Digsby got a really bad reputation a couple of months ago for bundling a ton of junk apps with it. I believe they say they have cleaned up their act. Just take care when installing it so you don't install a ton of junk software. Don't let it hijack your home page or search bar either.

Pidgin supports social networks too. It supports Myspace natively and Facebook & Twitter via plug-in.

Re: Digsby

Funky wouldn't recommend a closed-source software.

Is there anyway to turn off the pop-up every 24 hours for Avira asking me to upgrade to the non free version?

Pag 3 ITT bottom replies by Lirva I think

Good suggestions, although not sure Avira is so much better than AVG and avast! and having to disable the nagging seems a hassle. Some tests place avast! higher than Avira although the UI is terrible and Avira on the same level as AVG.

Overall, I'd like to choose my anti-virus based on which has the best detection for rootkits and keyloggers but idk if there are any such tests.

For me standard software also includes:
* 7-Zip - open source unarchivator for a lot of formats, including .rar and others that some people use; can archive in .zip format (although Windows Explorer can do the same).
* Launchy - open source application launcher; although Win7 start menu now includes something similar for quickly launching programs this is still more convenient

I haven't been able to find good open source alternatives for:
IrfanView - shareware image viewer that recognizes many formats including Pentax RAW files that I use
A decent Bittorrent client - both Vuze and uTorrent are closed source

Any suggestions?

I like the AV-comparatives site but you've highlighted some points where I take issue with it. Most of them relate to false positives.

First they checked every category in the Avira setup. One of those categories is "games". This is a setting that's probably designed for a corporate environment where games are considered unwanted programs. I don't think many home users will check this.

They also don't give us any information about the type of false positives or the amount of data in their set of clean files.

I will agree that Avast is a reasonable AV choice. I don't agree with the simplified Advanced+/Advanced/Standard/Tested summaries though.

Re AVG: AVG only detected 94% of the samples...that's 10x more misses than Avira. Plus AVG can really bog down a system and the scanning time is super slow. Putting it in the same category with Avira is very wrong imo.

Word of the year. And 7zip is good for all of those reason plus it can use the .7z format which is faster and has better compression than .zip.

No suggestions for image viewer.

For bittorrent I just use Miro, but only for open content ldo. Miro has a nice search engine for legal torrents.

That is a very good point.

I'm glad we're not talking about things that can get me infracted or worse.

OK, I moved from AVG to Avira but it wouldn't update, it hangs on the "Scan for updates..." stage . I did a manual update but it still cannot do the automatic one.

Meh anti virus is overrated. I want to go without mine and would if I wasn't so paranoid.

I went without an AV for 4 years; then downloaded Avira, which found nothing.

Re: Defender

Malware writers seem to think it's useless, so I'm turning it off: "If you are already using Ares with Windows Vista and are experiencing problems, the solution is to turn UAC off. You will still have the built in 'Windows Defender' and the Norton, or Mcafee, antivirus protection." (Note this is the real Ares site.)

Avira is a joke. It simply wouldn't update. It tries mostly IPv6 addresses (e.g. http://[2a01:138:a001:201::21]/update which I suspect my ISP won't support) and even when it doesn't the addresses it tries (e.g. http://80.190.143.227/update) never opens so it never gets to update.

I'm not the only one with these issues:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r226...y-Slow-Updates

Same problem here. The updates download, but take a very long time to do so. Range of time is between 2 and 5 minutes.

I had this problem two days ago, I got beyond the "Scan for Updates" to the actual download but it was at about 6-9kb/sec and when it finished it froze.

Windows Security Center gave me the "Malware Protection is not Updated" mesage. I ended trying to update Avira at about 9pm Pacific and it was extremely fast at that point. Try updating at some off peak hours.

Edit: I have had Avira for over 6 months and this is the only update that has gave me some problems.

there's a service (in 7 and Vista at least) called IP Helper for dealing with IPv6 addresses over an IPv4 network. I can't comment on your ISP, but especially if this service got disabled at some point then your own network likely can't handle IPv6. (if you followed the blackviper services list that funky recommends, IP Helper was disabled.)

and they don't give priority on their servers to people from whom they aren't making money :-\