Avast Internet Security (2014) review: short on security

Avast is a company perhaps best known for its free antivirus software. But paying for Avast Internet Security 2014 ($40 for one year of protection on one PC) will get you such premium features as a robust firewall, online banking security, and phishing and scam email protection.

Avast blocked 89 percent of zero-day (unknown) attacks in our real-world tests. That result may sound pretty good, but most of the suites in our roundup blocked 98 percent or more of such attacks. In our roundup, only Vipre Internet Security 2014 (at 87 percent) and Webroot SecureAnywhere Internet Security Complete (at 82 percent) fared worse in the real-world tests.

When it comes to known malware attacks, Avast looks better on paper, blocking 98 percent of those attacks, except that all nine other security suites in our test group blocked 99 percent or more of them. Avast’s detection system properly ignored all of the innocuous programs, websites, and installations that AV-Test threw at it.

Avast Internet Security has plenty of advanced options for those who like to tinker.

In AV-Test’s performance evaluations, Avast scored a low-impact 2—below average (in a good way) for a security suite. You system won’t take much of a performance hit by using Avast.

Installing Avast Internet Security 2014 takes you through just a couple of screens. Regrettably, one of those screens is a software push for installing Google Chrome as your default browser and the Chrome Toolbar for Internet Explorer. Ironically, one of the suite’s services is a browser cleanup tool that “removes annoying browser toolbars from your computer.” Avast’s installer relies heavily on the Internet, so the installation process can be time-consuming if you have a slow connection.

Avast’s interface is easy to use, but its multiple colors and font sizes say “freeware” rather than “premium security suite.” The main screen features a large banner that indicates protection level: A green checkmark is good, and a red x is bad. Under the main status are four buttons: ‘Quick scan’, ‘Browser cleanup’, ‘Mobile protection’, and an empty button that you can use to add a quick link to any feature (even help and support).

The rest of Avast’s options, including tools such as SafeZone (for banking and shopping protection), SecureLine (VPN), and a link to Avast’s online store, are discoverable through a menu on the left. VPN service is a nice extra: If you connect to a new network, Avast prompts you to select a protection level (private or public) to keep you safe while you’re browsing the Web.

Average users might find Avast’s settings menu intimidating. Few explanations accompany the top-level menus. The sheer quantity of advanced settings is daunting, and Avast’s explanations are geared toward fairly experienced users. Though the buttons and toggles are touchscreen-friendly, none of the menus let you tap and drag to scroll—you have to use the tiny, thin scrollbars instead.

Despite its clunky interface, Avast Internet Security 2014 offers many features you won’t find in other security suites. It could be worth considering if you favor range of features over ease of use.

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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OCR makes short work of digitizing your docs

The file cabinet looms large in the office, yet it guards its secrets jealously...even from you. It's time to convert those papers to space-saving, easy-to-find digital documents. For that, you need a scanner to turn them into digital images and an Optical Character Recognition program to convert those images into editable and searchable documents. I took four of the latest OCR programs and a free online OCR service for a test spin. All of them work to varying degrees.

To test the programs, I ran 22 varied and not particularly clean scans of documents—including one hand-written note—through four OCR programs and one free service. I looked for accuracy in text recognition, image extraction, and the ability to recreate them in a Word document. In addition, I processed 264 separate scans from a yearbook for output as a searchable PDF.

You don't actually need to install OCR software if you need to convert only a couple of small documents. You can use a free service such as Free-OCR (also known as Free-OCR.com) and upload a scan of your document. File size is limited to 2MB and 5000 pixels in any direction, which is about 150 dpi for a standard page. The OCR engine handles 29 languages, including English.

Free-OCR makes you jump through a CAPTCHA hoop, but does it apologetically.

Although you don't have to register or even fork over your email address, the Free-OCR site does make you fill in one of those annoying CAPTCHAs. (Thanks, Web bad guys, for making everyone's life more difficult.) However, those CAPTCHAs serve to remind one just how difficult OCR can be. If humans, with our incredible heuristic abilities, occasionally have problems with these, just think how poor straight-line software perusing a stream of bits must feel.

Free-OCR did a decent job of extracting the text from the test documents. With standard typed pages, you should have no problems as long as you don't have fancy plans for the scanned text: The site does not output files or recreate documents. It simply places the extracted text in a box for cutting and pasting. As a matter of fact, embedded graphics tend to confuse the output.

Free-OCR s text capture works well, but even simple graphics confuse the website.

Free-OCR is not suitable for large jobs or overly complex documents, but when all you need is to quickly get the text out of a basic document scan, it will do nicely in most cases.

Tip: Use Microsoft Paint to reduce the size of any image you wish to use to 150 dpi.

FreeOCR is a nice, simple front-end for HP's public-domain Tesseract OCR engine (now used by Google) and is roughly the installable equivalent of the unrelated Free-OCR website. It interfaces directly with scanners in addition to importing image files, and it extracts text into a box from which you can cut and paste. The program is extremely easy to use and works well if all you want is text. It even extracts text from PDFs, though it exports only to text.

FreeOCR, though unrelated to Free-OCR, is just as easy to use.

FreeOCR processes only one image at a time, but will OCR multi-page PDFs. And, unlike the Free-OCR website, there's no limit on file size. Also, FreeOCR can create Word and RTF documents from the text it extracts, but it's just pasted text: There's no attempt to reconstruct the document or place images.

Read this dialog box and select your options carefully when clicking through FreeOCR's installation.

As far as it goes, FreeOCR is a neat little program, though it tries to install toolbars and reset your browser home page. You can install the program while cancelling and declining all offers (though it's unintuitive and the negative response buttons are grayed out). If you couldn't do that, you wouldn't be reading about FreeOCR 4.2 in this roundup.

X is a busy character these days. Not only is it still used traditionally in words, it's featured in the end of movie credits as the Roman "10," and has achieved rock star status as shorthand for eXtreme. It's even used in the name of Acrobat XI. Best of all, it can be used to illustrate one the major tools available to OCR technologists for recognizing symbols: context, i.e., looking at what surrounds a character to help identify it.

Acrobat XI Standard is very good at leveraging context and does a bang-up job of recreating entire documents, including text, images, and layout, then outputting them as the increasingly popular editable PDFs, .RTF, and Word docs. If outputting documents that look like the original is your focus, it's great. It is, however, a little less aggressive and slightly less successful at extracting text from some images than Nuance OmniPage and Abbyy FineReader, which are reviewed below.

The Readiris OCR engine gives Adobe Acrobat XI an edge in accuracy.

Acrobat XI lacks the side-by-side comparison of original documents with their recreated doppelgangers that most programs offer: Word, RTF, and the like are simply saved. However, the output files are very accurate (thanks to the Readiris OCR engine), and you can fine-tune the results of PDFs in-line with the "Find OCR suspects" function.

Although Acrobat XI is primarily for PDFs, its OCR is so good that you can easily forgo an auxiliary OCR program if you buy it. But at $499 for the Pro version and $299 for Standard, it is expensive. OmniPage and FineReader perform OCR and handle the PDF basics for considerably less cash.

OmniPage 18 Standard ($150) is Acrobat XI's equal at outputting Word files and editable PDFs, and it also does a very good job of extracting pure text. By default, it's a tad aggressive at rotating images trying to find text to extract. However, you can disable this behavior in the settings dialog.

At defaults, Omnipage 18 Standard is a tad aggressive about rotating images. But you can turn this behavior off, and it did a great job making an editable version of my high-school yearbook.

OmniPage features the side-by-side comparison editing of all types of files that Acrobat's lacks, and its interface is bit more flexible than Abbyy FineReader's, allowing you to arrange the various panes in more ways. Like Acrobat, OmniPage also provides a batch manager for automating multiple jobs.

OmniPage Ultimate 19 is the real news for this industry stalwart. The new $500 Ultimate marries OCR with company's speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies from Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and starts a transition to a Windows 8-style interface. Though those aren't strictly OCR features, it does mean the program is morphing into a jack-of-all-trades translation tool. Maybe Nuance will even consider handwriting OCR in the future.

Anyone who's purchased a multifunction printer or scanner recently will probably recognize the name FineReader, as the Sprint version ships with many such products. Obviously, there are deals being made, but there's no questioning that the program also does a very nice job of OCR. Text extraction is great, though it's not quite as good at recreating complex documents in Word and RTF files as Acrobat or OmniPage.

Abbyy's dual-paned interface makes it easy to compare originals to OCR.

FineReader is straightforward and easy to use. The main window shows a list of images in a column to the far left, the image being processed in a pane next to it, and the OCR'd text and elements in a pane on the right side. This side-by-side arrangement, shared with OmniPage, makes it super-easy to spot mistakes and compare page elements.

Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional is fast, recognizes text in 189 languages, and outputs in a number of different formats including ePub, editable PDFs, Microsoft Word, and even open-source PDF competitor DjVu.

FineReader created a searchable PDF of my yearbook scans just fine, but like OmniPage, it was over-zealous at rotating images trying to find text until I turned off this feature. With most OCR programs, you're better off using Windows' own Photo Viewer to rotate scans to their correct orientation before OCR'ing.

While the $170 Professional Edition that I tested slightly more expensive than OmniPage Standard, it is also available in a capable $50 Express 9 version.

OCR programs are as useless unless they have digitized images to work with. For that, you need a scanner.

A fast sheet-fed scanner that scans both sides of the page simultaneously is worth its weight in gold for anyone with lots of two-sided business documents to transfer into the digital domain. HP's Scanjet Professionals or Fujitsu's ScanSnaps are available for under $500.

A garden-variety A4/letter-sized flatbed scanner such as Canon's $200 CanoScan 9000F or similar is great for small to standard-sized photos, magazine articles, etc.

For oversized books, such as atlases or the high-school yearbook used in my testing, you'll need something that handles larger documents. I used Plustek's pricey but fast $600 Optic Pro A320. Mustek makes a variety of cheaper, albeit slower large-format scanners.

TIp: Most scanners bundle competent, albeit less comprehensive, versions of the software we've covered. Grab your scanner first, then see if you need to upgrade the software.

If PDFs are your focus, then Acrobat XI is a very good choice, though you'll pay a lot for either Standard or Pro. Most users will be just fine with the less expensive OmniPage Standard 18 or Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional version. OmniPage gets a slight nod if you're outputting RTF or Word documents, but it's otherwise a tie.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Juilliard, and now he power-mods his car for kicks.
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Sony VAIO L24 Review: A Media Juggernaut That's Short on Performance

Though the Sony VAIO L24 is by no means a powerhouse machine, it succeeds as a reasonably priced media center PC.

Priced at $1400 (as of May 24, 2012), the VAIO L24 is a fully functional desktop and HDTV. It comes configured with a 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-3210M dual-core processor that can accelerate to 3.1GHz with Intel's Turbo Boost Technology. Intel also supplies the system's integrated HD Graphics 4000. Rounding out the hardware are 6GB of DDR3 RAM, a 1TB (7200-rpm) hard drive for primary storage, and a Blu-ray Disc player.

The 24-inch LED multitouch screen supports a native high-definition resolution of 1920 by 1080. You can adjust the display settings through a touch panel on the lower right of the screen. The Home screen offers access to a plethora of settings options. Learning how much pressure to apply to the touch buttons took some time, but searching through all the settings is easy. The VAIO L24's multitouch capability should make it ready to work with Windows 8.

The VAIO L24 earned a score of 85 on our rigorous WorldBench 7 benchmark suite. That's not the worst score we've seen by any means, but it does fall below our baseline score of 100. Clearly this PC wasn't designed for power or performance, but for digital entertainment--particularly video, where the focus is on the screen.

Despite relying on integrated graphics, the VAIO L24 managed to squeeze through some strenuous game benchmarks at its highest quality settings, though at barely playable frame rates. It managed an average frame rate of 8.4 frames per second on Crysis 2 at a resolution of 1920 by 1080, and 35 fps on Dirt 3 at the same resolution. Even at a lower resolution (1024 by 768) and on low graphics quality settings, Sony's all-in-one averaged only about 26.2 fps on Crysis 2. So you can run these games, but the results probably won't be very enjoyable.

The VAIO L24 comes with a ton of applications, ranging from useful to gimmicky. Through a quick launch menu from the desktop, you gain access to recording tools, a calendar, games, and a media streamer. The VAIO Touch Portal has nine applications that show off the different capabilities of the multitouch screen. You also get a typical bunch of games that mimic popular flash games online, plus quite a few picture-arranging and drawing apps.

Among the VAIO L24's amenities are a 1.3-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a TV Tuner. Connectivity options include three USB 2.0 ports, three USB 3.0 ports, a slot for an SD Card, and an HDMI input/output port. The system's wireless keyboard and mouse let you dedicate the USB ports to other peripherals.

If you're not a fan of touchscreens, you might prefer the HP Omni 220 (priced at $1000 as of March 14, 2012). It earned an impressive mark of 106 on our WorldBench 7 test, thanks in part to its Intel Core i7 processor and discrete graphics card. The HP's lack of touchscreen support lowers its price as well.

The Sony VAIO L24 manages home entertainment tasks well, but it doesn't have a lot of oomph for jobs that rely on raw power. Cutting out relatively expensive hardware helped keep the all-in-one's cost down, but we wish that Sony had offered some upgrade options for buyers looking to get a top-performing media center. A couple of small upgrades could bring up the system's performance score significantly. I enjoyed some of the applications and features that take advantage of the touchscreen, but I don't think I would spend much time after the novelty wore off. Ultimately, this is the perfect product for consumers who are looking for a fun little appliance to take the place of an old computer and TV--two birds with one stone.

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Canon Pixma MG2120 Color Inkjet MFP: Basic With Pricey Black Ink and a Short Warranty

Depending on how much and what you print, the $70 (as of 03/07/2012), USB-attached Canon Pixma MG2120 color inkjet multifunction printer may be adequate for a home user. But its black ink is hardly a bargain, so if you print mostly text, you won't like the ongoing costs. On the other hand, if you normally print mixed text and color graphics, this MFP costs about the same to operate as most of the competition.

The Pixma MG2120 will handle low volumes of printing, copying, and scanning easily. Not surprisingly, given the price, it has no amenities such as an automatic duplexer, or an automatic document feeder (ADF) for the scanner. On the plus side, the lid for the letter/A4-size scanner telescopes to accommodate thicker material, and you can even push-scan by changing a setting in the scanner dialog. The single input tray handles about 100 sheets, and the output tray directly above it handles 50.

The control panel is rudimentary. The single-digit LED and array of flashing-light indicators can be hard to decipher, despite some good labeling. There are no media-card slots, nor is there a display for navigating menus or previewing photos.

Canon, unlike HP with its Photosmart 5010, offers a full-featured PC printer driver. The unit has the regular panoply of layout options such as booklet and "n-up," or tiled, pages (multiple pages reduced in size and printed on a single sheet of paper).

Mac users, however, will be disappointed: You'll find no manual duplexing support for the Mac, and Canon's solution for supporting Lion (OS X 10.7) was to send me to a website where I could find no download specifically for the Pixma MG2120, only those for more expensive models. Fortunately, Apple's own Add Printer installation found, downloaded, and installed a suitable driver for the unit.

The output from the Pixma MG2120 is decently fast considering the price and its intended low-volume usage. Text prints at about 5.8 pages per minute on the PC, and 5.7 ppm on the Mac; 4-by-6-inch photos print at 2.4 ppm on plain paper and at about half that rate on glossy photo paper. The full-page photo we print from the Mac takes a little less than 4 minutes, or 0.3 ppm--a bit slower than the norm. Scans and copies on the other hand, are a on par with, or quicker than, those of most MFPs.

The quality of the Pixma MG2120's output is about the same as that produced by other Canon Pixma MG-series printers. Text is not laserlike, but certainly serviceable, even for business correspondence. Color graphics have a warm, friendly vibe. They’re not terribly accurate in terms of their color palette, skewing orangeish even on Canon’s own photo paper. They do, however, show nice detail.

The Pixma MG2120's black ink is expensive no matter which size of cartridge you purchase. The PG-240XL Extra Large black cartridge costs $21 and lasts for 300 pages, which is a pricey 7 cents per page (cpp). The $38, 600-page PG-240XXL black cartridge is only slightly cheaper at 6.3 cpp. The tri-color CL-241XL cost $30 and lasts for 400 pages, or 7.5 cpp. That makes a four-color page 13.8 cpp at best, which is about average for an inkjet MFP.

Canon offers only a 90-day warranty on the Pixma MG2120. Before discovering that, I would've estimated that the construction of the unit would have it lasting far longer than three months. However, Canon's brief commitment to the unit should be noted.

If you print in low volume--a few pages a few times a week, or an occasional photo--then the economics of the Pixma MG2120 might work for you. For more frequent use, opt for something a tad pricier with better black-ink costs, such as the Brother MFC-J430W or the Epson Stylus NX430. Both of these units also carry a more reassuring one-year warranty.

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Webroot SecureAnywhere Essentials Review: Fast Security Suite Falls Short in Cleanup

Although Webroot Secure Anywhere Essentials 2012 ($80 for one year, three PCs as of January 29, 2012) finished toward the back of the highly competitive pack in our 2012 roundup of security suites, Webroot's newest offering shows lots of promise. SecureAnywhere represents a complete overhaul of Webroot's product line, with a brand-new interface and new internals to go along with it. The package is fast, and it's good at catching malware before the invader reaches your PC, but a higher-than-average false-positive rate and disappointing system-cleanup results keep it from ranking any higher.

Webroot's new offering is effective at stopping brand-new malware, as it blocked 96.2 percent of attacks in our real-world malware detection tests. That result pegs it right around average in this year's tightly bunched field. It also detected 99.49 percent of known malware samples--that's a better-than-average outcome, though a little short of the best performers, some of which detected over 99.99 percent of samples.

In a couple of areas, however, the Webroot suite struggled: For instance, it mistook 11 known safe files (out of a pool of over 250,000) as being potentially malicious. Although that is quite low percentage-wise, it was the poorest false-positive showing of the suites we looked at this year.

More worrisome was its inability to clean up malware that has already infected a PC: Webroot's package detected 60 percent of active malware infections, and managed to render just half of the infections inert. On both fronts, that was the poorest showing of our test group; the majority of the 2012 suites we evaluated were able to detect and disable all active malware infections on our test system. According to Webroot representatives, the company recently made some changes to the way its software cleans up malware infections that it says should improve matters. That said, we were unable to retest Webroot's claims of improved performance as of press time.

Webroot says that its new cloud-based SecureAnywhere suite is lightweight, and won't hog system resources. For the most part, that claim held true in our testing, as SecureAnywhere was the overall winner in our system-speed tests. Its impact on PC performance was minimal: It added less than half a second to PC startup time (as compared to our test PC with no antivirus installed), and it barely slowed file-download and file-copy operations.

Scan speeds were equally impressive. Webroot's suite completed our on-demand scan test--which shows how long a suite takes to check 4.5GB of files in a manually initiated scan--in a scant 59 seconds. That was easily the fastest time we saw in this particular test, and it was a full minute better than the average for the suites we looked at. The on-access scanner--which kicks off when you open or save files to disk--tore through 4.5GB of data in 2 minutes, 4 seconds, finishing 30 seconds faster than its nearest competitor. To put that latter test into context, the average completion time for the suites we evaluated was 4 minutes, 48 seconds.

We like Webroot's revised interface, too. Installation is a breeze--open the installer, enter your license key, and then click 'Agree and Install'. Once installed, the software will check your PC for malware. The main interface is nicely laid out: Five tabs along the left side of the main window let you access the suite's main features. The advanced settings screens can be a little technical in spots, but they too are well organized.

Despite its low ranking, Webroot's new product line offers a lot to like, and we look forward to seeing it develop over time. But should you buy it right now? If you're an existing Webroot user, Secure Anywhere Essentials 2012 is a definite improvement. For users of other products, we can't give Webroot SecureAnywhere a recommendation just yet. Nevertheless, if Webroot sorts out its malware-disinfection issues, SecureAnywhere might just turn into a real contender.

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