In a state of complete exhaustion from having to clean friends’ computers repeatedly of viruses and other malware, I’m going to babble on a bit about patching and updating your software.
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Does your computer emit endless beeps during bootup? Does your PC crash for no apparent reason at random intervals? Or you get blue screens of death with errors such as IRQL_Less_or_Not_Equal? If so, then it is very likely that there is a problem with your computers memory (RAM).
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As my recent experiences with a bank (which shall remain nameless) confirm, some people take security too far. There is a point at which more security measures actually reduce security, rather than increase it.
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As the number of wireless routers and access points in homes and small offices rises, seemingly exponentially, wireless crackers and wardrivers are exploiting the endless supply of unsecured wireless access to obtain free internet access, and gain anonymity in their exploits. In most cases, users don’t even bother changing the default access username and password, allowing any attacker to connect to their network and change the wireless settings. Even less common is the use of encryption. Encrypted wireless access would prevent users who do not know the encryption key connecting and making use of the wireless access.
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This article explains how Windows Activation works and how much changes to your system you can do before Microsoft considers your computer a new system.
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Some users (wether yourself or your clients) may have seen popups that appear on their desktop at some time or another with the title “Messenger Service”. This is not to be confused with Windows Messenger (built in MSN Messenger). The Messenger Service is used for sending messages across a network or LAN.
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A task that frequently appears in computer repair jobs is retrieving the data on the clients PC when a hard drive has failed (or failing) or Windows wont boot and they want me to do a Reinstall. This article is intended for people who are comfortable working in DOS or some other command line, however if you are a beginner a GUI tool such as Ultimate Boot CD will be extremely helpful.
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