Category: Technology

PC work? Not for you.

April 30th, 2010 · · Family, Illinois, Mount Vernon, Technology, Work No comments - Tags: , , , , ,

The following story is true to my best recollection, and happened a couple of years ago.

I  shy away from working on personal computers for one major reason – people who are sue-happy. A PC is a machine, it breaks mechanically as well as by software. Had a woman who asked me to look at a PC, I did, and after I had her reboot, it would not come up. I left, after doing nothing to the PC other than plugging in a USB thumb drive (software tools I commonly use are on the thumb drive).

She told me I had broken it and needed to pay to have it replaced after her ‘friend’ she gets weed from said it was non-repairable. We had a few missed phone calls back and forth, but I offered to pay 1/2 of the repair cost at a neutral shop to be nice. I should point out that she suggested I buy her a ~$1,500 laptop to replace the 5+ year old desktop her weed-buddy said I broke.

Then she contacted the MVPD who told her(according to her message) that I had likely downloaded personal information from her PC using my thumb drive (thanks for that, MVPD), and was a criminal planning to exploit that information. Finally she left me a message that said she had ‘better not find me out anywhere’ and that I should ‘come back by her house because her dogs have something for me’.

Long story short, I’m shying away from doing PC work for anyone other than immediate family. Until I am incorporated and have a much better liability policy, my family cannot afford the risk even though I love helping people.

I won’t mention her company for fear of being sued, but her family runs a local pest control company named ACME, beware.

Today, I was offered ‘dream job’

November 19th, 2009 · · Illinois, Technology, Work One comment - Tags: , , , , , ,

And hell yes I accepted the offer. As of December 7th I will be working for School Center in Carbondale. The drive will suck a little, but the joy of doing what I want every day and being a part of a normal job will be awesome. I miss the routine of going into work, doing my job, and going home. It won’t be that every day, as it is a datacenter, but it’s closer than anything I’ve done recently.

I have to say that I was/am very grateful for the position I have been working for the past month and a half, but this is a great opportunity and it will not be passing me by while I sit there and wave. I am also extremely thankful for my family and friends’ support over the past 6 months while I have been looking for employment, and more recently for better employment.

At least for the next two weeks I get to whistle while I work and look forward to the future instead of wondering if this is my lot in life. I’m excited as can be, but you who know me well know I have one look, so don’t expect me to be jumping around or anything.

AAAAAAAAAAAANNNNDDDD I will get to release this stupid blog back into the wild instead of hiding it like Sloth in The Goonies.

How to remove junkware

September 16th, 2009 · · Technology No comments - Tags: , , , ,

I was having a case of writer’s block, and Mr. Hall suggested that I write about this subject.

When you buy a new PC, there is often a large amount of software trials included for you to sample and use. This is not such a bad thing if done properly. We consumers get a price break (you don’t think Dell loads that junk for free, do you?) and we can try out software that we might not know about or use on our own.

Remember, I said if it is done properly this is not a bad thing. Unfortunately most PC manufacturers load this junk software (junkware) on the operating system without providing any way to dump it. That problem is not the proper way to conduct this type of advertising.

In my opinion, when you buy a PC, it is yours. You should have the right to use it as you see fit with whatever software and customizations you choose. Not whatever junk the PC manufacturers are paid to put on the PC. Microsoft, Dell, and others do not seem to feel this way however. So, now on to how to remove the garbage.

The most simple way to remove this junk is to use Windows’ Add/Remove Software ability within your Control Panel. You should be able to use this functionality to see a list of all programs installed on your computer. Using this window, simply select the offending program and choose ‘remove’.

In a perfect world, that would handle everything and the junk would now be gone. We do not live in a perfect world, and that is not the end of some software. AOL is particularly bad about hiding in a folder and then re-installing itself or popping-up on your screen. Some other software is as bad or getting to the point of AOL, however.

To help you through making your PC truly yours, I recommend a program with a name which I hope does not offend you: PC Decrapifier (http://tinyurl.com/3yywu7). It is a great tool to remove junk from your PC. I have used this software many times with great results, however you use at your own risk as always. PC D* is free for personal use, but please consider a donation if it works for you. People make software and give it out freely to help everyone, but they need to eat too.

Can/should I run more than one antivirus program?

September 15th, 2009 · · Technology No comments - Tags: , , , , ,

Baseball Mom has a situation where her children ‘accidentally’ installed a second software on her home PC. This happens more and more every day as our kids grow up around technology and often know how to use computers and the Internet better than we do.

Can you do it? Probably. Some antivirus programs contain a check to see if there is other protection software present, and others do not. In this case, Norton did not check to see if there was protection present and installed itself.

Now, should you do it? In my opinion, nope. My reasoning is that the software will possibly ‘fight’ about which is actually supposed to be protecting the system. This can make for system resources being hogged by both programs that are attempting to do the same job. This amounts to your system performing double-duty on a task that should only require one or the other program to be active.

The second reason to not double-up on antivirus software is that you will have false positives and run the risk of one program destroying the other. Antivirus programs use definitions of viruses to check your PC and remove any bugs that might sneak in past your firewall (you are running one, aren’t you?).

If you have two antivirus programs keeping you protected, when one scans files it should find the definitions from the other software. This may result in a scary moment where you are advised you have a virus. You don’t, but the definition matches, and the program is not smart enough to know the definition is not a real virus. The false-virus is then deleted, making your first program less effective.

Later, your first program scans and finds the definitions from the second program. Again, you are told you have a virus, and delete the bad file. The end result is that neither works as it should, possibly leaving you even less protected since you think you are safe and may be a little more careless with your activity.

So, the short version is that you should not be running two antivirus programs. They will bog down valuable resources and work against each other, hurting you. What you should be doing, is using Windows’ Automatic Update, install a firewall, use an antivirus program (ONE), and not go to questionable sites.

Your browser, or How I learned to love the Internet

September 14th, 2009 · · Technology No comments - Tags: , , , , , , ,

How many of you know what a browser is? No, it’s not the lady who comes in and looks over everything and never buys. A web browser is the software that reads information (usually from the Internet), and makes it pretty on your screen. That is an overly-simple explanation, but I think it covers what we need here.

Almost everyone I know is using Internet Explorer(IE) by Microsoft. Primarily, this is because Microsoft pushes IE out with its operating system Windows. IE is just ‘there’, and works, so people use it. Unfortunately, the bad guys know this too and write malware (viruses, etc.) for Internet Explorer more than the other browsers combined. I have to admit, I first surfed the Internet using Explorer myself. The great news is that there are many free browsers to use for surfing, and they may suit you better.

Opera (opera.com) is a browser that has been around for some time. They are about to release version 10 to the public, but 9.6 is the current release. Some of the perks of Opera are that it can synchronize your information across different computers, check mail using the built-in email client, and preview news feeds from your favorite sites before you subscribe.

Opera also makes the claim that they have the fastest browser engine. This claim is hard to verify, but if speed is important to you, it might be worth downloading for a better experience.

A new entry for those using Windows is the Safari (apple.com/safari) browser from Apple. Safari has its own pros and cons. Most of its pros relate to being ‘pretty’ and being able to pass standards tests. The standards are important so that websites work properly across all browsers and everything works as it should. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really mean much to the average user. Also, Safari claims to be the fastest browser available. Are you noticing a trend here?

The last browser I will mention is Firefox (mozilla.com). Firefox (Fx) is an open-source browser from Mozilla. Since Firefox is open-source, anyone can look at the code that makes it run and find problems or fix them. Firefox also has an extensive range of ‘add-ons’ that people contribute to make Firefox able to do more than just surf the Internet.

For example, I use these add-ons: AdBlock, Xmarks, Twitterfox, and NoScript.

AdBlock stops me from seeing ads on websites. Imagine the Internet with no ads, and that’s how you can see it. Xmarks synchronizes bookmarks and passwords across different PCs like Opera does with ‘Opera Link’. Twitterfox updates me with my friends’ tweets from Twitter. Finally, NoScript stops Javascript from running without your permission, and I would not recommend using it unless you don’t mind learning how to allow scripts to run that you want.

Those add-ons make my browsing much cleaner and more useful for me. There are a great many more that do these same things, just in a slightly different way. There are also add-ons to do everything from posting to your blog to listening to music at Last.fm. Put simply, Firefox can be customized by adding and removing add-ons until you find what works for you. With its 3.5 release, Firefox promises to be faster and easier to use.

Put simply, there are choices out there to be had. My suggestion is to give one or each of these a try to see what works for you. After all, isn’t that what a ‘personal’ computer is all about?