Our favorite search engine, Ixquick, is now also known as Startpage.   Actually, Startpage and Ixquick are really one and the same.  Startpage is simply an easier name to remember.  Why is it our favorite search engine?  Privacy, Accuracy, Speed.  This is the only search engine awarded the European Privacy Seal.  It does not record your searches, and it does not even record your IP address. Give it a try.

http:startpage.com

or

http://ixquick.com

From a security standpoint, it makes a lot of sense to move to Windows 7 ASAP.  Windows 7 will have a small fraction of the security vulnerabilities and requisite update fixes as did Windows XP.  Why? Windows 7 was built from the ground up with security in mind, which was only an afterthought with Windows XP.  No doubt, there will be vulnerabilities to fix.  But in the long run, it should prove to be a very good move for the average user.  We have been running Windows 7 on a test machine since the Beta was first available, and are quite pleased with its performance and functionality.  Not totally pleased, mind you, but pleased enough to be recommending it to all our customers and readers.  Let us know what you think.

We recently ran a test of Anonymizer Anonymous Surfing™

Here is our mini-review:

We found the speed of page loading to be severely deficient. It could take several minutes to load a web pagemaking accessing a web site painfully slow  It is like turning your broadband connection back 20 years to a 1200 baud modem.   

We contacted Anonymizer support to complain about the problem and they were no help at all.  They just admitted that they need much more server capacity and said that they are working on that.  Hey, even if they doubled their server capacity, it still would be useless.  Even ten times the server capacity would only make the program marginally usable.   Too bad, because this should be a usable tool to protect one’s privacy online.  As it is we cannot recommend it and we give it two thumbs down.  Don’t waste your money.