Reviews

In the early 1960s, my parents bought my youngest brother a box of LEGO bricks. That was the beginning of our family’s appreciation for LEGO, which continues to this day (I recently gave my LEGO robot mini-toy to my favorite 9-year-old, but I still use my LEGO gym bag and have a LEGO soccer player minifig on my desk). In our local shopping mall, the Apple store used to be right next to the LEGO store, and I have spent a lot more time with LEGO toys than "Apples". My son and daughter still have thousands of bricks and minifigs and accessories in storage here and there. So when I got the chance to review a book called The Cult of LEGO, I was eager to get started. Was my enthusiasm for the project rewarded? Read on and find out.

Personally, I am a fan of Belkin routers and I have owned a few good models in the past. By chance, I managed to get my hands on a Belkin N600 DB Wireless Dual-Band N+ router which, at least in theory, packs some interesting technologies and features. I was really curious to learn if it is a good router and if it is worthy of running my home network. Let’s see what I have found out.

We continue our series of improvements to the Security for Everyone series with an update on how we centralize the results of our testing. From now on we will have a list with the best Internet Security suites reviewed each year. Let’s start with the best suites of 2011-2012.

I have never used VIPRE security products until this review. I decided to review it only because some of our readers asked us and I was very curious to learn more about them. Is GFI VIPRE Internet Security 2012 worth using by casual users and geeks alike? Does it provide effective protection? You will find the answers to these questions plus all my findings in this review.

BullGuard chose to license protection technologies from other security companies, improve upon them and create their own security suite. The result is BullGuard Internet Security 12 which brings together the antivirus engine from BitDefender and the firewall from Agnitum. But is this enough to transform it into a great product, that works well for all users? Let’s find out in this review.

The 64-bit version of Internet Explorer 9 has been sitting there, installed on my computer for a long time and I never bothered to check it out. I knew that there weren’t any plugins for it and that some websites would not work well on it. But things have changed in the meantime and the plugin problem has disappeared. Therefore I decided it to take it for a spin and see how well it works. First, I spent some time to run a few benchmarks, compare it to the 32-bit version and see if there is any performance gain. Read this article to learn what I have found.

We haven’t reviewed Avira products for quite a long time and I was very curious to learn more about their latest versions. They always provided some of the best antivirus solutions, able to successfully compete with products from larger companies in this niche. Therefore, I downloaded Avira Internet Security 2012 and took it for a test drive. Read this review to learn more about its effectiveness in securing your system.