NORTON INTERNET SECURITY 2012 - A complete package that offers robust tools to help u protect your PC

 

Rs 2,530

(1 year of protection for 3 PCs)

Rs 1,165
(1 year of protection for 1 PC)

www.symantec.com/en/in/

System Requirements

OS: Windows XP/Vista/7; RAM: 256 MB; Drive space: 300 MB.

      

 

Your data today is more vulnerable to threats, more so because it tends to be scattered across the cloud. Although most cloud networks tend to be quite secure, gateways to malware tend to open up when you try to connecting your PC to the Internet.

Thus, just an anti-virus protection at times doesn’t suffice. Instead of setting up multiple protection software like an anti-virus and firewall that also affect the normal performance of your PC, you can opt for an Internet security package instead, which offers an all-in-one solution to put less load on your system resources.

Features

Targeted towards home Internet users, who want better control over their security suite, Norton Internet Security 2012 is a power packed tool. A few notches better than the 2012 Antivirus tool from Norton, the Internet Security suite offers a potent antivirus and spyware tool along with online identity theft protection. The Internet Security suite also provides Norton Online Family security for child-friendly browsing options. While installing the application, users can opt to be a part of the Norton Community Watch program that aims at controlling digital cybercrimes by forwarding data automatically to Symantec.

 

A strong Firewall

The firewall set up is probably one of the strongest facets of the tool. It not only blocks every popup effectively, but also stops users from killing the process from the task manager or even altering registry entries, making your machine secure to the core. The anti-spam mechanism is very robust too and boasts of high accuracy rates.

Keeping your identity protected

You can sync passwords across multiple computers using the Identity Safe login using your online Norton Account details. Identity Safe also lets you automate the process of filling Web forms using Identity Cards. You can create multiple identity cards with personal information, email and address, phone numbers, and one credit card. While the Identity Safe tool helps users save passwords and autofill forms, the service doesn’t start as a popup, but remains docked as a tool bar on your browser, making it less intrusive and easy to locate and use whenever needed. 

 

Well Integrated

Although the Internet Security suite doesn’t come with a built-in parental control tool, online back up or mobile security features, it gives you access to connect to these services using the main window. So if you use any of these features, you can still use them via the home page of the Internet Security interface.

SONAR 4.0

In a bid to curb FakeAV detection, Internet Security 2012 features the SONAR Policy Enforcement that can block processes that are suspicious. While this feature of the tool is aggressive, it does tend to go overboard by blocking even legitimate programs, making it a tad bit annoying.

 

Verdict

Norton has surpassed not just its earlier versions of the Internet Security suite, but has emerged as one of the strongest security tools to date. The decluttered interface and quick reference system insights, along with detailed reports help you understand the workings of your PC better.  It is not very resource-intensive either. Once you close applications connecting to the internet, the suite also reduces system usage accordingly. 

Tools To Analyse Your Website

Woorank

The excellent Woorank provides an unparalleled service, with both it’s gorgeous interface, ease of use and sheer number of stats it gives you. The image below is a small snippet of the data it provided for this site. Woorank’s services are free once a week, however for a more in-depth analysis, along with unrestricted usage, you are required to purchase a plan, along with which you get bonuses such as a PDF document of your stats, and report customization. It shows you how your site looks on mobile devices, such as the iPad and iPhone, which is a useful bonus.

What makes Woorank really special is its rating system, which it displays at the top of your stats page. Your rating is calculated from all your stats, and also a checklist of site elements that Woorank consider essential, although these may not be in the case of individual sites, so may skew the stats a little. It also reviews the SEO of each site, which is something that not many other sites include, which is very useful for site admins.

Alexa

Alexa offers free tools on its site, and boasts a very powerful search function, guessing, as Google does, your search before you’ve finished typing it, search it’s database of sites. It will then rank your result by traffic and keywords. Alexa’s most notable feature is its ‘reputation’ score, which is simply the number of sites that link to yours, showing your site’s influence throughout the web—it also ranks your site against all the others listed in Alexa; interestingly, WDD fared slightly better on Alexa than on Woorank, however this is because Woorank aggregates it’s score from a variety of third party sites, including Alexa. Along with traffic stats, it tells you the top search queries that have led to your site, which will help with SEO analysis, and then it also tells you how to improve your SEO by indicating powerful keyword used by competitors.

For the demographic side of things, Alexa will tell you the age, education level, browsing location, gender and even whether they have children or not. Now whilst these aren’t going to be 100% accurate, they will provide a broad understanding of your viewership. As a free set of tools, Alexa is nigh on faultless, given the amount of data it provides, even giving you ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ sites, where users visited immediately before and after your site. The interface needs some work, however, and for the average user may prove a little complicated—it also doesn’t offer the security and peace of mind in reliability of statistics that paid sites can. However there is the AlexaPro packages, which users can purchase should they wish to further their analytics.

Compete

Compete analytics offers an interface good looking enough to parallel that of Woorank’s, offering tremendous ease of use. It offers surprisingly little, however, in terms of free analytics, instead giving you a taster of what to expect from the paid packages. It shows a graph of unique visitors, and then monthly and yearly change, both as raw numbers and percentages. Besides that, the only other stats offered is the site’s Compete rank, again with monthly and yearly change.

It’s main feature on the paid plan, evident through the site’s marketing, and namesake, is showing your stats alongside those of competitors, so you can easily see what they’re doing that you’re not, and vice versa—key to getting ahead on the web.

Google Analytics

An obvious choice, and widely used, Google Analytics is especially useful when used in conjunction with the entire suite of Google software. An attractive option, especially if your site uses WordPress as it’s CMS, as Google offer a plugin, so you can see your Google Analytics Stats directly on your dashboard. As mentioned earlier, other Google products, specifically AdSense work seamlessly with Analytics, being built into the interface.

As far as criticism goes for this tool, it doesn’t offer the trademark simplicity of Google, instead burying itself in numerous levels of confusingly organized menus, despite a recent redesign. This is typical of Google’s more niche software however, and is perfectly useable for the majority of people. Besides that, the interface is fairly user friendly, and once you’ve found the particular stats you were looking for, they’re laid out in a very easy to read way. The export functionality is a great feature of Google analytics, allowing you to analyze and edit your data in a number of different formats, besides storing it offline. You can also opt in to having your Analytics emailed to you, at intervals of your choice, which could be hugely useful.

Wordstream

Wordstream offers similar analytical tools to the others, however it is not a ‘traditional’ toolset – it comes with built in marketing software, allowing you to act financially upon changes in your site. WordStream’s Web analytics reporting is designed to present you with data based on actual search traffic, that is specifically useful for your search engine marketing campaigns. So it effectively cuts out the middleman of you trying to decipher the relevant pieces of data from your analytics results. Wordstream ensures that every piece of data collected through web analytics is introduced into a dashboard that allows you take action, by quickly grouping and organizing keywords, attaching ad text, and then posting them to your Google AdWords account instantly.

Top Android Apps For Students

Wikipedia

This application does not need any introduction. It is one of the most used reference sites in the world and is being referred to by practically everyone. If you need to quickly look up a term or want to know something in detail, just go through the app.

The Wikipedia app on Android has more than 20 million articles in 280 languages, and is the most comprehensive and widely used reference work humans have ever compiled. You can save articles to read later or offline, search articles nearby, share articles using Android's 'share' function, or even read an article in a different language.

Formulas Lite

This is one of the best educational applications available in the Android Market today. The app has different sections that include Subjects, Calculators, Translator, Math Invasion, Web Reference and Facts.

In the subjects section, the app lists Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry. The developers are also about to add a dictionary section, which is currently inactive. Each subject has further been divided into sub sections. So if you want to know about Torque, just click on Physics and then click on Torque; or if you want to know about Statistics, go to Mathematics.
All the three subjects have been very well covered. Of course you cannot use it for comprehensive studies, but Formulas Lite, as the name suggests, is of immense help to students who want a quick revision just before a test. Since you have it on your phone, you can read it anytime, anywhere.
Besides, Formulas Lite has a Calculator, Translator, Facts and Web Reference sections. The calculator, though, is not a normal one; in fact, it provides five different types of calculators including a scientific calculator, unit converter, function derivator, binary-hex-decimal, and simple calculator.
With Translator, you can translate any English word to any of the languages listed on this app. There are no Indian languages, though; nor did it work properly when we tried. Translator perhaps works when you are connected to the internet but since it failed each time I tried, I cannot comment on this.
As the name suggests, Web Reference enables you to search for something on Wikipedia, Physics Forum, Maths Forum or Chemistry Forum. For Web Reference too you need an internet connection. The Facts section lists interesting data under various headings like celebrity, human body etc.
So all in all, Formulas Lite is a very interesting app that will prove to be helpful for students especially, enabling quick revision whenever and wherever they want.

Evernote

"Evernote turns your Android device into an extension of your brain,” its developers claim and no doubt it does that with ease. With Evernote you can create notes which can be in text, picture or voice and even video, or a mix of all these. Plus, you'll never lose these Notes as they are automatically saved on the cloud, which can be accessed anytime from any computer or mobile phone using an internet connection.

So you can take notes during class and study them later. Even if you lost your phone you can retrieve notes by accessing your Evernote app using a PC, smartphone or tablet.

Merriam Webster Dictionary

Merriam Webster is one of the more famous dictionaries and is referred to by many worldwide. In addition to all the definitions from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, this app offers voice search - to let you look up a word without having to spell it - along with synonyms, antonyms, example sentences, Word of the Day, and more. It's a great tool for reference, education, and vocabulary building.

You can also keep a list of words that are particularly interesting to you. Besides, in the Recent History tab, you can see the words you've looked up earlier. The app is free and does not have any ads. And, you do won't need an internet connection to view any of the definitions.

CamScanner

As the name suggests, this application helps you scan documents and turn them into pdf files. In a nutshell, if you find a journal or a chapter in a book you came across very useful, just scan it using this app and save it for later. This way, you can save a lot of time and energy that would've been spent taking notes.

With CamScanner, you are able to digitise paper documents by photo shooting. Simply take a picture of paper documents such as receipts, whiteboards, notes, agreements and so forth, and CamScanner can auto-crop images, enhance image quality and create industry standard pdf files. And you can easily upload documents to cloud storage sites like Dropbox, Google Doc, Box.net, and then manage them by tagging or searching.
The free version of CamScanner comes with advertisements, and creates pdf files with watermarks. There is also a limitation of 50 documents, ten pages per document, and up to three scans each time in batch mode.

Top 4 Lightest laptops

Asus Zenbook UX21E-DH52:

This ultrabook which comes under the Asus Zenbook UX21 series weighs around 1.1Kg. The device comes with 11.6-inch screen, an Intel Core i5 processor, non-backlit keyboard, Nifty AC adapter, 4GB of RAM and 128GB solid-state drive. It supports mini-VGA, USB 2.0 ports, HDMI output, Ethernet dongles and Bluetooth for connectivity. This marvelously thin and light ultrabook costs Rs 52,200.

Toshiba Portege Z835-P330:

This light ultrabook weighs just 1.12kg and measures only 15.9mm thick at its thickest point. It comes with an option of been powered by Intel Core i3, i5 or i7 processors according to buyers choice and sports a 13.3-inch screen with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels, 128GB SSD, a backlit and spill-resistant keyboard, three USB ports-one 3.0 and two 2.0, SD card slot and a battery life of up to 8 hours. This ultrabook recently entered Indian market with a price tag of Rs 96,290.

Samsung Series 9 (NP900X3A-B01UB):

Samsung Series 9 laptops are not actually Ultrabooks, but the NP900X3A-B01UB model weighing just 1.31kg is highly portable and gorgeous. The device is engineered with 1.6GHz Intel Core i5-2467M processor, Intel HD Graphics 3000 graphic card, 4GB DDR3 memory and 128GB SSD. It features 13.3 inches screen with 1366 x 768 resolution and supports Ethernet ports, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, SD card reader and HDMI ports for connectivity. This sleek baby of Samsung costs around $999.

Sony VAIO VPC-YB35KX:

This netbook of Sony weights juts 1.4kg and comes with the best combination of processing and graphics with its AMD APU processor. The device has an 11.6-inch LED-backlit display with a resolution of 366 x 768 pixels, a 500GB SATA hard drive, a 4GB of installed DDR3 RAM and supports Bluetooth 2.1, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, HDMI, and two card reader slots for connectivity. This good looking netbook is affordable for Rs 28,500.