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.

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!

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!

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

One of my friend’s aunts had her laptop in the shop this week because it wouldn’t boot up correctly.  We found that it had a bad hard drive.  We installed a new hard drive for her and were able to restore it using the recovery CDs that she had retained from when she purchased it.  All in all it was a pretty smooth operation.

This brought up an interesting thought though:  More and more I am seeing new brand name machines not coming with recovery CDs.  What used to be standard fare with any computer, desktop or laptop, that you purchased is now extremely rare.

If you read the fine print on your name brand machine, (pretty much all of them now are doing this) you may find that it says something to the effect of: “Please run BrandX utility to to create recovery CDs or DVDs”.  Basically these companies, in the effort to save about $1, have elected to put all of the recovery information right on the hard drive.  They usually give you a utility to use to make this recovery into a set of CDs or DVDs at your convenience.  The problem is that normally this utility is buried way down in a submenu somewhere and is very difficult to find.  So you never make the set of discs.  And then your hard drive crashes.  And nothing can be recovered.  And now you have no recovery discs by which to reload your computer with Windows and all of the other programs that came with it from the factory!  Oh the misery!  And the kicker is that brand name maker of your laptop will probably charge at least $25 plus shipping to send you a new set of discs.

So, the moral of the story is:  If you have a brand name computer, make SURE that you look for that utility and make those discs!  You will thank yourself in the long run.  Oh, and on a side note, all new UNI Computers always come with the Windows CDs/DVDs to reload the operating system, we feel it’s the right thing to do, even if it does cost one extra dollar

For those who haven’t run into this before, click click clicky is what we at UNI call a hard drive failing.  Inside the drive there is a little arm and spinning disc, not unlike a record player, and when that arm starts banging all over the place and going crazy, it usually makes a click noise, which means you can usually kiss all of your data good-bye.

For any hard drive out there, it’s merely a matter of time before it goes south and ‘gives up the ghost’.  Some drives will last a week, some will last 2 years, some will last 10 years, and there’s no way to be absolutely sure when yours will have its last happy day.  Yours could be next, right as you are reading this article.

Let me bring you back from the brink though, and inform you that you have a multitude of options available to you to help keep this from ever seriously affecting you:

1. Have a good, solid backup plan. This can be quite a broad topic, but the basic components for the home user would be to keep super important files in more than one place.  Like on your computer AND your laptop, or on a couple different flash drives (use more than one, as they can fail without warning), or on a couple different external hard drives. (once again, more than one!)  Or all of the above.  Keep multiple older versions of files if you ever think you made need to ‘go back in time’ to an earlier revision of a paper or lawyer document.  Keep in mind that if you are a professional user that has a RAID array in their desktop that this does not count as a backup.

2. Invest in a solution to ‘image’ your computer. This is an amazing technology that has been around for awhile, but has only recently become popular.  It basically means that you take an entire point-in-time copy of your hard drive and save it to another location.  This way, if your hard drive crashes, you simply install a new one, boot up off of your image software recovery CD, and restore the image of your system, and viola! everything is back just like it never happened!  No reinstalling Windows, no reinstalling all of your software, no setting up your email application again, no setting up your iTunes again (shudder!).  The best thing is, if you have Windows Vista or Windows 7, this technology is built in and you have no other software to buy!  All you need is an external hard drive or an extra internal hard drive to save system images too.  If you are still running Windows XP, don’t fret!  UNI has a software application we sell that works great with Windows XP.  Even if you have Windows Server, we have options for imaging that don’t cost any more than it does to image a desktop computer!

3. Replace your hard drive before the warranty expires. This one can be hard for some people to swallow, as they think ‘why should I replace it if it isn’t broken yet.’  The best analogy I can think of is the timing belt on your car.  It’s a belt hidden in the engine that makes sure critical pieces work together.  If the belt breaks, it can cause $1000′s of dollars of repairs in an instant.  No warning, just driving along and then BANG! you’re coasting to a stop with a dead car.  This is why manufacturers have a specified time frame for when you are supposed to replace the belt.  Going longer is like playing Russian Roulette with your car’s engine.  No one wants that!

Your hard drive is the same way, and if you put your self on a schedule to replace the drive every 2-3 years max, you will avoid most drive failures from ever happening.  This is what I have done personally for the past 12 years, and I have never had a drive fail on me, not once!  Most hard drives out there have a 3 year warranty.  (All of the internal drives UNI sells have a 3 year warranty, some even have a 5 year)  So while you won’t be out any cash to get a new drive if yours dies during the warranty, is the risk of losing all of your data really worth it?  Also, it is much easier for a technician to copy the contents of an older working drive to a brand new drive than it is to try to resurrect data off of a  drive that has crashed!  By the way, beware of hard drives you buy from big box stores that are in pretty retail box packaging.  Most of the time these drives only carry a 1 year warranty! All of the hard drives sold by UNI, regardless of whether they are retail box or OEM packaging carry at least a 3 year warranty.

4. If you have a laptop, treat it with care! I’ve seen so many laptops that have had hard drives fail prematurely most likely because they were not handled correctly.  When hard drives aren’t powered on, they can take quite a bit of abuse without failing, but when they are actually running, the tolerance goes way down.  Being careful with your laptop will not only preserve its overall life (and keep the outer case looking nice) but it will go a long towards extending the life of the hard drive inside.

The path to data happiness lies in being prepared for things to fail.  Computers are not ‘fire and forget.’  Just like a car, they need maintenance, and just like a car, an ounce of prevention now is worth several pounds of cure later on.  Keep this in mind and you will have many less issues with your computer.  And as always, UNI is there to help all of it make sense and make sure that you have the right backup plan for your needs.

While the name could be as American as apple pie and John Wayne, the thick non-American accent is still a tell-tale sign.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with our friends around the globe.  I just prefer to do business locally when I can.  I enjoy bumping into my customers at Free State, Liberty Hall, or checking out the latest fashions in footwear at none other than FootPrints.  Big corporate businesses have buying power, economies of scale, massive marketing campaigns, and on and on…but these locally owned and operated Lawrence businesses have their own secret weapon: customer service.  I’d like to add the word “neighborly” – neighborly customer service.

The truth of the matter is that you’ll probably bump into one of the folks here at UNI as you run errands, eat, or play around town.  We’d like that to be a positive experience.  So unlike giant outsourced corporate call centers, we actually listen first.

Ok, everybody, when you call 1-800 computer support, no matter what symptoms you observe, what’s the first thing they tell you to do? That’s right, “reboot the computer.” Even if you tell them that the computer is as dead as a doornail, no power lights, no fans, nothing.  Still: “reboot the computer.”  How frustrating.

So instead, the tech team here at UNI will actually listen to you, ask a few questions to clarify if needed, and then the begin troubleshooting.  Now, to be fair, sometimes “reboot the computer” IS actually valid, but we want to make sure that we understand as much of the customer’s symptoms as we can before suggesting that proper course of action.

Bottom line, there’s no script here when troubleshooting.  Why? Because we hire only the best and then we make them better.  Then we allow them to prove themselves under close supervision.  Yeah, this puts a strain on staffing sometimes but it allows us to be the go-to team for neighborly customer service who will actually listen first, and then act.

At first I was thinking, ‘well, too bad for them’, but I did a bit of research and found a program called Wine Bottler, which allows you to ‘package’ Windows applications in a format that a Mac can run them.  And it’s free.  Well how about that!

One of my buddies always tells me “Once you go Mac, you never go back.”  Well, sometimes you ‘need’ to go back, and here’s a great way to do it!

Download these 5 emails I sent you. Go install this media player. Go install that zip program. Uncompress all of these emails and piece the files together to make a video about mad poker skills.

The customer was frustrated, he just wanted to watch the video!  Those instructions were in tech speak, and while they made perfect sense to me, I’m kinda nerdy, and they don’t really make sense to anyone not immersed in this stuff all the time.  I realized that this customer just needed those instructions in English, and not Tech, and then he’d be fine.  I had him come into the store, we checked in the machine, I made the files into a happy video, and wrote out the instructions for him in English so that the next time his poker coach throws him the curve ball, he’ll be armed with the right tools.