Viruses and what to do about them

Viruses.  Spyware. Malware. Scareware. Worms.  Chances are you or someone you know has been affected by one of these little buggers at some point.  If not, count yourself among the lucky.  Almost all users will be hit more than once in their computing lifetimes.

Viruses have progressed from little annoyances that only displayed unwanted messages on your monitor to full blown data-destroyers and credit-card-stealers.  It has changed from a game of “I did it because I could” to “I did it to make money.”  Needless to say, it’s serious business.

Viruses also used to be only the domain for PCs.  Macs and other Apple products seem to be completely immune.  This is no longer the case, and while the vast majority of viruses are still written for PCs, Mac-friendly viruses are on the rise.

How to stay safe

1. Don’t. Trust. Anything

More than 95% of all email sent today is spam email.  Yeah, that’s not a typo: 95%.  This means most of the messages you receive do NOT have your best interest in mind.  Messages that say ‘Go here and check this out!’ or ‘You have 23895 viruses, click here to remove!’  A new favorite of mine are Paypal and Ebay messages that say ‘We need your account information so that we can verify blah blah blah.’  It’s almost all fake.  If you ever think something like this is real, open up a web browser, go to the actual site (eg. www.paypal.com) and log in.  If they have something that needs verifying, they will let you know right there.  This is doubly true for anything concerning your bank account or credit card.

 2. Keep up to date antivirus software

You’d think by now that this would be obvious, but we run into people all of the time that let their protection expire, or don’t have any at all!  There are many solutions out there to stay protected.  Subscriptions to updates usually last one year, and can be easily renewed via credit card.  Be careful to only use name brand products.  If you can’t find it on the shelf of your favorite software place, double check before you install.  There are 5 fake antivirus programs for each legitimate one.

 3. The magic of Alt+F4

A little known way to get rid of those annoying popups is Alt+F4.  This means holding the Alt key while you tap the F4 key, and then letting go of both.  This is the universal close command in any version of Windows.  (on Mac it’s command + Q).  Popups have gotten quite a bit smarter recently.  They have remapped that red ‘X’ button at the upper right to be an ‘OK’ button instead of the standard ‘Exit’ button.  Sneaky.   Lucky for you, they can’t remap Alt + F4.  Keep in mind that if you have a laptop, sometimes you have to activate the F4 (or any F-key) by holding an additional ‘Fn’ button.

What to do when you get hit

1. Run a full virus scan

Run a full virus scan if you think you’ve been hit.  Most antivirus software supports doing periodic scheduled scans.  You should allow this and if it is not already setup, get it done.

2. Shut down and visit your preferred repair shop or person for removal

Unfortunately, sometimes a full virus scan won’t  clean a machine all the way and more drastic measures are needed.  This is when you contact your trusted computer repair shop  and have them do an in-depth cleaning.  Once in a while, a full clean can’t be achieved and a full format will be required.  Make sure you have prior backups (see last month’s technology article)

3. Change passwords to websites/bank accounts

You’re doing this on a regular basis anyway, right?  Even if you are (most aren’t), if you have any reason to suspect you’ve been hit with something, change all of your important passwords.  This includes banks, credit cards, mortgage accounts, facebook, twitter, email, you name it.  Also, don’t use the same or very similar passwords for multiple things.  Once a program obtains one, they will try various permutations of that passoword on major sites and if they get lucky, you’re going to lose more.

Viruses can be nasty, but it can also be relatively easy to stay away from them altogether.  It is kind of like driving defensively:  if you act like everyone else is on ice, you will probably get into less wrecks.  Keeping  your computer files safe from viruses must be addressed daily.  Never let your guard down and you can keep your computer up and running.

Hard Drive Prices

If you follow prices of computer parts at all, you’ve probably noticed the sharp increase in prices of hard drives recently. This is due to flooding in Thailand where several parts of hard drives for all of the major manufacturers are produced. This has caused a shortage of parts to make hard drives, causing the prices to sharply increase.

Some hard drives have seen a 100%+ increase in price in just 3 weeks. This is affecting everyone from Dell to Apple to us here at UNI. Margins on computer components and full computer systems are always slim as the price for parts is ever decreasing. With this sharp increase, however, pretty much all manufacturers have had no choice but to either increase the price of their computers, install smaller hard drives at the same price, or do both.

One hard drive technology that was unaffected, however, were Solid State Drives (SSDs). These drives forgo the traditional spindle/platter/head design that resembles a record player for straight memory chips. The result is a much much faster drive, but also a much higher cost per gigabyte. Since these drives have none of the parts that are manufactured by companies currently under water, their price has been relatively unaffected.

It will be interesting to see how fast the hard drive component manufacturers get back online with parts so that prices can go back to normal. If it doesn’t happen pretty quick, it may just pave the way for SSDs to start a price war or at least come more in line with traditional hard drive prices.

Keep Up With UNI!

Now you can keep up with UNI Computers on your favorite social networking site! We are on both Twitter and Facebook with tech tips, store news, specials, and more! Find us on Facebook or Follow us on Twitter!

Small Business Saturday with American Express

American Express is having a Small Business Saturday on November 27th. On that day only, bring in your American Express card to UNI Computers and spend $25 or more. American Express will credit your statement by $25!

See the facebook link above for details and enrollment information.

Windows 8 release date leaked!

It looks like the Windows 8 release date has been accidentally leaked from Microsoft Netherlands.  It looks like October 2012 is the current release date.  If this is the case, and not just a rumor, then we should be able to expect Windows 8 beta editions early in 2012.

After the success of Windows 7, it will be most interesting to see if Microsoft can keep up the pace!

Best of Lawrence!

The US Commerce Association just awarded us “Best of Lawrence 2010″ in “Personal Computers”!  We are greatly honored and humbled to receive this award.  I always see these “Best of Lawrence” at great establishments around town, and am very proud to be counted among them!

Malware infection chart by browser type

Here’s an interesting site I ran across today.  It shows the browser infection rate of the most popular web browsers currently out.  Check it out.

Ubuntu 10.10 is available!

For all of you linux users, Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat), is now available.  Head over to Ubuntu’s site and pick it up!  We are going to stick with ubuntu 10.04 LTS for now on our inhouse fileservers, but will be staying tuned to how 10.10 progresses.

Google Instant Search

So I was on Google today (I know, shocker) and I noticed that as I typed, I started getting search results instantly, which changed and auto-refined as I typed more.  Insane.  If you haven’t been to Google today, get over there now and check it out.  Amazing.  My searches are now 2 sec faster.  Life altering for sure

Move your files from your old PC to your new one, and it actually works!

I know this might sound weird coming from a computer guy, but I hadn’t had a chance to mess with the Windows 7 “Windows Easy Transfer” which allows you to move all of your stuff from an older machine to your new Windows 7 machine.  Microsoft had this functionality back in Windows XP, but it was like playing Russian Roulette with your stuff.  You’d probably get it all, but it wouldn’t necessarily work correctly once it was transferred.

This is all different now with Windows Easy Transfer.  My wife upgraded her Windows Vista laptop to a new Windows 7 laptop, and of course I was tasked with moving everything over.  Normally this would illicit some silent internal groans, as the process of moving everything over from an old machine to a new machine is a pain.  Not so with Windows Easy Transfer!

I fired up the wizard (under start->all programs->accessories->system tools) and it asked me a few simple questions.  Since the old machine was Windows Vista, the new Windows Easy Transfer software had to be installed first.  I picked the option to transfer to an external hard drive. (thumb drive in my case)  I popped that into the old machine and fired up the shortcut for Windows Easy Transfer.  It automatically recognized that the old machine was in fact the old machine, and spit out a 6 digit number to type into the waiting dialog box on the new machine.  Once I typed that in, it immediately connected the two machines together via my wireless network, no muss, no fuss! (and no firewall configuration changes!)  After  a few minutes, I was greeted with a box showing everything to be transferred.  I was thinking “yeah but the username on the old machine is different than on the new machine, how are you going to handle that?” but Windows Easy Transfer impressed me by defaulting to merging the old info into the new username!  Sweet! (of course you have the option to create the old username verbatim on the new machine, which would be preferable if you hadn’t setup any user specific stuff on the new machine yet, which we had.)

After that, I simply hit next, and the file transfer started.  It took quite awhile (my wife likes iTunes!) but everything worked out just fine.  I love it when Microsoft Wizards just work out, which is happening more and more with Windows 7.  Now I’m happy, and more importantly, my wife is happy!

Solar Charging for your iPhone

Are you like me?  Are you constantly running out of juice on your cell phone?  Did you forget to plug it in last night?  If so, never fear, solar charging is here to save the day!  Novothink has released an Apple-certified solar charging case for iPhones.  They claim two hours of direct sunlight will give enough juice for 30 minutes of talk on a 3G network or about 60 minutes on a 2G network.  It also comes with an app to manage your solar needs.  The product is called Surge, and it is sure to be a hit!  (Hopefully they’ll release it for Blackberries so that I can join in on the fun!)

Going All Custom on Your Router

This is for those people who aren’t afraid of getting their hands a little dirty and doing some tweaking. For those of you out there that have Linksys brand wireless routers, you may have noticed that you have to reboot those routers on a semi-regular basis.  (Linksys is not alone on this, most consumer routers have issues here and there, especially if they are a bit older.)  Most of the time the cause of this is as simple as the router messed up and needs to be rebooted, or maybe the user was downloading too much through bit torrent (!) and locked it up.  Either way, depending on what model you have, there is finally a semi-permanent fix available.

Now, I’ll preface with this warning:  This is *NOT* for the faint of heart or those not intimately familiar with computers.  This involves replacing the built-in software on the wireless router with a completely different program, and while free, is not without danger, the worst of which is rendering your router a useless blue brick!

Ok, with the Public Service Announcement out of the way, I’ll point you in the right direction.  The first thing to do is check on DDWRT and see if your router is support by this firmware.  If it is, and you want to try it, then read through the documentation on the website, and visit all of the forums and posts that it tells you to.  Make sure you understand everything before you do it.  I’ve performed this a number of times on different routers, and each one has its own procedure to get the firmware changed.  Do not deviate from the directions.

Once finished, you will have software on your router that is MUCH MUCH better at handling high connection loads and staying on for months on end with no issues.  I personally run a Linksys WRT-150N at home, and it is notorious for being a *not very good* router. (hey, I got it for free )  Anyway, I upgraded the firmware to DDWRT, and I haven’t rebooted it in over 4 months, and before I’d have to reboot it at least once per week.

I also recently performed the upgrade on my In-Law’s Linksys WRT54GS, and just like at my house, they went from rebooting it a couple times per month to never.  It is a worthwhile upgrade to any compatible router, and you can feel good for supporting Open Source Software!

Windows Media Sharing issues with Vista and Windows 7

As great as the newer versions of Windows are, sometimes we run across really strange issues that cause huge performance issues.  Once such issue has arisen with Windows Media Sharing.

By default, in both Windows Vista and 7, Windows Media Sharing will share out folders like your Music, Pictures, and Videos folders so that trusted people on your network can access them.  Sounds great, right?  Well, it is, unless it accidentally gets configured wrong.  Then it’s a performance sapping vampire that has an insatiable thirst for your CPU and Memory.

Have no fear though, we’ve seen this problem enough and the solution is actually pretty simple.  In Windows Media Player, there is a Library menu (in Vista)  or Organize menu (in Windows 7) that allows you to change what folders are ‘looked at’ for each category of music, video, etc.  Sometimes, usually by accident, folders such as C:\ and D:\ get added to one of those categories.  This causes huge issues as Windows Media Player automatically looks through all of the folders listed and indexes the contents for easy retreival later.  Each time a file changes in the folders being ‘looked at’ the indexer goes back and makes note.

On the C:\ (and sometimes D:\ folders, there usually exists a file called pagefile.sys.  I won’t go into long explanations about this file, but it has to do with memory management for the system.  Anyway, this file is changing, literally _all_ of the time.  So, if a folder containing a file such as this gets indexed, the indexer will never actually ‘finish’.  This causes it to consume massive amounts of CPU power and memory, sometimes bringing the machine to a literal halt!

But wait, you don’t have to throw the computer out the window!  All you have to do to fix the problem is remove the C:\ or D:\ folder listings from the Pictures, Video, and/or Music folders that the entries are in, and *poof* problem solved!  Of course, if you don’t want to mess with it, you can bring the machine into UNI Computers and we can get it done as well!

UNI Computers, we find the really weird fixes so you don’t have to

WordPress 3.0 is a go!

We just finished upgrading to WordPress 3.0.  Wordpress is the engine that runs this website and allows for me to post this oh-so-awesome content for you!  So far, everything looks great, no major crashes, no fires, no insanity.  If you run into anything that doesn’t work on the site, please comment on this post or send an email to info@unicomputers.com

Free Windows Programs worth checking out

So I’ve been using Windows 7 for a while now, and completely love it. It does everything well. Multitasking, running for days on end without needing a reboot, recovering from video driver crashes without bringing down the system, I could go on and on. Anyway, I have found a few free programs that are worth checking out.  Most of these will work with most older versions of Windows too:

Chrome

This is my new favorite web browser.  Google released this browser a while back and it has really taken off in terms of the number of people now using it for their primary browser.  It goes off of the philosophy of ‘less is more.’  When you start it up, you don’t get a myriad of buttons to confuse you.  You just get the tab that you’re on currently (plus more tabs as you open them) forward, back, refresh, and a tools button.  That’s it.  More space is devoted to actually ‘showing’ the webpage, and less to features that 90% of people will never use.

And then there’s the speed.  Oh the glorious speed.  This browser loads so fast, if you blink, you’ll miss it.  It renders webpages fast, it loads Java-based sites super fast, it does everything fast.  That said, it is RAM happy, so if you don’t have plenty, it may not run that well, but in most machines built nowadays (and especially anything you get from UNI), plenty of RAM is installed right out of the box.  It will run on Windows XP, Vista, and 7.  (y0u have to have at least SP2 for Windows XP)  Get it here.

Notepad++

This is a nifty alternative to the standard “notepad” program that comes with all versions of windows.  It handles multiple tabs, a lot of web editing features, and plugins for even more capability.  Here is the direct download site.

Dropbox

This impressed me enough that I immediately emailed all of my friends, clients and co-workers so that they could check it out.  It is a tiny little program that installs on your machine, and then syncs back with Dropbox.com.  You get 2GB of storage, free.  The best thing, however, is that it operates just like a folder on your machine.  In fact, by default, it’s just a folder on your desktop.  Drag some files in, they sync automatically with Dropbox, done.  So, if you have Dropbox at work, and Dropbox at home, just drag some work that you need to take home into your Dropbox, and then when you get home, it will be synced there for you to continue working on.  When it’s time to take it back to work, just put it back in Dropbox, and when you get back, it’s there!  Super Easy.  Super Awesome.

It also allows you to access www.dropbox.com and download or upload any files, in case you are on a friends machine that doesn’t have Dropbox.  Also, at the time of this article, if you invite friends to Dropbox, you will get free space added to your account, up to 3.25GB total.

I’ve know one client who took a job in Dubai.  In order to be able to easily transfer pictures and stuff back and forth with his wife here in the States, they both installed Dropbox using the same account, now they can easily transfer files much more fluidly then trying to cram them into emails.

For those of you that need more space, Dropbox has a pay option where you can buy more space for a monthly or yearly rate.  Go check it out, it’s like having a little flash drive that’s ‘always on.’