users. AVG provides very few jargon-free explanations of its various settings.

AVG Internet Security 2014 offers good protection, but it’s perhaps most suitable for power users who want a lot of advanced options at their fingertips.

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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Toshiba Excite 10 LE Review: Lightweight Tablet, Unfortunate Display

In a sea of me-too tablet slabs, the Toshiba Excite 10 LE—running Android 3.0 (Honeycomb)—distinguishes itself on two key metrics. First, at 1.18 pounds, it's the lightest 10-inch-size tablet we've seen to date. Second, it's the slimmest, measuring just 0.3 inch thick. Sadly, Toshiba made a few questionable design choices in its construction and display that detract from using it, and make it a poor choice.

Another reason to stay clear: You'll be paying a little extra for the 16GB version: $530, versus $499 for the 16GB Apple iPad. (For 32GB, you'll pay $600—the same price as Apple's iPad, but $100 more than Asus charges for its same-capacity—and better-performing—Transformer Prime.)

Design Trade-Offs

Make no mistake about the engineering significance of Toshiba's Excite 10 LE: Constructed of magnesium alloy, the tablet feels noticeably lighter than competing models, including the close-in-weight Samsung Galaxy Tab Wi-Fi 10.1 (1.23 pounds). The Excite 10 LE was well balanced in the hand, and felt easy to hold one-handed in the vertical or portrait orientation, a common way of holding a tablet for reading books, magazines, and the like. No fewer than a dozen editors around the office handled the Excite, and all preferred the weight of the Excite over that of the Apple iPad 2, the current iPad, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, or the Asus Transformer Prime.

The slim design does come with some trade-offs in physical construction. For one thing, the tablet is squared off around the bottom edges, which means that the Excite lacks the comfy, smooth tapering found on the iPad 2, the third-generation iPad, and the Asus Transformer Prime. For another, the edges of the tablet have some give and some gaps, so that they actually flex away from the Gorilla Glass screen. While I wouldn't go so far as to say it feels as if it would snap in use, I wouldn't want to toss it into a jammed backpack and put any serious stress on it; an iPad could withstand that, but the Excite does not feel as if it would.

A few more design gripes, and one plus: The plus is that the Excite conveniently puts all of its ports—including microUSB (with support for USB On-the-Go, an unusual find), micro-HDMI, and microSD—in a row, along the left-hand side in landscape orientation. Above those ports sits the awkwardly-placed headphone jack. And the the slim, hard-plastic buttons for power, volume, and rotation lock—running along the top of the tablet when you hold it in landscape mode—lack distinction and are awkward to adjust, which makes them decidedly annoying to use. Finally, Toshiba continues to rely on a bulky proprietary charging cable that plugs into the centrally located dock connector (and jacks into the USB brick for power). Yet, oddly, you don't use this cable to transfer data directly to the tablet; for that task, you'll need a microUSB cable.

Mediocre Performance

The Excite 10 LE is the first Honeycomb tablet I've used in a while that had quite as many glitches and crashes as the Excite did. The Excite uses Texas Instruments' OMAP 4430 processor, which makes me speculate that perhaps Toshiba and TI need to work harder on optimizing the Excite hardware to work with Android 3.2.1 Honeycomb. Or perhaps Toshiba's implementation of the OMAP processor somehow makes processing tradeoffs in order to provide better battery life and performance in the tablet's slim form.

Whatever the reason, be aware that the Excite, with its launch software, crashed often on Google's own apps. The camera app crashed frequently; so did the Gallery app, e-mail, and the Web browser. Other programs I tried seemed fine; still others seemed to chug along compared with a smoother experience on other Android models. Toshiba says the Excite is upgradable to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, but really, with no solid ETA for that upgrade, it's a thin promise from a company that hasn't had a good update track record. It's also odd that it's taking Toshiba so long, since the company doesn't do any custom launchers or overlay tweaks to Android; instead, the company just loads on a bunch of apps to get you going out the gate, apps that include Netflix, Quickoffice, and Toshiba's own media player app.

Besides crashes, I noticed another glitch in the Gallery app when I viewed a folder of high-resolution digital SLR images. Like some other Android tablets (including several of the Samsung Galaxy Tab models running the TouchWiz software), the Excite struggles with properly rendering these high-resolution images on the first go. At least, though, the Excite gets there, sharpening up the preview render without requiring you to do something like zooming into the image first (as the affected Samsung models do). But it takes a moment, and your eyes can often feel as if someone's playing a trick on you.

Beyond the glitchy software, the Excite has a few other performance issues. Specifically, overall responsiveness was sluggish, and the touchscreen didn't always respond smoothly to my fingers.

The Excite 10 LE scored poorly in our display tests, too. The display lacked the color accuracy and clarity of like-resolution tablets. More critically, all of our test screens—from still images to a Web page to test patterns—were marred by a tattoolike pattern imprinted on the display. The pattern is actually the touchscreen interface itself, and it's more distracting—more visible—than the usual screen-door, gridlike touch technologies seen on other tablets.

On our SunSpider JavaScript benchmark browser speed test, the Excite was right in the mix, and on our custom Web-page loading test, it took 2.9 seconds to load a page—faster than the iPad 2's 3.3 seconds, and slower than the Transformer Prime's 2.6 seconds. On the GLBenchmark test with antialiasing off, it was competitive with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Wi-Fi, at 30.9 frames per second, but far short of the Transformer Prime's 56 fps. Finally, in our subjective testing, stills and videos produced by the Excite's camera were judged only fair; images had a lot of noise, and lacked sharpness.

Bottom Line

Physically, the Excite 10 LE still excites me, but solely from the standpoint of the ideal it represents in weight and size. I look forward to the day when tablet makers can achieve lighter weights and thinner designs, as the Excite has, but do so without making a slew of usability, performance, and price tradeoffs. As it stands, however, this lightweight tablet has to be relegated to the annals of tablet experiments.

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

More Juice Please: All Lightweight Laptops Should Last 10+ Hours

In the rush to hook know-nothing consumers mindlessly scannning the shelves at retail, looking for shiny objects, too many notebook makers have forgotten the true meaning of “ultraportable” as they manufacturer systems that get little more than half a day’s battery life. Sure, everyone wants a notebook that’s wafer thin, blinged out with brushed metal or soft-touch rubber, and lighter than Kodak’s bank account, but not when that $1,000 system takes a siesta first thing after lunch. There’s only one solution: higher-capacity batteries.

With the noteworthy exception of the HP Folio 13, which lasted a solid 7 hours and 50 minutes on the LAPTOP Battery Test, all of the Ultrabook notebooks we’ve tested have gotten less than 7 hours of battery life, with ASUS’s UX31 lasting just 5-hours and 58 minutes and Acer’s pitiful S3 dying after only 4:23.

Ultrabooks aren’t alone in trading precious minutes of productivity for a smaller chassis. While not officially labeled as “Ultrabooks,” the MacBook Air 13-inch lasts just 6.5 hours while the new Samsung Series 9 endures for only 4:48. In LAPTOP’s tests, the average thin-and-light notebook (14-inches, less than 5 pounds) endures for a little over 6 hours while the average ultraportable (13-inches or less, lighter than 4 pounds) lasts just 6:39.

If those numbers don’t sound bad to you, let me put them in perspective. The LAPTOP Battery test we used to get the above runtimes measures a common, but not very taxing use case, surfing the web at 40 percent brightness and loading up a new page every 30 seconds. If you’re pushing up the brightness level or you want to do something more intense like crunching a video, viewing an HD movie, or playing a game, you can expect less endurance than we encountered. But even if your usage habits allow you to  get a full 5 or 6 hours of life, that’s simply not enough endurance for real all-day use.

The standard battery life for any laptop that weighs less than 5 pounds should be 10 hours or more. Whether you’re working on an international flight, going from meeting to meeting at the office, or sitting on the couch at home with your lightweight notebook,  you need that amount of time to avoid battery panic. Even if you’re not using the notebook for 10 consecutive hours, you ought to be able to use it on and off throughout the day, without even worrying about its charge level. 

As I write this article, I’m sitting on my couch with my 13-inch notebook unplugged. In this location, I have relatively easy access to a wall socket, but I don’t plug in, because being tethered to the wall is still unpleasant as I have to worry about yanking the wire, sitting on the wire or watching my cats knock over the adapter. Though the system gets a full 5 hours of battery life under optimal conditions, I’m down under 50 percent after just a couple of hours of work and must start thinking about either plugging in or lowering the brightness to uncomfortable levels. I shouldn’t have to deal with that distraction.  

When I’m in my office, carrying my notebook from conference room to conference room, I often have to carry my AC adapter with me and sit near an outlet or string my power cord across the room and hope nobody trips on it. Trade shows like CES are the biggest battery challenge of all, as I spend 12 to 14 hours a day running to a series of hotels and conventions centers writing articles and editing videos with no time at all to stop and recharge. I’ll often have to go out of my way or crouch down on a hard floor, just to find an outlet I can sit next to. 

Smartphone companies are starting to get it. After a 2011 year in which manufacturers released a slew of 4G handsets with anemic endurance, Motorola recently showed its competitors the right way to build a device when it released the Droid RAZR Maxx with a high-capacity 3300 mAH battery on-board that allowed it to last through over 8 hours of continuous use. Compare that to phones like the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, whose 1850 mAH battery only gave it enough juice to last 3 hours and 40 minutes on our test.

Notebook makers need to learn from Motorola’s example and beef up their battery offerings, even if that means charging more money for their products or increasing the chassis size.  The longest-lasting notebook on the market, Lenovo’s ThinkPad X220 lasts a whopping 12 hours and 39 minutes with its extended 9-cell battery. The trade-off for moving up from its default battery is a 1-inch battery bump in the back and an additional .2 pounds of weight, well worth it for nearly 5 additional hours of battery life and the ability to leave your .5 pound AC adapter in the hotel room.

If you get the right kind of battery, you can even pack a lot of juice into a very small space. The RAZR Maxx, for example, is only .07 inches thicker than the original RAZR, yet gets nearly double its battery life. Sure, Motorola is charging $100 more for the thicker battery, but it’s worth it.

With phones, users expect to be able to leave their chargers at home, spend 16 hours using them on and off, and then plug in when they sleep at night. You ought to be able to do the same with a notebook and you could, if notebook makers would stop racing to make their products 0.2-inches thinner, 0.2 pounds lighter, and a few dollars cheaper and focus on what users really need from a lightweight laptop. As consumers, we need to support this effort by purchasing longer-lasting notebooks.

Fortunately, if you’re in the market for a notebook today, you don’t need to wait for the industry to get its act together. You just need to make the most of the long-lasting choices available today and be willing to purchase a system that’s available with an extended battery or a battery slice. In many cases, your best choice is a business-oriented notebook, but that doesn’t mean consumers should hesitate. For example, the corporate-minded Lenovo Thinkpad T420 with 9-cell battery costs less than $850 but lasts over 10 hours on a charge. The $1,399 Sony VAIO S lasts nearly 11 hours with an attached battery slice.

In the end, every extra penny you spend on a notebook with a high-capacity battery will be worth a dollar saved in therapy costs for low-battery phobia. If only vendors understood this.

From Laptopmagazine. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center Here