From: newsletter-bounces@thepcgurus.com on behalf of Kevin-PC Gurus
[microdome@seidata.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2008 8:31 PM
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Cc: PC Gurus Newsletter
Subject: GuruNews, Volume 8 Number 25, 7-17-08
Attachments: ATT00013.txt
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Vol. 8, No. 25
7-17-08
1 Once more with feeling
2 On THAT?!?
3 Hacker whacked, spammer canned, Mars Needs Women, rock on
4 If the boss asks, you don’t know us
5 Cleaning help
Summer is here and with it comes the yard chores, recreational activities, picnics and barbecues. The poor computer sits idle and unloved, common maintenance activities left for “another day”.
Some things can admittedly be postponed, such as defragging and spyware scanning. If you aren’t surfing you aren’t infesting. You’re antivirus will take care of itself and stay updated, as well as prevent things from just crawling in.
One thing you can’t afford to neglect, though, is the backing up of important data. Many things can happen regardless of use levels that can result in the loss of everything. Those priceless graduation pictures, that music collection you spent months converting from your old CDs or LPs into MP3 files, that database full of serial numbers and purchase prices of everything of importance in the house.
Any of these and more could be lost to drive crash, fire, theft, alien invasion, you name it and it can happen to ruin your day. If nothing else just making frequent backups of the most important files, say your financial and tax records, can save you severe headaches later.
Since the last time we addressed backups a few years ago the options have exploded. Back in the day a second internal hard drive and CDs were about it for anything resembling efficiency and ease of use. Tape has been around for years but it’s expensive and on the home level notoriously prone to failure. Don’t even think about floppies, if you even own a drive that will read them.
Today you have internal drives, USB drives, network drives, CDs, DVDs, online backups and flash drives. What a difference two or three years makes.
For portability you can’t beat optical disks or flash drives, although 2.5” USB drives offer far more storage and will still fit in a shirt pocket. 3.5” USB and network drives (known as NAS, or Network Addressable Storage) offer capacity in a less portable format and online storage gives security in both distance and safety.
Prices range from 10-15¢ per disk for blank CDs and DVDs to $100 or more for a large USB/NAS drive, with flash drives falling toward the lower end and online backup services using a monthly subscription model.
Any and all are fine for backups and a good plan is a mixture of two or more. Personally I burn the most important items to optical and store them in a drawer at work, use a NAS box located in the opposite end of the house for major frequent backups and a 2.5” USB drive to save the less important but larger files like photos and media files. That last one stays in my laptop bag and travels along with me.
This gives me the offsite storage of the most important items, a certain amount of protection for major amounts of data due to catastrophic loss and easy portability of my fun stuff like pictures and music. The best of all worlds.
Regardless of what and how many solutions you use the important thing is to just do backups. If you don’t you WILL lose data, maybe not next week or next month but eventually you’re going to kick yourself when something bad happens.
Now pick an option or two and get started!
Kevin Mefford, Editor
Terry Wise
Tech News of the Week
A city computer engineer
accused of tampering with San Francisco's new
computer network to give himself exclusive access was ordered held on
$5 million bail. Looks like hacking isn't all fun and games anymore:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jZ0u3sipQ_XEvgvKj-Y678YpurDQD91V7ID80
A 27-year-old man was sentenced to 30 months in
prison Tuesday for
blasting AOL subscribers with spam over a four-month period. The
court of public opinion voted for the death penalty:
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/148512/spammer_gets_30_months_for_inundating_aol.html
A lot more Martian rocks were altered by water
than scientists
originally thought, suggesting that early Mars was a very wet place.
And where there's water, there's....bikinis?
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2008-07-16-mars-early-water_N.htm
Toshiba just added a 400GB model to its range of
2.5-inch, 7,200 RPM
drives targeted for notebook use. Now you can take all that
"borrowed" music with you:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=290
Copy us on the good stuff!
Matthew Dattilo
Download of the Week
PHUN
is a timewaster designed as a computer science student’s master thesis
project. Watch it at YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H5g9VS0ENM . If you
decide you’d like to design some outlandish creations
which bounce, which collide and which are liquid. Then, you can connect them
all with hinges, motors, chains or springs, and set it all in crazy motion.
Have some PHUN. It’s free. Read the tutorial before downloading and
installing: http://phun.cs.umu.se/wiki/Tutorial
. This stuff is beyond me, so direct
your questions to the website.
Carlita Lupino
Email Question of the Week
Q: Ordinarily, I consider myself to be computer
saavy and very cynical.
Don't trust anything on the internet, yeah, yeah, yeah....
This morning, I get up to find that I have a whole mess of trojans,
password stealers and implements of mass destruction on my machine,
from what I thought was my antivirus program. There's a "removal
tool" from Antivirus 2009 that I need to get to remove these malicious
tools since my free version isn't doing the work.
What do I do? I give them my credit card and order the $79.95, three
year upgrades package! When the program failed to give me a receipt,
I knew I'd been screwed. As I was looking up the number for my bank
to stop the transaction, they called me, saying there's been activity
they want to verify.
Oh glorious day! I get to cancel my debit card and have a new one
mailed to me. Then I get to notify all my automatic billing
statements that I have a new credit card. When the fee is posted to
my checking account, I also get to dispute the amount and try to get
my money returned.
Here's the question: Now that I have this bogus software, what's the
best way to get rid of it? I am presently running my AVG (Free
Version) to remove any viruses that may be present, but want to fully
insure that this does not happen and that the Antivirus 2009 is fully
removed. Will also follow with spybot and adaware. Do you have any
suggestions, please???
Keep up the good work! I appreciate the work you guys and gals do on
the newsletter and look forward to receiving it each week. Thanks for
all your hard work.
Yes, I'm feeling pretty stupid now....
A: As far as getting rid of the Antivirus 2009
program, click on this
link: http://www.malwarebytes.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=5178 and
follow the instructions listed there. I would also follow it up with
a Spybot: Search & Destroy. As far
as the rest of the e-mail, I'll point
out the old phrase, caveat emptor. The website listed above makes
note that the trojans that were installed on your computer advertise
the Antivirus 2009 software as part of the trojan. Before you install
anything, run the program through google and read the top 5 links. If
any of them mention to not install the program, I'd suggest that you
heed the advice. Also, you can always send us a question here at the
team, and we'll take a look and see what is out there. It's
unfortunate that this has happened to you, but this is a lesson to us
all that it can and does happen out here in the world. Good thing
that the bank is working with you to get this straightened out. If
you need anything else, feel free to e-mail back and we'll see what we
can get done.
Hope this helps,
Daniel A. Williams
daniel@thepgurus.com
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