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Today I decided to test out a number of the anti-virus scanners that are floating around the internet. I didn’t do a very in-depth test, just gathered a archive of 3765 viruses and tested each anti-virus scanner to see how many of the viruses it found and how many files it scanned.

Note: Some of the viruses had files archived in side of them so the scanned number will sometimes be higher then the number of files I listed above.

Microsoft Security Essentials (Scanned: 3799, Found: 3668)
* Quick scan.

Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010 (Scanned: 3851, Found:3680)
* Requires reboot after install.
* Slow scan.

Sophos Anti-Virus (Small Business) (Scanned: 3772, Found: 3631)
* Is designed for a management environment (10+ systems) and not a SOHO environment.
* Bad scan reports.

Sunbelt Vipre (Scanned: 190, Found: 13)
Don’t know what happened with this but it wouldn’t scan more then 190 files.
* Quick install.
* Requires reboot after install.
* By default it doesn’t scan inside archives.
* Can’t scan archives inside other archives.

F-Secure Anti-Virus (Scanned: 3757, Found: 3698)
* Requires reboot after install.
* Minimal interface
* If system has low memory it disables email scanning and other advanced process monitoring by default.

Avast Pro (Scanned: 3796, Found: 3644)
* Requires reboot after install.
* Quick install.
* Really quick scan.

Panda Cloud Anti-Virus
I stopped the scan after letting it run for about 10 min. and it had only scanned 233 files and only found 150 infections.
* Quick install
* High CPU usage.
* Requires network connection
* Very very slow scan.

ESET NOD32 (Scanned: 3739, Found: 3622)
* Quick virus database update.
* Very fast scan.

ClamAV for Windows (Doesn’t support scanning one file or directory)
* Easy install
* Can’t scan individual files or directory’s

Avira AntiVir (Scanned: 3773, Found: 3716)
* Quick scan.
* Bit high on system resources

AVG Anti-Virus (Scanned: 3774, Found: 3702)
* Somewhat slow install.
* Low system foot-print.

We’ve been looking to buy a new house over the last few months and I’ve seen a lot of people talking about how it’s better to rent then to buy so I sat down and ran the numbers and this is what I cam up with.

If you buy the a house at $350,000 with no down with a 30 year loan at 5.25% interest, you will pay $345,776 in interest bringing the total to $695,776. Now lets add property tax, witch in my area is 1.1% so you would do 0.011 times 350,000 witch comes to $3,550 per year over 30 years equals $115,500. That bringing are total to $811,276. Okay, now with repairs I’m going to shoot high and say over 30 years you will have $50,000 in repairs, that bringing the total to $861,276. So owning a $350,000 house for 30 years will coast you $861,276 if you don’t make any extra payments.

If you rent a house that would coast about $350,000 in my area it would cast you, on the low end, about $1,400 per month at 30 years that comes to $504,000, that’s assuming that rent doesn’t go up over 30 years.

So on the surface it looks like your saving $357,276 but lets say you want to sell the house and lets assume the house is worth the same as what you paid for it ($350,000), that means over renting you brought the coast benefit down to almost zero. That’s assuming you don’t stay in the house for another 10 or more years. If you do live in the house for more then the loans 30 years then all you have to pay is property tax.

The nice things about owning your own house is you can do what ever you want to it, also you wont have a land lord you have to deal with. Now if you plan on moving a lot in the next 30 years then buying is definitely not for you.

NOTE: I didn’t add house insurance into this because I was assuming two things, you would have renters insurance, and you would have your car insurance under the same police as your house insurance witch almost always saves you money bring the coast difference between the house insurance and renters insurance to zero.

[EDIT] Changed property tax in my area from 1.08% to 1.1%

I updated FlickrMyG so that it now allows you to add an exclude list to the getUserSets function.

Function reference: http://wiki.faulk.me/index.php?n=FlickrMyG.GetUserSets
Download newest version: http://svn.faulk.me/listing.php?repname=FlickrMyG&

Last Thursday I traded in my old truck a ‘97 Ford F-150 XLT 4.2L for a new ‘09 Toyota Tacoma 4-cyl 2.7L and its my favorite color black.

The old trucks trad in value was worth little to nothing but using the Government’s “Cash for Clunkers” program I was able to get $4,500 off the new truck.

About the program:

• Truck has to get less then 18 mpg average according to http://fueleconomy.gov
• Car has to get less then 22 mpg average.
• The truck/car has to be no more then 25 years old.
• The new truck has to get 2 mpg average better then the old one, or the new car as to get 5 mpg better then the old one.

You can find more info at the officeal web site: http://cars.gov

I started a new web site last week (http://wordsfor.me). As the about page states:

“I started this project because I love words, the sound the meaning and the “feel” of them.

I am dyslexic and reading and writing has always and will always be a challenge for me; but because of the amount of efferent I have to put into a word, sentence, or book I find that I have fallen in love with the “word”. So I put together this site to share some of the words that resonate with me or just sound exquisite on the tongue or have a definition I find excellent.”