Burchwords

I’ve been saying this for a while, if a antivirus company starts to become successful its only a matter of time before it’s effectiveness is depleted or functionality is lost.

In the last week, I’ve either had to use different antivirus programs due to fact that certain aspects of the new AVG 8.0 will not work.

First Computer:
AVG 8.0 will not work if you have an out dated version of Roxio on your computer. I’ve tried to uninstall Roxio and clean up the registry, but the AVG installer reports that Roxio is still installed on the computer. Since I knew Roxio was gone, I installed AVG. After I rebooted the update service that keeps AVG running would not work, and you did not have the ability to do a full system scan. I had to take it off and I put Bitdefender on the system.

Second Computer:

After removing Roxio from another computer and AVG actually acknowledged that it was uninstalled, so I went ahead with the installation. Everything went great till i rebooted and went to do the updates. Now, pay attention to this: AVG installs some type of network service that hosed up the internet connection and there was not way for me to get around it. I justed uninstalled AVG again and put AntiVir on the system.

It’s like I said as soon as a software company starts with the glossy button and the fancy user interface all hope is lost. AVG use to be as simple as install and walk away, but now I fear that Grisoft has fallen in the path that Norton and McAfee chose to take.

Acronis has done it again. I’ve wrote about their past achievement with Universal Restore, now they have a software that will simplify backing up your Exchange server. It’s still in Beta phase, but looks very promising. If anyone is a beta tester for this product, I would love to know how it performs.

Here is their description of the product:

Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange includes features that make it easy for anyone to create and implement a Disaster Recovery plan for their email, including:

Easy-to-use, centralized Management Console auto-discovers all Exchange Servers on your network, providing status and other information on disaster recovery progress from one central location.

Automatically create Disaster Recovery Plans that analyze your backup needs and present intuitive information to assist even non-administrators determine the best disaster recovery strategy.

Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange includes features that give you the flexibility in implementing your Disaster Recovery plan, including:

Flexible backup options enable you to choose whether you want to backup the entire database, specific users’ mailboxes, or mailboxes based on criteria you provide. For example, you can choose to create a “brick-level” mailbox backup for the company executives.

A full range of recovery options enable you to recover data from the last known archive, a particular point-in-time, or from the Exchange server’s point-of-failure.

Granular recovery helps you restore specific emails or mailboxes, regardless of whether you have backed up the entire Exchange database, or only created “brick-level” backups of specific information.

Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange includes features that give you unparalleled reliability in implementing your Disaster Recovery plan, including:

Exchange Dial-Tone support, giving you even more flexibility and reliability in backing up and restoring your Exchange database.

Flexible storage options let you choose where your archives are automatically copied, be it on a local hard drive, network share, FTP server, or other external device.

AES industry standard encryption protects your company’s most valuable data ensuring that your organization’s private information is safe and secure.

Acronis Recovery for Microsoft Exchange will be available in April 2008, and will support Microsoft Exchange Server 2000, or later, running on Windows 2000 Server, or later.