FREE PC, OS, Network, and Software help

Is anyone or do you know anyone that is a Web Designer? I may have some work to farm out.

Media Mate 773-4466 They would be a very good contact for you to have here. They do a very large portion of the websites on all 3 islands and have alot of stateside work as well.

I will be on island as of Monday the 6th.

Feel free to pass my contact info to all your relatives, friends, and associates.

They may contact me direct at:

877-6-GET-VIC

or email me at:

vroberge@vnrconsulting.com

I will continue to post in this forum as long as there is interest.

Thanks all for your support and encouragement.

Vic

Worm Alert!!! Conficker

News today reports the arrival of a new worm that has already affected a million PCs, and it's expected to mutate tomorrow.

It has stolen personal information, wrecked hard drives, and mass emailed through address books. It may also do nothing and wait until future instructions are received.

It may be prevented if you have updated your OS with the latest MS updates.

You can find more details at http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_356436.html

Vic

I have been following this thread and have found it extremely helpful. Thanks for sharing your expertise..not often you get something for free in life.

No problem Cleo.

I thought I'd be overwhelmed with questions, but was surprised to see how manageable the forum turned out to be.

Vic

I'm sure as people have problems you're going to get lots more questions. It's nice of you to help.

Thank you for the update on the new worm virus. My business is totally dependant on our computers. We already take precautions but we are being especially diligent because of your warning. Thanks again.

Found about 15 "You have a Hallmark card" emails in my inbox today.

Obviously from PCs that have the worm. Just highlighted them and deleted them, then deleted them from the Deleted Items folder to get them off the laptop.

This is one way the worm works its way in to your OS. It was pretty obvious, as they were Valentine greetings, and there were so many of them.

But the advice of the day is if you have any ecards from ANYONE today, just delete them.

Vic

My PC seems fine today. No worm or strange emails. When my shop opens this morning I'll tell my employees to be careful of strange emails but we get them from all over the world so it might be hard to tell. Any advice.

Piece of advice: not only should you have good anti-virus software, but I also depend on the free Spybot software. Do not install the "teatimer" part of it.

Never agree to allow anything to be downloaded on your computer, like a video player or any Active-X software.

I find MS Windows Defender to top the list of spy programs. MS knows their OS better than anyone, and it's a free download.

I've found the other spy programs may give false positives on hits in the registry, and may if fact remove an important part of the OS.

Vic

I had a PM yesterday request to remote in to help with an issue. Unfortunately we could not get the remote assistance to send out the invitation from her laptop (Vista). The problem she was asking for help was slow and unresponsive PC.

The slow and unresponsive PC indicates an infection or multiple infections and/or spyware. One of the ways of testing if you had the Conficker worm is to see if you could get to a virus protection vendor site like Mcafee or Norton. The infection literally will hijack the browser so you cannot complete the connection.

I suspect in the case of the issue I had yesterday, the laptop was so far gone that any attempt to get help was being hijacked. In that case, we got all the way through the request process to the point where the email was being created, and the new email window froze so the requester could not enter the address to send the request to me.

Unfortunately, this would require a site visit to fix, and typically as the OS is so damaged, even if the infection is able to be removed, it is recommended the OS be reinstalled.

Vic

Can't believe it. It's moving day!

At 2:29 this afternoon, we will step out of the plane on to our new home.

Hope to meet and greet you all soon.

Vic

Have a good trip! Best of luck to you.

Does anyone know where I can score two tickets to Taste of St Croix?

We didn't realize they would sell out, and wanted to do some networking at the events.

Sometimes ebay, or take out a ad in the Avis. It'll cost you a lot more now. For future reference, they go in the first hour Always. You get to where they sell the tickets a hour to a hour and a half early so you can be guaranteed a ticket. Bring a chair, something to drink and maybe some sunblock depending on where you are.

I have a networking question. Is it possible to network my office computer to my home computer so that we dont have to enter everything into Quickbooks twice? And if so how would we go about doing this. We used to use something called MYPC, but Im hoping there to be a less dramatic and more cost effective way. Thanks in advance.
Lisa - VI Solar Depot, LLC.

The short answer is yes. The long answer depends on what OS is at each end, how both ends connect to the Internet, and what if any firewalls lie in between.

MYPC is one way to go.

You would probably best be able to connect via Remote Desktop (check help files). As long as RD is enabled and any barriers along the route are removed, you would log in to your work PC from home by entering its IP address in to Remote Desktop. It would ask you for credentials and log you on to the work while you are at home. You would see a window open on your home desktop that is your work PC desktop.

The second option is to set up a VPN connection between your home PC and the work PC. VPN would tunnel through the Internet from your home PC to the work PC, and depending on the VPN method, you would see your desktop, or at least have access to your files and programs.

If all else fails, you may just save the business file from Quickbooks to a travel drive and upload at the other end. This of course could still be confusing.

I have successfully used remote desktop to log in to PCs and laptops of several friends, family, and associates to help them out with problems. Based on experience, it seems this would be your best choice. You do of course have to leave the work PC on and at the log in screen.

Hope this helps

Vic

Met with Roger Morgan at Paradise 93 this afternoon. Going to be doing a bunch of advertising starting next week. Should be about 4 spots per day over three weeks. Let me know if you hear any of them.

V 2 tickets to taste of stx on classifieds board

If any of you have been following the Air Card thread, it shows a perfect example of one of the things we ALL fall prey to.

The rest of the story is that a while back on one of my trips to the island, I realized that cable was not always going to be reliable, and I found this site for a free service to TVTonic. It basically has a bunch of categories of short videos on each topic that get published as they come available, and the install downloads them automatically so you can view them at your leisure.

While I did try to insure that all auto updates were disabled while trying to troubleshoot the Air Card problem, this downloader did not show up in the startup, the firewall, or the services that I could see on the laptop, and yet it did continue to execute every morning to do its work.

Surprise, surprise! The moral of the story? You just never know what that piece of software is going to do once you give it access. If you start complaining about a slow PC or Internet, look to the last install you did.

Unfortunately, I installed this software over a year ago, and forgot about it, as I never used it in CT. So this one was a tough one to track down.

I had PM a short time ago regarding Internet connection speed. Not sure if I spoke about it before in this forum, but basically the user was asking if the speeds promised by the provider were actually being provided.

Shortly there after, I submitted a Open Forum message to the Source on line, asking them to investigate and accumulate data on the number of users that are experiencing deficiencies in the connection speed provided. They did nothing, and did not publish my concern, probably because the providers are advertisers.

Today I see there is a new message list item on the subject, and my concerns continue. A number of years ago, AOL was hit with a class action suit for just such a business practice. At that time, they were selling far more memberships with promised bandwidth, without upgrading their servers to accommodate the potential simultaneous usage. Their penalties levied by the court were severe, and went directly to the users in the form of substantial monthly credits. They were also required to immediately upgrade their equipment to deal with the required bandwidth.

The problem with this type of issue is that everyone does not know that everyone else is having the same problem, and believe it's only their PC. Therefore the provider gets away with the deception, because nobody compares notes. Well, I would like to get to the bottom of this and accumulate those "notes" here if you would like to voice your concern also.

Tell your family. Tell your friends. Tell your associates. The simple test is to go to www.speedtest.net and CLICK ON THE GOLD PYRAMID on the United States. Record the numbers the test produces. Post them and the bandwidth numbers you are paying for from your statement, in this forum.

It could only help.

Internet access security is something taken for granted an overwhelming majority of times. To be more specific, your wireless connection to your router in your home or office may be a possible breach point.

When you hook up a wireless router in your small network, the installation process usually will walk you through the connection options. Many users might not know or understand some of the terminology or uses of the different installation steps, and subsequently may end up bringing up the router in a non-secure mode.

There are two possible breach points if the router is unsecure:

1) Anyone within range of the router can access the Internet and steal your bandwidth. Some routers and wireless cards today have ranges up to 400 or 500 feet. Aside from the obvious slow down of access that you could experience during use because someone else is also using the bandwidth, you open yourself up to possible legal issues in the event piracy, child porn, data theft, or hacking is detected from your access point.

2) Not only does the security breach point allow stealing of your bandwidth, it opens your private network up to outside access. Even though you think your PC is secure and nothing is shared in it, it won't take a brilliant hacker long to find a way in to your files. This is why Microsoft constantly comes up with security updates.

The easiest way to check to see if your router is configured for security is to look at its configuration page in your Internet browser. Most small office routers will have a static IP address assigned to them, and further, most of the static IP addresses will be a standard 192.168.1.1. Just type this number in to your browser address bar and see if it come up. Then look for the security link. If the standard IP does not work, the IP will probably be on the router label or in its documentation.

I got a call to look at a laptop yesterday. On arrival, the user demonstrated that while he could get on the Internet, when he tried to download an attachment to his email on webmail, the where to save dialog box would not appear. In addition, if he tried to just open the attachment, it would run through open process to the point where the document should appear, but it never appeared.

Upon setting out to diagnose the problem, I discovered other normal system operations would not execute properly either, things as simple as opening Internet Explorer Options. It appeared that somehow the OS was corrupt, and the corruption was cascading.

I went to Microsoft sight to be sure all updates were installed, but when the site tried to install an active x control required for the auto update scan, it was blocked by the OS as a "security setting issue", and of course not being able to get in to Internet Options, those setting could not be checked.

So we set out to try and update from the OS (Vista) itself, and got similar result with an error in execution. Then it was apparent.

Confiker strikes again.

Microsoft published a paper on the manual removal that required a download of a security patch that of course could not be downloaded from that laptop, so I got it from mine and sneaker netted it to his. The patch install was stopped in its tracks before it even got going.

Only option now was to try to step the laptop back to a previous restore date, but that was also blocked in the Windows environment, saying the D drive was corrupt. Restarted and went to the boot menu where a Repair Operating System option was available. Executed this and stepped back to March 31 (the day before Confiker was activated). The laptop came up, all seemed well. Immediately did all updates for the OS and all virus and spyware software.

Happy customer.