Roger Hall’s Post

Transcript

Service. After that it's like, what the heck do you do with your computer? And it could be very easy to accidentally end U with software on your computer that can hurt its performance. Is completely give you a a terrible experience or worse than that steal your information. So today we're going to talk about some of my top recommendations of items that should absolutely never make it to your PC. I'd like to point out also too that I'm going to be completely screwing my cookies on my own computer so I can go to the websites and show you the sites that you should be staying away from. First and foremost is Norton. Norton. My gosh, Norton used to just be a basic antivirus that back in its early days actually did its job. Unfortunately, Norton also became. A money making machine where it just decided to start building full suites and with that becomes a crap ton of costs, inconvenience, and to be honest just doesn't really do anything for your system. If you want to know how bad Norton affects the performance of your PC on top of just not really protecting you. Like the amount of stuff that actually makes it through Norton's malware sniffers and actual virus scans is insane. But run a benchmark with Norton running and then turn off Norton and run a benchmark. And you'd be surprised that absolutely how much resources Norton uses U. Of course you can't mention Norton without mentioning McAfee. Actually, if you're ever bored, actually just look up the story of McAfee himself. That's actually his name. You're gonna find a story of Houston and lavish vacations and stuff. Capades. It's actually. I think we had the probably mute some of those words as we went because of the algorithm. It's actually made for TV type of story. But again it's complete and utter garbage and both of these. Programs slash suites also include now the latest craze, which is VPNs. So do yourself a favor, absolutely, positively NEVER install Norton at all in your system. Fun fact, did you know that one of the latest scams and e-mail phishing scams actually involves Norton and McAfee? Not officially, but because people are not running this software and they're deleting it from their systems as fast as they can. Scammers know that if they send you an e-mail saying thank you for resubscribed with Norton, we've just charged your account 560 bucks. Your annual subscription or whatever it might be and they put a phone number for you to call down there. Guess what? You've just called in to a scam center who is now going to go through all the processes of trying to steal your information by phishing you to contact them by thinking you auto renew with Norton. Fun fact, my mom actually fell for this and they really are looking for people that are just not very versed in computers for these scans to work for. So if you have ever received one of those emails, just trash it. If you know you've never signed up for Norton, don't ever click on anything in your e-mail. Just a little safeguard to never click a link in your e-mail from something you don't trust Anyway. What That said, let's move on to the next thing that is like the latest money grab opportunity for software developers. We're talking about VPNs of course. Now VPNs are virtual Private network was something that was actually very necessary for the longest time to get around things like region locks and stuff like they were very handy when it came to trying to watch YouTube in countries where maybe say YouTube was outlawed for whatever reason. Those countries do exist and to this day or there's certain. Types of content or TV shows that might be available on Netflix in one region and not another. So you could install a VPN, just change the location of where you are, generates an IP and a VPN through that tunnel, through that country or whatever and then back to where you want to go. Although you might not have the fastest Internet speed through the tunnel because they would really, for the free versions, they had very slow connections on that tunnel and then on the paid versions. They would give you better speed and stuff and it would give you access to things on different parts of the world that were region locked on top of that. So they always advertise this as protect your data because what it does is it encrypts and decrypts on each end of that tunnel. So any of that information that gets grabbed along the way couldn't be decrypted. Now the reason why you'd want to encrypt your data and. A VPN sound like a great idea is if you're doing online shopping or online banking or any sort of sensitive data transformation or transfer online, which should be just about anything these days with our current busy electronic lifestyles where hackers and other people's grabbing that information from public Wi-Fi networks or airport networks, Starbucks or whatever random Wi-Fi someone might leave open and unlocked just hoping someone will connect to it to try and sniff that information wouldn't have a chance of getting that info. Unfortunately, VPNs have become. Very lucrative business. And with that lucrative business comes opportunities for them to just nickel and dime you to death for something that the most, for the most part, doesn't even work that great anymore. The reason why I say that is ISPs have caught on to VPN networking and tunneling, and So what they started to do is to be able to determine if a VPN is being used and then either one, throttle your connection already on their own or two, just downright deny the connection altogether. So there's actually a lot of. Litigation going on right now for like open Internet access and such that is still going on in litigation with many different countries being unable to sort of agree on how that should be handled where right now the ISP is just kind of free to just shut down the connection entirely. So VPNs are one of those things that might sound like a great idea and it was back in the day. There also another point of access for hackers where hackers now are are targeting VPNs to try and get as much data. From that that source and that tunnel on both ends as possible, and this happened Nord VPN, who I have U right here, used to be a sponsor of ours way back in the day until they had a very egregious. Data loss that they tried to hide. And it was one of those things that after they tried to hide it and it came to light that this would happen, that's been happening for years. I said that's it. I can't trust nor VPN. I can't trust anything from them. I don't trust their VPNs. So you can ask yourself whether or not a VPN is important. There are VPNs that are legit out there. A lot of them are free, but you got to be careful with what's labeled as free, because sometimes the free software in itself is intentionally sniffing the data itself. That it that it's encrypting. Remember it's encrypting your data, which means it has access to that data and everything sent. So it's also a money making opportunity from them or potentially even an identity theft opportunity for them. So it's one of those things where if you're on a public Wi-Fi, VPNs can seem like a smart idea. But do your research and really maybe watch some of those channels that focus on some of the software safety side to figure out which ones you can trust, especially if you're traveling through an airport or a public Wi-Fi and if you're going to be on a public Wi-Fi. For God's sake, don't go to anything sensitive like website data like logging into YouTube. You're banking all that sort of stuff. Do what you can to go and like Incognito mode and stay as off. The grid as you can. Alright, so this next one, my gosh, we've been even been approached by some of these brands and I just refuse, absolutely refuse to do it. It's any sort of shopping extension. Even Microsoft Edge has its own shopping extension. When you search shopping extension, it's the first thing that shows up because I'm on Edge right here. But Chrome has one, Amazon has one, Edge has one. Honey is probably the biggest one you guys have ever heard of and what these are designed to do. You got Cooper Art right here. Think Teemu even has one now. The point of these extensions is the fact that credit full. I guess that's just a web link showing all of them. CSNC or CNBC is even talked about 5 best browser extensions to save you money. The Penny hoarder. The point of these extensions is supposed to be when you're shopping and you're about to check out on something, it checks the price of where you are and then cross references the price with other known online shopping resources to see if it's cheaper anywhere else. Or you could say, hey I'm interested in this, notify me when somewhere has it. That's the lowest price that's been seen in predetermined past time. So you could say like in the last 30 days, tell me where the lowest price is and then I can go and buy it direct to them. Unfortunately for those shopping browser extensions, as they're also extensions that are in a very sensitive part of the Internet, which is your checkout process. OK, I don't trust browser extensions whatsoever. I don't trust any of them. The honeys that to me is all just asking for trouble. Not only that, it's extremely annoying that any website you've ever gone to like. For instance, you saw at the top of that previous page, it had a hair extensions. I don't know why that's there, It's gone now, but it was there and basically it could have popped up right now and been like, hey, this extension that's being shown right here is cheaper over here. It becomes very intrusive too in your browsing experience. And if you go to Amazon, like if you click on anything on Amazon, you click on the product page, it'll pop down with all this crap and it's super annoying. Yes, you can go into the extension, you can sort of tune how invasive it is, but it's extremely annoying what I tend to do. Is if I'm going to buy something at a website. Like for instance, I've got a new company truck and I wanted to get an exhaust for it and I went to the site, the website where I knew I was going to buy the exhaust. But then I just did a manual search for XYZ coupon code to see if there's any legit coupon codes. Now unfortunately a lot of these websites do have a lot of popups. They do have a lot of cookie trackers and all this sort of stuff. So again, it kind of sucks to try and find the legitimate coupon sites out there. Not to mention like 90% of the times they don't work I have. The ones that have worked, that saved me like 20% on purchases before, but I do it manually. I don't have a browser doing it for me, but I think this is another way to slow down your PCs, to just make your browser have pop ups galore and just having your information sort of constantly tracked. And I'm the kind of person that does not like my stuff being tracked all the time. That being said, I do have a very vanilla version of Edge on this system right now that is tracking everything that I'm doing, so that sort of sucks. But never install any of those shopping extensions. Trust me, they're going to be more. Knowing that they're ever going to save you, and if you're actually shopping online enough to have it be worth it to where you're saving lots and lots of money, might be time to like Dave Ramsey up or something and maybe change your shopping habits. Now that's sort of segues me into the next proportion here. It's almost like I have a train of thought on these. Or I talked about PC performance and browser performance with Edge extensions and shopping extensions going. Anything that's advertised as a PC performance booster, stay away from it. Stay as far away as you possibly can. They don't work. All they want to do is take your money and make you think something is working. In fact, I did a search right now in Google for PC Performance Booster and look what the number one result is on that. Morton because again, these companies are vultures. They know exactly what the Laymans are searching for and are saying, hey, let's make this thing and it doesn't freaking work. It is a placebo at best, and more often than not they slow down your system because they're running in the background eating up resources. So PC performance boosters back in the day when we had spinning hard drives and such, the number one reason an operating system would start. Running slow, Well, two reasons technically is a fragmented hard drive or a cluttered registry. Now that's because of the seek time on a hard drive, especially like a 5400 RPM drive is so slow versus anything we have today that all these would typically do is go in there and sort of defrag your drive at night. Maybe do a virus scan maybe if it was part of a suite and then sort of clean up your registry on Pro because we've already showed you when it comes to like Revo Uninstaller. When you uninstall a software, it leaves a ton of registry files and entries behind, and that registry starts to become huge. And So what happens is when you go to access the registry for the slow hard drive, it's got a huge registry that has to navigate through. So with SSDs that's really not that much of a problem.