Date: June 25th 2009

PC-ASSIST/MAC-ASSIST | Early Summer Service Specials and Updates!

(760) 837-9496 or (760) 969-0974, Monday through Friday by appointment.

Holiday Special | Viruses | Backups | XP or Vista | Samsung?

With that, here is the holiday special from Father's Day until July 6th!

This special will run until July 6, 2009. (Website services are excepted�I was going to do it until the 4th but I might be barbecueing that weekend, so it is extended till Monday!)

For ANY service call onsite, $125.00 for the first two hours! (Travel time out of the valley NOT included beyond Thermal or Palm Springs; $75.00 per hour for less than two hours.)

For dropoffs, $125 for up to FOUR hours!

Have you thought about tuning up the performance of your computer?

Has it slowed down, or become unresponsive?

Need some help with service updates, anti-virus configurations, new or old printer problems with new Vista Service Pack 2?

New viruses have been out in past two weeks and if you have been hit, take advantage of the special to get your computer cleaned back up.

Do you have a good backup system going for protecting your data? I can help configure what data needs to be backed up so do not lose valuable information!

How about an uninterruptible power supply to make sure that your computer SAFELY turns off in a power outage?

Now is the time to get these configured and working...it may be too late after you lose your data!

Viruses and other malware | TrendMicro or BitDefender?

On the Virus front, the past week has been very active with six computers in my shop after they got hit with the latest round of viruses.

It is that time of year again as students are out of school and spending more time online allowing increased proliferation through the various social networking and other sites. The hackers know this and actually are at work writing more code at this time of the year. Last year saw 8 weeks straight of just virus removal at this time.

Of the machines that have been dropped off, 5 have been hit from FaceBook/MySpace viruses that took over a user profile and sent messages to all of the profile's contacts. After clicking on the link that was sent to the user, the machine was infected through the web address as it exploited a number of security holes.

Make sure that you have updated your anti-virus program and do it at minimum daily.

The latest updates from Trend should handle most anything, but on occasion, a virus hacker writes code that can get by even the best AV software. If it does, TURN OFF THE COMPUTER IMMEDIATELY. Why? If the computer remains on and the virus did get past whatever security system you have, the longer it is on, the more infections it will bring in through the hole it punched in your software. What can be a one hour fix can turn into a $nightmare$ with data loss and a damaged hard drive. Yes, some of the rogue rootkits can take over a portion of the hard drive and use it as a private server to send out more infections and other unwanted and potentially illegal data.

As of this month, customers who are expiring with Trend this year are advised to call PRIOR to renewing as I am now recomending the BitDefender product. I have been testing the two against each other and so far the BitDefender product has caught every single attack. As your TrendMicro subscription expires, I stringly recomend the switch to BitDefender. The link to it is now on the home page of my site: http://www.mac-pc-assist.com.

Backups...Again??

Another computer catastrophe that can be avoided is the total or partial loss of your data including photos and documents. Remember those pictures you took 8 years ago and left on a zip disk? Well even Zip disks can fail over time and so can CDs.

There are a number of backup solutions that I have come across and can recommend.

Solution 1 - the simplest: get an external backup drive (500GB or more) that will copy the data off of the computer at night so you do not lose your photos, spreadsheets, documents, Quicken or other financial data. While some go for encryption, this can be a problem when it comes to restoring data if the key becomes corrupted. ("Scott, we backup it up every night." But it is encrypted with a non-decipherable key...not even the NSA can get to the 500GB of scrambled data!)

Solution 2 - almost as easy as Solution 1, but guranteed that data will be available even after a disaster....get an external drive as in Solution 1 and also get an online backup service that is well rated and easily accessible if you had to restore the files to another computer in the event of a total failure. I have used Carbonite and am about to try out Mozy for one of my medical clients. Both are highly rated and Carbonite just saved my day after a profile crash on a machine.

Solution 3 - a little more involved but worth it for small businesses and medical offices....get TWO external 500GB drives that are easy to transport. Each day, one gets swapped out so that at no time is there a data set more than one day old. In conjunction with an online backup system and even another stationary backup drive that stays in the office, this guarantees that the data will be retrievable and your business will expereience the least amount of loss due to the crash or disaster. (Hey, I used to do the backups on weekends for American Mensa and we had OFFSITE storage for our backup tapes...yup, TAPES! Every day we had a pickup and a delivery of data sets so we were never more than a day out...)

Purchasing computers �Windows XP or Vista? Windows 7? New Information!

As some of you know from this mail list, I was asked into the first beta of Windows 7. I am also about to install the new Release Candidate, a more stable version prior to final release of Win7.

I can tell you that it appears that Win7 will be a hit. It works much better than XP and is easier to work with than Vista, though it is based on Vista's bas programming.

Since Micorosoft has now offered FREE upgrades to Windows 7 for new purchasers of computers with Vista, it might pay to get a new computer sooner.

Where Vista can be quirky, like not liking most of my Smithsonian-level printers from three years ago, Windows 7 seems to play nice with the hardware I have without having to buy new lasers in color and B&W.

Microsoft is also offering to certain customers the XP compatibility pack which allows Win7 to run XP software with less difficulty than Vista.

Of course the next question: 32-bit or 64 bit software?

64-bit is the future as it will handle larger amounts of RAM, it runs faster as it uses CPU and memory more efficiently and over the next few years, we will see more and more software written to operate at 64-bits.

How do you know what your computer has? If you look at the tag with the chip maker's mark, it will sometimes have a "64" on it. The best woul be a dual core 64-bit chip for the better processing power.

Apple is one of the best....

One of my customers recently called me up after her iMac screen started flashing what is thought to be Klingon and Vulcan characters.

She brought it over and after opening it up, a number of capacitors were blown on the motherboard.

Since she had AppleCare in the past, Apple will be replacing her motherboard though she will be picking up the cost of labor at just over $100 or so...Still a great gesture from Apple to take care of their customers!

http://www.apple.com/

http://www.macmall.com/

http://store.apple.com/

http://www.CDW.com/Mac

Samsung?

Five months, ten hours and finally a replacement printer! Would you buy this product?

A customer of mine purchased a Samsung laser and it failed within two weeks. That was in November 2008 and under warranty. The replacment unit finally arrived after placing complaints with the BBB, countless calls to their customer service departments with an "s" and multiple conversations with class-action attorneys. The replacement arrived in April, of this year!

I can not recomend this company as their track record for customer service is this bad. Other customers have had MAJOR Samsung appliances and monitors fail and they usually fail right after the warranty period has expired.

If you do decide to purchase the Samsung or Hanspree brands, be advised of the potential problems for repairs and Samsung not honoring their warranty. (I would avoid them altogether...HP, Epson, Canon or Brother for printers and faxes; Dell, Acer, HP, Viewsonic and NEC for monitors.)

Have a Happy 4th!

Scott