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January 21, 2004 |
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Dying to get your hands on the new Adobe Photoshop CS? You're not alone; many of your fellow CNET readers are, too. But there's more to this update than you may realize--namely, a nice deal on Adobe's new Creative Suite. |
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Photoshop
To be completely honest with our regular Buzz Report readers, Photoshop has always been a popular search term at CNET. But this week's spike in interest was caused mostly by the posting of our reviews of all of Adobe's Creative Suite Premium Edition components--including Photoshop CS. For the Photoshop curious, the good news is that this top-of-the-line Adobe app is still the best professional-grade image-editing program out there. According to our hands-on reviewer, Senior Editor Lori Grunin, "most serious users will find at least one feature that justifies the upgrade despite its steep price." (Those who don't need all the serious tools should look into a less expensive alternative, such as the top-rated Ulead PhotoImpact 8.0.) But if you're thinking of upgrading, you may want to go for the entire Creative Suite: Adobe has sweetened the pot with tempting pricing on a package that gets you full versions of the suite's other apps as well. So even if you need only one other element of the bunch, you'll get all five great apps for the price of two. |
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Trojan
A new year brings new creepy-crawlies from the depths of the Internet. And the nasty du jour seems to be a variety of Trojan horse that opens inroads to your PC that virus authors use to control your machine, whether to extract sensitive personal information or to use it to launch a denial-of-service attack. Last week, a couple of Trojan horses were on readers' radars: Downloader-GN, a small one that uploads the MiMail.p virus to the victim's computer and attempts to convince the user to type in personal and financial information; and Xombe, which comes packaged as e-mail from Microsoft's security team but, when launched, alters the Windows Registry and opens ports in order to listen for commands from a hacker. And this week, we have another Trojan threat called Bagle.a that opens up a back channel, similar to Xombe. To protect yourself from these invaders, arm yourself with a good antivirus program that can detect, isolate, and even purge these troublemakers from your system. Then, go the extra mile and install a personal firewall that keeps folks who'd like to use Trojan horses for their own purposes from accessing your machine. |
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Free firewall
Did you know that January 15 was Personal Firewall Day? If that sounds like a marketing ploy to you, you and I are of the same mind. But the good thing about this ploy is that it's truly about heightening consumer awareness about how to secure your system against invaders and keep important info from being sent out from your system (see Trojan, above). Whether you were all getting into the spirit of the day last week or simply trying to tune up your systems for the new year, many of you were searching for the best firewall at the best price: free. Lucky for you, our top-rated personal firewall, ZoneAlarm, also has an excellent free version. This package is easy to install, and it lets you know when other programs or processes attempt to access your Net connection or when an unknown outside source attempts a connection to your computer, allowing you to deny access. The one caveat about this free version is that you must also have a good antivirus app already installed, since the free ZoneAlarm is a firewall only. |
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Windows 98
You've probably been using Windows XP for a couple of years now, so wrap your early-adopter brains around this fact: there are a lot of people out there still cranking away on Windows 98 or even Windows 95. A study released last week by technology consultant AssetMetrix found that more than 80 percent of companies still have some machines using Windows 95 or 98. And consumers are in the same boat. Google reported that 29 percent of searches done in September came from machines running Windows 98, compared with 38 percent from Windows XP PCs and 20 percent from Windows 2000 machines. So, when Microsoft announced it was planning to stop supporting older products--including Windows 98--back in December, quite a few folks were concerned. Thankfully, last week, those users got some good news from Redmond; the giant said it will continue to support its aging OS until June 30, 2006. Now that that's out of the way, Windows 98 folks, maybe it's time to upgrade to XP. Believe those of us who use XP: it's way better. |
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