An ex Geek Squad employee speaks out about the price and time gouging forced by their parent company Best Buy to meet weekly quotas. Read More …

Laharl ex spotted this one for us:
Researchers at Symantec have discovered a proof of concept virus that targets a systems processor rather than its operating system. There are currently two versions of this virus, one targets the 32 bit version and the other targets the 64 bit version proccessors from AMD. Symantec are calling these viruses w32.bounds and w64.bounds.

Symantec found this code in online meeting places for virus writers such as underground websites and IRC chat channels.

On Monday, 28th of August, Intel released a fix for its “PROSet Config” software which had a memory leak which would slowly use more and more of a computers available memory.
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The Geek Squad is something most computer technicians have seen or heard about at some point even if you are outside the US. In this article I will be talking about their beginnings and their highly effective marketing that make people view them as mini-celebrities instead of just computer technicians.
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At some point in a computer tech support persons career they will come across a really stupid or annoying client. Here are two great sites that I know of with funny/annoying stories from computer tech support.
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There comes a time in the life of each hard-drive when it just won’t access any of the data on the drive anymore. The same applies to CDs and DVDs which, due to their fragile nature, get scratched and scraped beyond readability. As Murphy’s law would often have it, it happens exactly to the files you need when you need them. In order to preserve your data (and your sanity in case data starts mysteriously disappearing), you need to know exactly what can be done to make sure you don’t find yourself losing important files.

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Sophos has released an Anti rootkit detection tool which will detect and remove known and unknown rootkits. For those of you who do not know what a rootkit is, a rootkit is a term used a trojan which is used to hide a malicious object such as a file, process, registry key, open network port etc..) from the computer administrator or user. For more information, click HERE. For the direct download link, click HERE.

Apack ZeroTherm BTF90 Intel Duo Core / AMD AM2 Processor Cooler Review @ Tweaknews.net
“I’ll have to admit that when I first took the ZEROtherm BTF-90 out of its box, I was a little apprehensive. This being the first offering from a company I was unfamiliar with, I feared that I was looking at a gimmick cooler with questionable performance. As it turned out, my fears were unjustified; about the performance, anyway.”

According to the FBI, laptop theft is the second most common computer crime and less than 2 percent of those stolen laptops are ever recovered. Four in five (81%) of US firms have had at least one laptop stolen containing sensitive information according to a recent study.
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As many of you have seen in the news. Dell has had a massive recall of certain types of batteries in their laptops due to the possibility of them exploding. This article explains how something like a laptop battery actually explodes. Read More…