External hard drive question/advice needed

resnikov

Bushcrafter (boy, I've got a lot to say!)
I think that AVG may be having something to do with your slow speeds. I had it on my old pc running xp then after one of their updates the machine was very slow and a quick google suggested that AVG was to blame.. I removed it and installed microsofts own security essentials, which is free and the machine ran fine after that.

plus 1 to this.
 

Shewie

Mod
Dec 15, 2005
24,259
26
49
Yorkshire
It's interesting to hear the AVG problems, when I first installed it a few years ago nobody had a bad word to say about it and it just chugged along quite happily in the background. The 2013 version just kills my PC when it kicks off a scan, not to mention the annoying pop-ups about PC performance.

I'll have a look at the MS Essentials as I think it's time for a change
 

rik_uk3

Banned
Jun 10, 2006
13,320
27
70
south wales
I'm running my home network computers on MS Security essentials and have been virus free from day one Shewie, thats six PC's alone plus portable stuff. I used AVG for years but found it clunky and it seemed to slow performance down so got shot of it.

There are some good free AV programmes about these days, all do a great job depending upon which review you read.
 

ADz-1983

Native
Oct 4, 2012
1,603
11
Hull / East Yorkshire
ESET NOD32 or the full suite Smart Security is my top choice.

AVG is feeble and also gives you allot of false positives at same time as letting real malwarw through.

Microsoft Security Essentials was great however has failed allot of independant tests recently.

ESET, Kaspersky and BitDefender are top 3 IMHO.

Even have ESET on tablet/mobile ;-)




Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 4
 
Last edited:

mousey

Bushcrafter (boy, I've got a lot to say!)
Jun 15, 2010
2,210
254
43
NE Scotland
I had AVG along time ago [when it was new[ish] and pretty good] then was given a computer with a year of kaspersky on it, which was great until the subscription ran out and they wanted to charge me [Unfortuantley money is always tight with me]. Now I've got comodo which apparently had good reviews and has worked quite well for me so far [about 1.5 year]
 

HWMBLT

Member
Apr 2, 2009
17
0
Bothwell
I would not go for buying a large drive. If it fails you lose all your data. Two 500 G drives are a better idea than 1 1TB drive.
Scarey figures from Google who use huge numbers of off the shelf drives in their data centres. 1.6% of drives fail in the first year. This figure rises to 8% after 3 years.
I would not rely on DVDs for long term storage I have some that are unreadable after 3 years.
 

Swallow

Native
May 27, 2011
1,552
4
London
Does anyone on here run Ubuntu?

Ages ago I put it on a PC that was very past it's sell by date, something like a 500Mhz process in the days of 3GHz processors. And with Ubuntu on it punched well above it's weight.

The only reason I didn't stick with it at the time was that it was a pain to install the stuff that allowed you to watch DVDs (at the time it needed a bunch of command line stuff) but other than that I was very happy with it.

Loads of free stuff (that gets updated) comes with it including an Office Suite clone that opens Office files.
 

rik_uk3

Banned
Jun 10, 2006
13,320
27
70
south wales
I would not go for buying a large drive. If it fails you lose all your data. Two 500 G drives are a better idea than 1 1TB drive.
Scarey figures from Google who use huge numbers of off the shelf drives in their data centres. 1.6% of drives fail in the first year. This figure rises to 8% after 3 years.
I would not rely on DVDs for long term storage I have some that are unreadable after 3 years.

I would have agreed with you a few years ago when drives were very expensive, but the large drives are so cheap now just run two or more as I do. 500gb drive £27, 1TB drive £39, 2TB £69, 3TB £94 http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Storage/Hard+Drives/ I doubt they'll make 500gb drives for much longer. I remember my first hard drive was a 10mb and I thought I'd never fill it lol, I now use around 12TB mostly for my film collection.
 

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