RealtyTechBytes.com » Computer Maintenance

Data disaster blues and how to avoid them

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 04:53:14 +0000

Pop quiz! When was the last time you backed up your important data on your computer? You know, the IMPORTANT data like photographs, documents, your financial records…the stuff that would kill you if you lost it. What? Never?

If that was your answer, you are not alone. Most of the people that I talk with NEVER back up their data. I guess that if you don’t have anything that you would hate to lose that would be ok. But, almost everyone has something on their computer that would cost a lot of time, money or heart ache to replace if it was to be lost forever.

You might say to me that you have been ok up until now with your “I don’t back up my computer” strategy, but I am here to tell you that you are living on borrowed time. Ask ANY computer technician if you are at risk and they all will tell you that it’s not IF you will wish you had a backup, it’s just a matter of WHEN. You see, all computer hard drives will eventually fail. Many computers will contract a virus that could delete or corrupt data, some computers will get stolen or lost and some will be lost to fire, flood or earthquake. (To say nothing of the times that you accidentally delete something that you wish you hadn’t!)

I’ll admit that backing up a computer is no where near as much fun as playing a rousing game of solitaire with the computer, or reading or sending email. But, it’s got to be done. The purpose of this post is to expose you to several different ways to get the job done with a minimum of aggravation and cost.

To start with, if you have a Mac Running OS 10.4 or later all you need to do is buy an external USB Hard Drive equal in size to your computer’s hard drive and plug it in. The built in “Time Machine Software” runs in the background and creates backups on the fly. Every time something on the Mac’s Hard drive changes, Time Machine stores a copy. If you choose to activate the MobileMe account for $99.00, then Apple will give you 10 gigabytes of online storage (along with some other other goodies) which will allow you to sync items like calendar, contacts email and more from your Mac to the online storage giving you some redundancy.

If you are in the Windows world, you can do much the same, just not as easily. You can purchase a USB external hard drive equal in size to your computer’s hard drive and use the included backup software that comes with most of them to schedule backups.

This will work well, but still leaves you exposed to theft of the backup drive and your computer as well as fire, flood or earthquake loss.

The solution to this is sign up for an online backup service such as http://ww.Mozy.com or http://www.carbonite.com. Both offer free and paid services. You download a small piece of software to your computer, install it, run it and it will ask you what you want to backup and how often you want to backup. At that point it’s on autopilot. If you have a lot of data, you will outgrow the free allotment and will have to purchase a paid program that can be as little as $4.95 a month for MozyHome (No commercial or business use allowed) or pay $3.50 a month and .50 per Gigabyte for the MozyHomePro. Carbonite is similarly priced but does not have a free option beyond a trial period. Both services use very strong encryption to make sure that your data is safe while being backed up over the Internet as well as while they store it. Both services offer robust, yet easy to use Restoration of data should you need it.

One more way of backing up data, that is free is Windows Live Mesh Beta (https://www.mesh.com/welcome/default.aspx). This service gives you 5 gigabytes of free storage and allows you to sync multiple computers with the storage (phones and Macs too). Of course if you don’t have multiple computers this won’t work for you! But, if you do, and if your storage needs are under 5 GB, this might be the best solution of all, as not only will it keep the two computers in sync, you can also grant access to your files to another party, like your assistant, if needs be.

As you can see, with a minimal (or no) cash outlay, and a little bit of your time, you can “buy” yourself some peace of mind and security. If you are not sure that you can handle doing this on your own, hire a tech to set it up for you. It will be money well spent.

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Data disaster blues and how to avoid them

Have you staked out your piece of the Internet?

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:32:37 +0000

That’s an odd question! What do I mean by that?

The simple answer is that I want to know if you have a domain that you own. Do you have an address on the Internet that you can use for your blog or website? Do you have an address on the Internet that you can use for your own dedicated email address?

Maybe you already have an address, but now you want to expand your empire. Aren’t all the good names taken already? How can you quickly do the research to locate an available domain name, and then get it registered without hours of trial and error?

I’ve got the answer here for you in the form of an online domain search that has quite a few very interesting features. Go to https://domize.com to try out their “Fastest Domain Search Ever”. Just start typing in the name of the domain that you are thinking of and it will immediately start searching availability using one of five possible domain registrars. By default it selects GoDaddy, but you can also search Dotster, Network Solutions and Moniker if you choose.

<– Here is a shot of the home page. Just start typing and the site will start checking for you. It will check availability of .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .us by default and you can also add .mobi if you wish.

Power search is a feature that allows you to bulk search lists and combinations of words to quickly check a large selection of potential domain names.

Add lists to your query by writing a list of words, letters or numbers separated by commas between a set of [square braces]. Enter “[red,blue,green]light” to search for redlight, bluelight and greenlight (.com, .net, .org etc.).

You can also call a few special functions:

* [like:word] will list synonyms of the word you enter
* [set:item1,item2,item3...] will list more of the same type of item
* [bulk:http://url/textfile.txt] will load a list of domains to check from the given url

They have also provided some pre-made lists to help you out:

[vwl] – Vowels -The 5 vowels of the English language: a, e, i, o u
[vwly] – Vowels (including y) – The 5 vowels plus “y”
[cns] – Consonants – The 21 consonants in the English language
[alpha] – Alphabet – All letters in the English alphabet
[digit] – Digits – All 10 single digits 0-9
[digite] – English digits – “one” to “ten”, spelled out
[digite20] – English digits to twenty – “one” to “twenty”, spelled out
[digite10s] – English tens – “ten”,”twenty”,”thirty”…
[ending] – Endings – Common word endings, “er”, “ed”, “ster” etc.
[prep] – Prepositions – Most common English prepositions
[color] – Colors – A list of common colors
[verb] – Verbs – A list of the most common English verbs
[phonetic] – Phonetic alphabet – The phonetic alphabet: “alpha”, “bravo”, “charlie” etc.

Once you have a name or a list of names that you want to register domize.com handles that by switching you to GoDaddy and starts the process of registration by filling in the name of the domain that you want.

This free, online tool makes very short work of researching and registering that perfect domain name. What are you waiting for? Go stake out your piece of the Internet now.

Free conference calling for everyone!

Jerry Kidd — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 19:58:48 +0000

Have you ever had the need to set up a conference call? And have you ever been stymied by how to do it on the office phone or your cell phone? Do you know if your home phone can do conference calling? I may have the answer to these questions for you in today’s post. It’s called rondee, and yes, it’s absolutely free!

With rondee you can set up scheduled conference calls or you can create on the spot conference calls. You can have up to 100 callers on the call and you can record the call. You can email invitations and you can track the invitations so that you know who has accepted (and who hasn’t!).

There are no downloads, there is nothing to install. You log on to rondee and set up a free account. Thereafter, you login to setup the date and time for your call. You are then prompted to add the details of the call and to enter the email addresses of the people that you want to invite. (Or you are given a pin number to distribute to your invitees via text messages or even by calling them yourself and giving them the log in info). They simply dial in at the appointed time, enter the pin number and they are connected to the call.

Here is what the email looks like that your invitee receives.

Not much too it and notice the lack of advertising for anything but rondee itself. If they click on the link in the email, they come to a web page where they can accept or decline. If they accept, they can add comments and even invite other people as well. It’s all pretty easy to follow, and you get notified of everything they decide to do.

To get started, just go to rondee.com and create an account. You don’t have to do it this way, but if you do create an account, you get to register your phones. A benefit of registering your phones is that ever time you use the phone to call rondee, it recognizes your phone so that you don’t have to use a pin number to get to the call. Another benefit of registering is that you can create an address book of frequently used email addresses. This will save you time when setting up a rondee. Once you have done that, you go the web site and follow the steps as illustrated here. Pick a date, pick a time, invite attendees, choose a topic and you are done. You can even download the details into your Outlook or iCal calendars!

I see several uses for this for real estate agents. The first and obvious use is if you have clients who are at different locations and you need to talk to them both. One might be at work and the other at home. Just setup an on demand rondee and you are good to go. You can add in the lenders, title, inspectors and so on. And, don’t forget that the call can be recorded. If you do decide to record the call, all parties to the call are notified that the call is being recorded and all parties can later download the finished call. (You will need a free 3rd party converter to convert the call from the GSM format to WAV or MP3, but that is all explained on the rondee website, complete with links to the converter software)

Another use is in prospecting. Have you ever wanted to set up a First Time Homebuyer seminar, or a short sale seminar, or an investor seminar but were concerned about the cost? In today’s world of high gas prices, doesn’t it make sense to do a teleseminar? You could use rondee to do just that. They have a two tier pin system where some invitees get one pin that allows them to talk (you and your presenters for instance) and another pin that you would give to attendees who could only listen.

Given that you can record the calls, you could create your teleseminar with just you and your other presenters. Do a seminar, record it, download it and convert it to MP3 and then put it on your blog or web site. The possibilities to use this to promote yourself are almost endless.

Remember, it’s free. All you need to enter into a call is a telephone. Cell phones work just fine, too. Please don’t whine about the fact that you have to call a San Diego number. If that is a huge problem for you, you can pay rondee for the use of an 800 number!

Tell me how you would use this tool to enhance your business by leaving a comment so that we all can benefit!

Cool email backup tool

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 04:18:49 +0000

If you’ve got a business email account then you have an asset that needs to be protected. What would happen if one day you logged on to your computer and opened up Outlook (or almost any other email client) and it did not open? Or it opened but it couldn’t find your email?

If you are using a corporate email system then you might be ok as the admin’s MIGHT be able to restore the email for you…but maybe they can’t because they don’t have the backup files any longer. Or, maybe it’s late at night or on a weekend and they are not available. Even if they did have the file and even if they were available to do it for you, the amount of time that it would take for them to locate the backup, and run it to recover your mailbox is staggering.

There has to be a better way…and hopefully it’s a no brainer, and oh yeah, free would be great too!

As it turns out, this week’s topic, Amic Email Backup is all of that. It’s drop dead easy to use, you can schedule automatic backups and it is free! Here is where you get it: http://www.amictools.com/v-amic_email_backup.html

The software is easy to use, and has two working modes, a Wizard mode and a standard mode.

The Schedule feature allows you to backup the email database daily, weekly or at any chosen time period. The email database can be saved on one computer and restored to another, thus making Amic Email Backup not just a backup utility but also a synchronization tool.

Once you have downloaded the Installer, just double click on the file that you downloaded and the installation wizard will appear. Follow the easy steps in order to complete the installation.

Creating your first backup is easy as well. Just follow the Wizard which will walk you through the steps, or you can use the manual mode to select which email you want to backup and where you want to place the backup file.

Here is what the manual screen looks like:

My initial backup took over 35 minutes and resulted in a very large file. (I have over 9 years of email stored) The options tab allows you to break the file up into “pieces” that will fit on CDs so that you could copy the files onto CDs for off site storage. You could also take the CDs to any other Windows computer that is running the same email client (like Outlook) and Amic Email Backup will “restore” those files on the remote computer.

Now that is a great way to ensure redundancy AND to safely store your backups in a different physical location!

Give it a try and let me know what you think. I’d also like to hear what you are using to back up your email. Drop me a note in the comments!

Technology tools for real estate agents…redux

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 04:07:41 +0000

I’ve been on vacation since Friday afternoon. Actually, I spent all of Friday afternoon and part of Friday evening driving the 482 miles from Orinda, California to Newport Coast, California down the El Camino Real, otherwise known as US Hwy 101.

During the 7, almost 8, hour drive I had plenty of time to reflect on this week’s blog post and what I would talk about. I had several good ideas, but the most compelling idea was to recap what I have talked about to date.

When I started out to do this blog my main purpose was to show real estate agents how they could use tech tools to enhance their businesses and along the way provide better service to their clients. According to the WordPress dashboard, I have made 34 posts in 8 Categories in the 4 months that I have been blogging, and if I may be so bold as to say this, think that I have been true to my purpose.

The Categories are:

Apple Information – Posts about Apple products including computers and the iPhone

Buying Technology Tools – This category contains posts about cool tools that I think you should know about, and how to buy them.

Computer Maintenance – We all hate it but we all need to maintain our equipment

Computer Security – Let’s all practice safe computing

Cool Freebies – This category contains info on useful tools that are free!

How to… – Curious about how to do something? Look here.

Product Reviews – Here is where I give you my take on products that I use and think that you should too!

Sales Tips – Let’s face it, we are all sales people. Here are some tech related sales tips.

If you look through these categories, you may notice that a dominant theme is working remotely or working while mobile. This is no accident, as I believe that the future of our business lies outside of our bricks and mortar offices. The agent of tomorrow will need to bring the transaction, from end to end to the client…no matter where that may be. I have written many of my posts on that topic and you will learn about the tools that I use to work from wherever I happen to be that has an Internet connection.

So, take a few minutes and look through the categories to remind yourself of where the goodies are while I go sit by the pool!

Backups

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:02:16 +0000

I want to talk a bit about backups. But first, let’s take a little quiz:

First question: Do you have a backup program/system in place that regularly performs a backup of your critical data? (Answer truthfully and no copying your neighbor’s answer)

Second question: How likely are you to remember to do this on a daily basis if you had to change tapes and transport them off site? (No peeking at the book)

Third Question: If you had a relatively inexpensive method that was a fully automated way of backing up your data would you do it?

Ok, pencils down, the test is over.

Until recently, if you wanted to backup your computer, your choices were limited to tape, CD or external hard drive. All have benefits and all have issues. Tape backup is most commonly used by companies. Tape is a good solution as you can take the tapes offsite to a storage facility after every backup. This gives you the protection of having your backup data safely stored away from the main computer. That’s a good thing in case of a fire. The downside to tape backup is the cost of the tape drives and of course the tapes themselves. Then, of course is the hassle of taking the tapes offsite. Some companies have technicians whose sole job is to perform backups, manage the tape libraries and perform restores as needed. Imagine that, somebody thinks that their data is important enough to have to have full time employees manage it!

Most late model computers come equipped with CD or DVD burners installed, and they also have rudimentary backup software installed as well. You can buy a stack of blank CD-R or DVD-R discs and you can set up a plan to burn CDs once a week or so that contain copies of your data. The cost of blank CD-R media is trivial and blank DVD-R media is relatively low. Here is the problem with this method: the disks don’t have enough capacity to do a full backup on one disk. This means that you have to be present to change out disks as they fill up. Then you still need to transport them to an offsite storage facility.

Many hard drive manufacturers now offer external hard drives that come with backup software and connect to your computer using a USB connection. This is a pretty good method, as the software allows you to setup your backups to occur automatically. The downside is that you cannot move your backups off site.

So, why aren’t you backing up? Is it because of the cost of tape drives and tapes? Is it because you have to remember to change the tapes every day and keep track of the tapes and store them offsite?

Or, is it because the hassle of changing CD-R or DVD-R disks is too much work for too little reward?

Of course it is! You are busy trying to get new business and you are busy trying to service the existing business, be it buyers or sellers. Who has time for this stuff?
The problem is that it is not if you are going to wish that you had a current backup, it’s when. In plain English, ya gotta do it!

The solution that I urge you to implement is a no-brainer. You set it up, you perform a full backup once, and then it just backs up what changes, automatically, with no intervention on your part, in the background, quietly, and so on. It just flat couldn’t be easier. The investment is small considering what the cost to replace lost data might be. And, you will have some protection in place that satisfies the need to backup automatically and also satisfies the need to store the backups off site. That solution is online backup. If you have highspeed connectivity where your computer is located, then you are a candidate for this type of service.

There are any number of online backup services available. There are two that consistently rank as #1 and #2 in all reviews that I have read. They are Mozy and Carbonite. Both have slightly different feature sets and pricing schemes, but both are excellent. I use Mozy, in case you were interested

And by the way, periodically do a Restore of a few files to make sure that the system is working…and that goes for tape, CD/DVD and external hard drives as well.

Help! My Computer Crashed!!! (Part 6)

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:26:49 +0000

So one day you go up to your computer and it is doing something weird or it’s not doing what it should be doing or something is wrong and you just have no clue what to do. You’ve even rebooted, but the problem has not gone away. It’s now time to call tech support…or is it?

But wait! There are a few things that you can do first to make life a little easier. In fact, it’s best to do these things way in advance of ever having to call tech support, so why don’t you do them now before you need to make that call?
First of all, have or keep good records. Buy a small copybook for each computer that you own. On the first page record the date that you bought it and what it is, i.e. Pentium III, 866 Mhz, 128 Megs RAM, etc. Copy down any serial numbers and model numbers that you can find. It will be easier to look them up here than to chase through the paper work mess that most of have called our receipts file. Make note of tech support numbers and operating system and software versions as well.

Now, this part is key: anytime that you install software, write it down in the book. Date & Time installed and the name of the program installed. Also, record the source of the software and the company who wrote it. The reason for doing this is simple. Sometimes when you install software it breaks something.

So the second thing to do is try removing the last installed software and see if that fixes the problem. Sometimes it does, and once again you don’t have to call tech support!

But, if none of this works, you have no choice, so pick up the phone and give them a call.

When you finally get through to them try not to let them know how angry you are for being on hold for so long!
Then clearly explain what your problem is as concisely as possible. Most of the folks you get at TS are called first level support. They often don’t know much more than you and many times they will try to solve your problems by reading from a script. Keep in mind that their understanding of your problem is only as good as YOUR ability to accurately state your problem. It will be helpful to know what you were doing with the computer just prior to the problem showing up. They will need to know what you did to try to fix it and they may be interested in knowing what software you have recently installed.

The techs on Level 1 support are there to catch the easy problems and they often do, but most of them are ill-equipped to fix the really nasty problems. For that you need to “escalate” the problem to the next level, often known as Level 2.

Here you can expect to find techs that have been on the job for a while and have a good understanding of the product. They will have known what the level 1 techs have asked you to do to solve the problem, but may ask you to do some of the same things over again anyway. Don’t argue with them or cop an attitude, just do it. The old adage of you can catch more flies with sugar…holds true here as well. These people have to field a great number of calls everyday, most of which are from angry and frustrated people. Be different, be kind and you will stand out from the crowd and will get better treatment as well.

The final level is Level 3. You will rarely get to this level because this is usually just a few people who are highly trained and experienced in what they do. They get the truly baffling problems. If they can’t fix the problem, then it’s usually pack up the equipment and ship it back time!

Here’s the trick. In many cases, the first level people have no real idea what to do if the problem is not on their script. This is why you may be told to “re-install Windows”. Being told that by first level techs is inappropriate in my opinion. If you are asked to do that, ask to be escalated to the next level or ask to speak to a supervisor. In my opinion, a re-install of an operating system is warranted when your computer is so “hosed” (technical term for it’s all screwed up) that an OS re-install is the only way out. But let a level 2 tech tell you that, not a level one tech.

So that’s pretty much it.

Reboot often. Keep good records. Run error checking and Disk Defrag periodically. Keep your antivirus software up to date and scan frequently. Always scan attachments before opening. Don’t ever open attachments that have .vbs or .exe as their file extensions, unless you are absolutely certain about their origin. Call the sender and ask them “Did you mean to send me xyz.vbs file?” “What is it?” and “What does it do?” are good questions to ask as well. If they didn’t send you those files then tell them that they are infected with a a virus or a Trojan and then go delete the file they sent to you. Even if it says that Jennifer Lopez or Ricky Martin is coming over!

If your computer is a toy or is just a hobby instead of a business machine used to help you earn income, then go ahead and ignore these posts! But, if you’re like most of us, your computer is a very valuable business tool that you can’t be without.

Protect it and maintain it and your downtime will be minimal instead of catastrophic.

Help! My Computer Crashed!!! (Part 5)

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:21:50 +0000

Now I’ll talk about Error Checking (A.K.A. ScanDisk or ChkDsk) and Disk Defragmentation.

These two programs are essential to the continued good health of your computer. Running these two programs is like changing the oil in your car and getting a tune up. They don’t perform the same functions, but if your forget to change your oil, eventually you will destroy your engine. Failing to run Scandisk and Defrag won’t destroy your computer, but it can make for really sluggish performance and in extreme cases failure to boot up can occur.

Here’s what they do and why they do it. We’ll start with Scandisk.

Your hard drive is composed of several metal platters a little smaller in diameter than a CD. These platters are spaced and stacked on a spindle and revolve at high speed. Each side of each platter has a read/write head that writes and reads data to and from it’s individual platter. The platters are coated with a magnetic oxide and the heads place a magnetic charge on the oxide coating, or they read a magnetic charge. The platters are electrically divided into “cylinders” (think of them as tracks) and the cylinders are divided into “sectors” (think of a wedge of pie). Data is stored on sectors by the heads. A special part of the disk called the File Allocation Table (FAT) keeps track of where the data is so that it can be found when needed.

Now, even though this works pretty well most of the time, occasionally data gets misplaced and ends up not where it is expected to be. This is where scandisk comes in. It reads the FAT and verifies that the data is where it is supposed to be. If it finds that something is out of place, it stops running and asks you if it can “fix” the problem. Scandisk also does something known as a surface scan. In this test it examines the magnetic characteristics of each sector to determine if it can safely hold data. Because things like improper shutdowns, voltage spikes, brownouts, etc can cause problems with the data on your disk, it’s a good idea to run scandisk weekly. Don’t panic, I’ll tell you how to do this in your sleep before we are done here.

Disk defragmentation is a different animal. You would think that when you save data on a disk that it would go on the disk in a nice orderly fashion, i.e. start with sector 1, then go to sector 2 and so on. But that is not the case. What actually happens is that the system finds the first empty sector and puts as much data into it as it can. It then finds the next empty sector and puts as much data in there as it can. When this process is complete, your data is scattered all over the disk. The result of this is that when you want to retrieve your data, the heads have to fly all over the disk to retrieve it. This takes time, and on badly fragmented disks you can see the machine slowing down.

Defrag literally picks up the data and shuffles it around until everything that is supposed to be next to each other actually is next to each other. The defrag process usually starts with a scandisk because you don’t want misfiled data moved around…you would never find it again and the computer may actually fail to run. Once scandisk is finished, defrag starts. This process can take several hours on large hard drives with lots of data.

Instead of you having to manually remember to start these programs, what if the computer could keep track of itself? Well if you are running an earlier version of Windows you are in luck. Down in your System Tray in the lower right hand corner of your screen is a small icon that represents Windows Task Scheduler. Hover your mouse pointer over the ions until you discover it. Double click on it and the Scheduler program will start. Click on add scheduled task and a wizard will walk you through the process. You will get a list of programs and in the list you will find both Scandisk and Defrag. Pick one and set it up to run on Tuesday mornings at 1:00 AM every week. Follow the wizard to complete setting this up and then go back and schedule the other program to run on Wednesday morning at 1 am.
Unfortunately, Windows XP and Windows Vista do not make this as easy to do. However, it can still be done. Microsoft has a very good article on how to do this at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308569. For error checking in XP and Vista, you want to follow the instructions in the article and look for a program called ChkDsk which is usually found at c:\windows\System32\chkdsk.exe. Defrag can usually be found at c:\windows\System32\defrag.exe.

Now this may have been way too “geeky” for you, so this is one of those things that you may wish to have the geek on your team set up for you. At any rate, regular error checking/repair and disk defragmentation can go a long way towards keeping your computer humming along!

Help! My Computer Crashed!!! (Part 4)

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:16:56 +0000

Next up is Virus Scanning, so to start with let’s talk about what is a virus. If you go the McAfee web site, their glossary defines a virus as “A computer program file capable of attaching to disks or other files and replicating itself repeatedly, typically without user knowledge or permission.”
This is probably as good as it gets as far as a definition goes. The real question here is why would someone write and let a virus loose on the world. That’s hard to answer, but some of the writers who have been caught admitted to a feeling of power over what they had done.

Computer viruses have been written for all computer operating systems including Macintosh.
Some viruses attach to files so when the infected file executes, the virus also executes. Other viruses sit in a computer’s memory and infect files as the computer opens, modifies or creates the files. Some viruses display symptoms, and some virus’s damage files and computer systems, but neither symptoms nor damage is essential in the definition of a virus; a non-damaging virus is still a virus.

At any rate, the fact remains that viruses are out there. ANY ONE can send you a virus. Even me. None of us do it knowingly, as the definition above states, but do it we do. So how do you protect yourself? The answer is multifaceted.

The most important thing that you can do is to never, ever open an attachment without scanning it for viruses first. Of course this assumes you have a virus scanner! So the second most important thing that you can do is have a Virus detection program on your computer. Of course just having it does no good unless you update it daily. So, the third facet is to frequently download and INSTALL updates from your software manufacturer’s web site.

You may want to know which virus scanner should you use, and I would answer that I use TrendMicro PC-Cillin and have for years. Why you may ask, and I would say because I am familiar with it and it works well for me. Your mileage may vary. The truth is that McAfee, Norton, Dr. Solomon and others are all pretty much equal in the results of their work. They all have different quirks and different methods of getting there, but they all work. So, how do you decide? Remember that local techie I told you to cultivate a relationship with? Go ask them for their opinion on what will work best for you. You did start cultivating that relationship didn’t you?

Since new viruses are being released almost daily, the Anti-Virus companies must constantly revise their software and post updates on their web sites for you to download. Viruses can be detected because they have a “signature” or method of working that is different from how normal programs operate. Each new virus has a different signature, or a variation of an older signature. In any case, if you don’t keep your system up to date, you could fall victim to the latest virus.

Once you have installed your virus checking software and have updated it (yes, right out of the box it needs updating to cover the time from when the CD was created until you installed it, so hop to it and download the update), then you want to create the rules by which you scan your system. PC-Cillin will let me scan each file every time I access it. Whew! That’s a lot of overhead on my system, and even with a fairly speedy processor and tons of memory the slow down is unacceptable to me. So, my system is only set to scan e-mail attachments that come in. I have also scheduled the system to run a virus scan on my entire hard drive, checking EVERY file, once a week at night while I am asleep. PC-Cillin will check the web site for updates before running the scan, but I prefer to get the updates myself. Control freak that I am.

So to recap:

ALWAYS virus scan an attachment to an e-mail. Don’t fall for the Anna K, or the I love you, or the flavor of the month come-on. Scan no matter who sent you the e-mail. This is the single most important thing that you can do. Have a virus checker on your system and keep it updated often.

For those of you using Outlook or Outlook Express, do turn off the Preview feature…using that feature effectively opens an e-mail and can launch certain types of viruses.

But wait…it’s too late you may say, a virus has already infected my system. Well, no problem…IF you have recent backup. If you have a recent backup you can recover, even if the virus is so destructive that it has destroyed your data. You will need a Windows Startup Disk, your backup software and your backup data for these extreme cases. Don’t wait for disaster to strike before starting a backup program.

If you are fortunate and have only been infected by an annoying virus rather than a destructive one, your anti-virus software will offer to fix the problem for you. In some cases, the virus may have hijacked a Windows System file. When that occurs the virus software won’t be able to fix the problem. The reason being that the ONLY way to fix an infected Windows system file is to delete it and re-install it from the installation CD. (Notice that I did NOT say re-install Windows). Windows will not allow you to go through that process while Windows is running, so that’s why the Anti-virus software can’t fix the problem. It is fixable though, if you shut your computer down and restart it using the Windows Startup disk. (You DO have one of those, right?). The Startup disk starts your computer in DOS mode. From DOS you can delete the offending file and reinstall the good file from the Installation CD.

If this sounds way too arcane for you, get your local techie to help.

Help! My Computer Crashed!!! (Part 3)

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 20:12:32 +0000

Moving on to some hardware issues now. We are living in dangerous times now here in California. (And if you believe the news, other parts of the country will have the same problems soon) I am referring to the dangers to computers from power outages. As mentioned yesterday, power surges are disastrous to electronic equipment (not just computers, but TV’s, fax machines, monitors, copiers, scanners, etc). So, here is the next rule, (Rule #2) at a minimum make sure that you have your computer plugged into a surge protector. Don’t by the cheap one from the hardware store. Buy the $50.00 dollar one from your local computer store. Good ones come with an insurance policy that will replace your equipment if the surge protector fails.

Of course a surge protector will do nothing to keep you computing if the power fails. For that you will need a device known as a UPS, or Uninterruptible Power Supply. This is a device with a battery inside and circuitry to convert battery power to something your computer can use. The way it works is simple, you plug your computer into the UPS and you plug the UPS into the wall. When the power fails, you have enough power to gracefully save your work and shut the computer down. You can get a UPS for under $200.00, but the more expensive ones give you more time than the cheaper ones.

So, rule #3 is to buy and USE a surge protector or a UPS. The good news is that if you go the UPS route, a surge protector is built in! (UPS= Uninteruptable Power Supply)
You need to back up your system. Repeat after me…I need to back up my system. But you knew that didn’t you? I’ll bet that only a very small percentage of people do that. And that is just waiting for disaster to happen. There is any number of ways to lose your data. In fact there are so many ways for that to happen that the techies like to say “It’s not if you will lose your data, it’s when”. There are lots of ways to back up data. To learn more, please see my post on backing up.