Affinity Law Office Technology Blog

AOL partners with McAfee to offer free antivirus software

For a short while last year and early this year, AOL partnered with Kaspersky to offer an excellent free anti-virus program.  For whatever reason, that partnership was discontinued. 

But AOL has forged a new alliance with McAfee and is now offering a special edition of McAfee VirusScan Plus at no charge.  You are required to sign-up for an AOL screen name (email address), which is free.  This offering includes anti-virus software, spyware protection, and a software firewall. 

Very small external USB drive at bargain price

The Aegis Mini 30 GB external USB hard drive from Apricorn has a $50 mail-in rebate during October.  That brings the regular $119.00 price down to a very attractive $69.00.  Ground shipping in the U.S. is free. 

There are higher-capacity hard drives available, but few as compact as this one.  30 GB is enough to back up all or most of the important data for many solo attorneys and small law firms.  The drive comes with backup, sync, and encryption software, including the excellent Second Copy 2000 program which can be used for automatically backing up your data and documents.

XP hangs tough

Although Windows Vista has been around for over half a year, its toughest competition may be coming from its predecessor, Windows XP.  It is nearly impossible to buy a new computer at retail with XP installed, but it remains possible to order an XP machine from most major computer vendors.  Sales of XP to consumers will end in January.  Sales to businesses will continue until January of 2009.  It is a good bet that the pace of migration to Vista will accelerate considerably once Vista SP1 is released near the end of the first quarter of 2008.   

Cheap huge hard drive

Sorry for the extended absence from posting to the Affinity blog.  The consultant primarily responsible for posting is also a practicing appellate lawyer and part-time law school professor.  We don't have to tell you that life and work can get crazy with deadlines that force everything else to the sideline.  The latest deadline has been met, so here is a good deal you may want to look into. 

Computer Geeks has a Seagate 750 GB Serial ATA hard drive for only $139.95 plus shipping if you use the "SEA750" discount code when you order.  Keep in mind that your computer must be able to support the Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive interface, not the older Parallel ATA interface.  If your computer is fairly new, it probably supports SATA.  This is a huge amount of hard drive storage for little money.