Monday, June 24, 2013

But they said they were from ….

A worldwide epidemic is afoot. Charlotte County seems particularly vulnerable based on phone calls and emails I receive. Here are the source points, symptoms, results and methods to protect ourselves.

Contact points appear to be an unsolicited phone call from “windows” or “Microsoft” or some other Internet technology company or our attempt to find a phone number for support.

With unsolicited phone calls the caller informs us our computer is infected and may crash, infect our friend’s computers or is sending viruses infecting computers around the world. The caller offers to remove the virus and save our binary buddies. They then request that we visit a website that allows the caller to remotely control our computer. Sites like Logmein, or Teamviewer. Once in control, they go to Start – Control Panel – Administrative Tools – Event Viewer. Now they filter the events to show only the ERROR reports. Scrolling through recorded events they point out the red ERROR messages and tell us thousands of problems exist on our computer. Next they download a program that flashes a graphical scan screen that reports thousands of registry errors, and the caller states our computer is about to crash. While all this is occurring the caller may do one or all of the following: Infect our PC then request money to clean it up, steal our files / folders / e-mail address / passwords etc. use our computer to attack other systems. The caller may ask us to write down a series of numbers referring to them as support numbers, license keys, ticket control numbers to keep us distracted. The caller offers to resolve all the problems for some monetary sum, usually in the $199 range however the last few I have been called on have been in the $300 dollar ballpark. One client tried to pay with a credit card that was blocked from overseas transactions and the caller demanded that the client surrender the account and routing numbers to their checking account. When the user refused they hung up and sent an invoice via e-mail.

A recent twist to this scam is that now instead of taking a credit card payment for payment, they are using the credit card to fund a Western Union money transfer. One client had the money picked up in Singapore minutes after giving out the credit card and the scammers not only took $500 but charged the credit card for the Western Union fee. Once cash has left a bank, the bank will not give it back.

The same scam occurred when users, frustrated that they cannot find a phone number for Google, HP, Norton or Microsoft, type into a search engine “support phone numbers for” the company they are trying to reach. One client called a number they thought was the support line for Norton Antivirus and the person who answered the phone took over their computer and ran the same scan outlined above. Seems pretty strange that Norton would tell one of their customers that the Norton software didn’t protect them but for $179 they would remove what their software couldn’t.

Companies do not use phones. Online Chat, e-mail, and forums are the service de jour. Receive one of these calls or recognize the scam, hang up. For fun, see how long we can keep them on the phone without payment before they hang up.

Is it imperative that $169 be sent to someone? Please send it to me or a LOCAL tech of choice.

Here’s an interesting idea sent in by a loyal reader. They keep a copy of Grumbles From the Keyboard on the coffee table. Each day as they settle in for a little TV, they pick up the book and read another chapter during commercials. It’s quiet time, and they can concentrate on the subject matter without interruption. Get your copy today.

And don’t forget, after absorbing all that knowledge, you’ll be hungry. Find out what a computer geek likes to eat from my cookbook, Epicuria: An Adventure that Really Cooks!

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Monday, June 17, 2013

It’s a Brave New World!

Thinking about a new computer? Stores are filled with low priced towers and laptops. Why, because consumers have voted with their wallets. Tablets and smart phones are replacing conventional computers at a tremendous pace. Reports from NPD Online Research state that sales of new computers are down 11% from a year ago. Another report stated that tablets and smart phones made up 40% of all technology purchases in 2012. But some of us still enjoy sitting down at a desk with our work spread out in front of us and tapping out a column on a big old standard keyboard. For us a brand new tower or laptop with Windows 8 on it still suits us just fine. What impacts have tablets and smart phones had on new PCs?

For starters, Windows 8 no longer has support for playing DVD movies. (We can still use the DVD for reading and writing data.) Microsoft considered that tablets, smart phones and Internet TVs don’t even have DVD players as users increasingly stream movies directly from the web. Since MS pays license fees for each DVD movie playing computer, this was eliminated from Windows 8. Not to worry, many computer manufactures add DVD movie players to their products so the capability is still there. Just type DVD in the search field of the Windows 8 PC and look for any program that has DVD in it. If we have one of the truly bargain basement computers without a DVD movie player, download a free DVD player such as VLC from www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html.

Another impact on traditional computers directly linked to tablets and smart phones is the use of tiles (Martha, they used to be icons.) on the Start Screen. Tiles work like the icons on our older computers but now they preview changes to the programs they link to. For example: the mail tile will update regularly to notify us that new mail has arrived or a news tile will constantly display the latest headlines. We can modify the position and size of the tiles to meet our needs. Some tiles are rectangular while others are smaller and square. By using the right mouse button and clicking on a tile, we have the choice of using larger or smaller tiles and we can pin it to or remove it from the Start Screen if desired. To rearrange the position of the tiles simply grab one with the mouse and move it to a new position. Want a new tile on the desktop for our favorite website? Open the website and click on the site icon beside the web address. Now click on Pin to Start and a new tile appears on the Start Screen. The start screen may seem a bit awkward at first, but for folks that use the computer for basic functions every day it makes for easy access to those programs, I mean apps we use frequently.

Windows 8 also comes with a built-in SkyDrive app. With it, we can view and browse the files we’ve saved to SkyDrive.com. By installing the free SkyDrive desktop app we can also automatically sync  files across our computers.

It’s a brave new world.

Here’s an interesting idea sent in by a loyal reader. They keep a copy of Grumbles From the Keyboard in the bathroom. Each morning when they begin their constitutional, they pick up the book and read another chapter. It’s quiet time, and they can concentrate on the subject matter without interruption. Get your copy today.

And don’t forget, after absorbing all that knowledge, you’ll be hungry. Find out what a computer geek likes to eat from my cookbook, Epicuria: An Adventure that Really Cooks!

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Sunday, June 2, 2013

The New Computer?

HappyComputer_108x78 copyNews reports the hot item this year were tablets. Tablet devices such as Kindles, iPads, Galaxy Tabs, Nooks, and many more. General features are size, battery life, and wireless or cell connectivity to the Internet and touch screen input. Many have virtual keyboards or can attach QWERTY keyboards via either USB or Bluetooth connections. Tablet history goes back to 2000 when Microsoft unsuccessfully released the Tablet PC. 2007 saw Apple release the first iPad primarily as a media device for movies and music and the tablet form of computer became popular.

Today the tablet is still regarded as a media device but underneath all that flash and sound is a computer capable of performing the very tasks our desktops and laptops do now. Have tablets reached the level of our binary buddies? Not yet, but they are coming on strong. So strong that we may be watching the end of the desktop or laptop computer. Tablets available today are adding capabilities as fast as possible. Different tablets use competing operating systems, such as Android, iOS and Linux. The battle heats up with the Microsoft release of Windows 8 which will be a tablet oriented operating system allowing still another set of capabilities to tablets.

Let’s take a look at features to be found in some of the tablets available today. Standard in most tablets is wireless connectivity. This allows us to visit any place with a wireless Internet connection, such as the public libraries, McDonalds, Beef O’Bradys and thousands more including relatives and friends where we can connect to the Internet. Once connected, we can surf the web, purchase airline tickets, send e-mail and open and work on documents. Built in Web Cams can enable video calls via a variety of software packages such as Skype. Digital cameras, certainly, Tablets have a very limited amount of onboard storage space so much of what we do, such as writing a letter will be stored online. For example the tablet I use is connected to Google Docs. It looks like a word processor or spreadsheet, acts like it but the software is actually running on Google’s servers and my documents are stored there. There is even some capability to print from a tablet to a wireless network printer. Most tablets that have Internet and e-mail features will automatically back up the e-mail and contacts list to online servers. And yes they all download eBooks, pictures, movies and music.

There might be a tablet in your future.

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