Online Backup

UNI Computers Online Backup enables you to save everything that is important on your computer automatically!   Never again will you have to worry if your pictures, music, documents, or whatever you deem important are saved.

Used Parts

UNI Computers now carries a line of used parts.  All used parts come with a 30 day warranty and are stringently tested to ensure quality.

We currently offer used parts in the following categories:

• RAM (both desktop AND laptop!)
• CPUs
• CPU heatsinks
• Network cards
• AGP and lowend PCIe videocards
• Wireless cards
• LCD Monitors (HOT item)

We are always adding more parts to our used line, so be sure to stop by and check regularly!

Accessories

We carry a large variety of accessories.  Here is some of what we have to offer!

• Laptop AC Power Adapters
• USB Flash Drives
• Wireless Routers
• Wireless Mice and Keyboards
• Canned Air
• Laptop Bags
• Laptop Coolers
• Speakers
• Webcams
• Much more!  We can also order anything you need.

5 Things to check on your computer for the new year

The new year is upon us, and before you know it, we’ll be deep into 2012.  One month has already passed.  Now is the time to make sure that some basic checks on your computer and setup have been done.  There is nothing quite like big failures to bring your productive day or week to a screeching halt.

1. Clean it out

Computers have fans to keep them cool.  These fans suck in dust.  That dust collects on things inside the computer.  Over time, it can build up.  Computers need to be cleaned out periodically to keep them from running too hot.  When computers get too hot, they start doing things like shutting down randomly, failing, not turning on correctly, etc.

 A way to keep this from happening is to clean them out on a regular basis.  Your environment will dictate how often that needs to happen.  If you have a desktop computer (or tower) and feel comfortable taking the side off, take the computer outside and go to town with some canned air.  Don’t worry, you can’t hurt anything.  Get it from all angles, the dust bunnies love to hide everywhere!

 If you have a laptop, the best thing to do is locate the vent slots in the side or rear and blow canned air through those slots.  You should hear the little fan in the laptop spin up really fast if the air going all the way through.  If you can’t hear/see the fan spin at all, then you need to take it to your favorite computer repair shop to have it disassembled and cleaned out.

 Of course, if you aren’t comfortable with doing any of this, your favorite computer repair shop can do it for you.

 Also, here’s an extra tip.  Get that desktop/tower computer off the floor.  Being at least 6-10 inches off the floor will make a world of difference in the amount of dust pulled into a computer.

2. Get a UPS

 Ever see your lights in your office flicker?  Lawrence has some bad power issues in some parts of town, and computers absolutely hate these power issues.  Computers are designed to run on a very specific amount of power that is clean and stable.  They do this through their own internal power supply, converting the power from the wall to the consistent power that a computer needs to operate.  When that power flickers, the computer is not happy.  It can have effects such as blown capacitors, failing power supplies, bad memory, data loss on the hard drive, you name it.  At the end of the day, it can just create a huge headache.

 There is a simple solution to this problem. Get a UPS.  UPS stands for Uninterruptible Power Supply.  It’s like your standard power strip with a big battery in it.  It serves two functions:  1. Regulate power coming to your computer to what it wants to see all the time, regardless of what the wall is providing, and 2. Give you enough time to save your work and shutdown your computer in the event of a total power failure.

 UPSes are not very expensive and can save you hours or days of headaches getting your computer repaired because of bad power.  Remember that they should be replaced every 2-3 years, (or at least replace the batteries in them) as the amount of time they will run the computer in the event of a power failure goes down over time (just like a laptop battery.)

  3. Antivirus Subscriptions and Windows / Mac updates

The #1 repair we do at UNI Computers is virus removal.  It is almost 50% of our walk-in repair business.  A fair number of these were due to expired antivirus subscriptions or no antivirus protection at all.  Keep it current to keep it protected.

The same thing goes for Windows (or Mac) updates.  Microsoft and Apple put these out for a reason.  They discovered a problem, or exploit, and an update is put out.  Install these sooner rather than later.  Many a problem have been fixed by simply having Windows or Mac OS be up to date.  Some of these updates even fix holes in the system that viruses use to get in.  Don’t ignore them.

 4. Hard Drive age

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”  That works for a lot of things in life.  Hard drives are NOT one of them.  Hard drives have moving parts in them.  This means they wear out.  And fail.  Sometimes without warning.  When your hard drive fails, it usually means restoring your system from your latest backup.  For a lot of people, they are still going to have to reinstall the operating system, all of their programs (Microsoft Office, Adobe Reader, etc) and THEN put all their data back in.

This can be alleviated to a certain extent by not letting your hard drive get too old before you replace it.  Most computers purchased have a 1-3 year warranty.  Hard drives should last this entire time, but sometimes they don’t.  Unfortunately there is no way to really tell whether or not it is going to fail soon if it is running fine currently, but if you make a plan to replace it every 2-3 years without fail, then you drastically cut down the chances of having a failure.  I personally change out my hard drives in my home desktop computer every 2 years, and I haven’t had a failure in 10 years.

 5. Backups

Honestly, this shouldn’t even have to be here.  This should be as ingrained in people as putting gas in your car.  But it isn’t.  We still have people coming in all of the time that have a failed or failing hard drive that never backed up.  Or they thought they were backing up but never checked to make sure it was actually working.

Backups are a critical thing, because like I said in the previous point, hard drives fail, sometimes without warning.  Make sure you have backups of your critical files at the least.  Even better would be to have a full system image backup, which makes restoring to a new hard drive a point and click affair that only takes a few hours, instead of days reinstalling software.  Also, make sure you TEST your backups.  Check them out; make sure they actually contain the data they should.  Backups are not fire-and-forget; they need to be checked.  For most people their business is on the computer, and a failure is a big deal.  Make sure those backups are happening.

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!

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!