Review of CloudFlare service

I’ve used CloudFlare service since the early days of March.As visitors of my blog are mainly from South East Asia and my hosting is in USA,the latency is quite high(>300ms most of time) because the connections between Asia and USA usually are very congested.So when I found there’s a free service which could reduce the latency and providing some security features,I decided to try it.

It’s around 2 months since then,how’s performance of this service?In fact,I think most frequent visitors of my blog should have their answers already.Yes,the improvements are tremendous:lower and lower response time,faster and faster loading speed,last but not least,less and less down time.

It also helps me save a lot of bandwidth as well as prevent some potential threats.

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Firefox 4

After months of testing and improvements,Firefox 4 finally landed right after Internet Explorer 9 came to the world.

I was a fan of Firefox for many years.However,one year ago I started to use Google Chrome as it performs better than Firefox,of course better than IE too.

Since Internet Explorer,Firefox and Google Chrome have new versions coming out,I decided to test all by myself.I know that many pro bloggers have done the tests recently,but only with marks.Sometimes,score can’t mean for everything.Well,I’m right this time.
Upon the results from other sources,IE9 has the best result,followed by Google Chrome 10 and Firefox4 because IE9 is able to fully utilize the function called hardware acceleration,but others can only do it partially.This function can help to render those complicated websites faster than ever.

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DiGi 3G Broadband or Maxis?

Currently Maxis is doing a promotion to all existing postpaid customers who meet the requirements:

*Being individual Maxis postpaid principle holder for more than 6 months

*With minimum spend of RM50 monthly

*With no barred line

If you meet all the criteria,you could subscribe the Bonanza package:

Maxis Bonanza package 

I went to subscribe the service last Monday and after one hour of submitting the application,I was able to start to use the broadband service.During the past several days,I brought a DiGi simcard and tested the stability and performance against Maxis.I found that they have different pros and cons.

Maxis:

It’s not stable in some places,including testing in my home.The maximum speed could reach 3.6mbps in Sunway and One Utama area,but only could get 100-200kbps in my home.I think it’s because the capacity of bandwidth has been full in my area and Maxis didn’t improve the service on time.

DiGi:

My friend subscribes DiGi Discover plan which is promised for average download speed 700kbps and upload speed 200kbps.DiGi seems to cap the download speed at 1mbps and so it always reaches around there in almost every place.

My two cents are:If you persuade to get a higher speed for some time,you could try Maxis as it didn’t cap the speed yet;Otherwise,please use DiGi Broadband to get much stable service.

Switch to Nod32

I’m a Kaspersky fan.I have used its products for more than 10 years.Even though the products are always quite expensive,I still keep using it because I believe it could provide the best protection for my computers.It definitely did the job well in my computers in the past several years.However,recently after I upgraded to the latest Kaspersky Internet Security 2010,I found sometimes normal Internet connections were blocked and the software crashed with Windows Vista in many times.So I decided to try Nod32,another top antivirus software in the world.

Kaspersky Internet Security 2010

ESET Nod 32 Smart Security 

It seems that ESET Nod32 is a bit more expensive than Kaspersky.Well,if a little extra could make some improvements in terms of performance and compatibility,I’m willing to pay it.The fact didn’t make me regret.Nod32 starts up faster than Kaspersky and occupies less system resources.

So I think I will only try Kaspersky again only it could be much slim.