This is just a heads up to everyone out there to be extra careful when handling email.  We have seen an explosive increase in the number of attacks brought about to every day citizens through email.  From SPAM with fake links, to Internet Scams that these fraudsters want you to invest your time and money in, to Viruses/Trojans/Back doors, and of course Phishing attacks where someone pretends to be from some place familiar to you like your bank, eBay or PayPal in an attempt to get your account information.

There are some basic steps to take like using good anti-virus software, and making sure it is kept up to date, that can help you stay safe.  We posted an article a while back with these explained, and I believe we should take a look at updating it since it’s been a year or two.  The basic principals stay the same, and there is still lots of good info there, we will most likely just be adding more stuff to deal with new threats.  Take a look at it here, it’s called Web Surfing Safety, and we hope you find it useful.  In addition to that, be sure to check out the Library, since we have lots of other good information and tidbits in there too!  Thanks.

We’ve got some big ol’ updates for the Cool Tools section.  The folks at Piriform have been cranking out some cool stuff, and they just keep making them better and better.  Best of all they are all free.  They have several tools that help keep Windows happy, a system cleaning and fixing tool, a defrag tool and a system information too.  Check out a brief description of each one below, and be sure to follow the links to the sites for each tool to get all the details.  Be sure to check all of the Cool Tools that we have posted as well as all the good articles in the Library.

Cool tools from Piriform:

• CCleaner – This is a great tool for finding files that can be safely removed in order free up space on your hard drive.  It also has a great registry cleaner, a tool for managing program startup when your machine starts, an interface to uninstalling software and more.  This is a great system maintenance tool.
• Defraggler – This tool is one of, if not the best defrag tool for Windows.  This tool is not the fastest, but that’s OK because it’s very thorough.  It takes time to do it right, and do it right it does from my experience.
• Speccy – I superb system info tool.  No install necessary, just run and collect data.

In all, these free tools rival the commercial alternatives and any tech should add them to his or her kit.  Check ‘em out.

There is a website out there that I ran across a while back, and I just have to share it with you. Now, I am sure that some of you folks know about this site already, but just in case someone stops by that hasn’t seen this before, you really ought to check it out. It’s a website called ‘Bits du Jour’ which means ‘Bit of the Day’ to the rest of us. What this really means or represents to the visitors of this site is daily deals and discounts of software products. Each day they post a sale or maybe better called a deal on a particular software package for 24 hours, and let me tell you, some of these deals are quite good. It’s not uncommon to see 50% off or more on some really nice software. I know that I have picked up several things that either I didn’t know about or probably wouldn’t have shelled out for until I saw them on this site and at a nice discounted price. You ought to check it out, and do so quite often so you don’t miss anything. One nice feature that they have is that they have a list of what is coming in the future, so you can see if there is anything that you want to look out for. In addition, you can mark items that you want to be notified about when they come up for sale so you can make sure you don’t miss any. That’s pretty cool. OK, enough banter from me, go check out the site now!

*Note: No compensation or consideration of any kind was received by Solarum for this post/review.

Links referenced in this article:

http://www.bitsdujour.com/

Greetings all, I’d like to share with you an interesting tidbit of information that I ran across recently.  I have several customers that have purchased and been very happy with the Acer Aspire series of Netbooks.  I liked them so much I even got one for myself, and I too am very pleased with this little dynamo.  I’ll post a review later maybe, it really is a great machine. Especially considering the price, but now I will get back to the topic at hand.

One of these customers suddenly had a problem with the battery not charging.  In fact, the battery was non-existant, it wouldn’t charge or give an error light or really … anything.  Now, the little netbook ran fine when plugged into the AC adapter, so that ruled that out as being bad.  The logical assumption of course was that this customer simply had a dud for a battery.  You know, a bad cell, and open connection, whatever it is it rendered the battery useless much quicker than it should have.

Read the rest of this entry »

OK folks, here is a tidbit for you, if anyone has been checking out Windows 7 and thought that an upgrade might be in their future, well they would have been dismayed to find out that there is no direct upgrade path from XP to 7.  That means you can’t insert you good ol’ Windows 7 disk and upgrade your XP machine.  The only upgrade path is from Vista to 7.  At least that is the story from Microsoft.  I have read a few people who have posted hacks and workarounds, but I haven’t tried any, maybe they work maybe not but it seems like a lot of trouble nonetheless.  So, what’s the point of this post?  Glad you asked!  A colleague passed on this link to a tool that is supposed to support the allusive in place upgrade of Windows XP to Windows 7.  Now, I haven’t tested it yet since it’s a commercial app, but I am going to see if I can get a demo in order to do a proper review.  If anyone has tried it, or does try it please drop a line and let me know how it works out for you.  Enjoy!

http://solarum.com/v.php?l=0949Ka29

You have heard me share information about the fiasco that Verizon created.  In case you haven’t heard, I’ll recap quickly.  In the name of fighting SPAM, Verizon decided that they would block ALL port 25 SMTP traffic on their network for all of their ISP customers.  That means that anyone and everyone that uses Verizon as their ISP (DSL, FIOS, Dial-up, etc) cannot use any third party mail server or service that is configured to use the industry standard port 25.  That’s just plain stupid, but I have complained about that already.

I was in a quandary with this one, or maybe a catch-22 is a better term.  If I didn’t do anything about this “problem” that Verizon created, then all the people that I host email services for that use Verizon as their ISP are now out of luck.  They can’t send mail through their (read: my) mail servers.  So, I can just change the port that sendmail listens on, right?  Yeah, I could, and then my Verizon tethered customers can send mail again … but, all my other customers that don’t use Verizon have to change their email client settings too, since they would still be sending through port 25.  OK, I didn’t want to go down that road.  I wanted to fix the problem with the least impact on everyone. Read the rest of this entry »