It was that time of year again, the internet virus protection and cleaning tool I had been using on my PC for the last year, in this case Norton 360 glided to a halt, they wanted more money. 59.95 GBP (GBP = Great British Pound roughly double for US Dollar equivalent) or 99.95 GBP in fact for another one or two years service in fact, last time I upgraded a Norton program for a second year it only cost me 39.95 GBP, shocked at the increase I gulped and decided to forget the upgrade for another day.

In an unrelated event the following day at work the PC engineer turned up at work, shocked that there was no virus protection on our PC's. "I'm amazed your world has not come to a halt" he said in his artful dodger style accent, "oh yeah I thought" here comes the punchline Norton antivirus on all the PC's, 3 or 4 per licence that takes us to 700 GBP - 800 GBP to kit out the whole building. To my surprise however this conversation was not going in this direction, he recommended free virus protection programme AVG 8 , and a programme called Tune Up Utilities 2008 the latter at the cost of 29.99 GBP, but you could use it on as many PC's that reside at your address, so whether you have 1 or 100 pc's your still looking at the same cost; better still Tune Up comes with a 30 day free trial that gives you FULL use of the program, what was to lose?

Here is the key thing, nothing was to lose the work PC's started working better than before, so it was obvious that I was going to be trying this out when I got home.

Forget AVG 8 for now, that's another review entirely. Tune Up 2008 downloads from there own website or you can pick it up from PC world stores, difference being is that by picking it up you don't get the free month. The big plus with Tune Up is that at the end of the year you don't need to upgrade, once purchased its yours for keeps.

Tune Up is compatible with every single windows program since Windows 98, so you don't need to feel you have to have a snazzy operating system for this to work effectively.

There are two parts to the programme Tune Up Utilities 2008, and Tune Up 1-Click Maintenance. The first one looks after itself after first run, whereas the maintenance program should be ran once a week, I do mine on a Monday morning and it takes about 8 minutes maximum, far quicker than Nortons once a week updates.

Now considering that Norton 360, is supposed to keep your PC running smoothly as well as battle internet crime in the form of viruses,

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