As a computer technician, what do you look for when you buying something for your computer?
For me its the specifications. For example, If I was buying an external storage solution I would check the transfer speeds of the device, the hard drive brand that it uses and read some reviews describing the build quality.

But, chances are that you aren’t selling products to other computer technicians, you are selling to the average computer user. Chances are they don’t know what most of the specifications mean anyway. Instead, sell them on benefits, fear and lifestyle.
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A voice phishing alert has been posted at Sophos about a phish email that was sent to inboxes of people.

The email wants the caller to dial a 1-800 number since the sender, a credit union, supposedly placed the user’s account on hold due to a fraud attempt.

Sophos compared the phone numbers and they noted that they are different. If a user dialed the phone number, he or she will be asked to give his or her card number and PIN. It does not ask the caller for a Social Security number. However, the scammers can drain the funds through an ATM if they have the card number and PIN.

Source: Sophos

The Register has reported that there is a glitch in Symantec’s LiveUpdate package. The problem is that there are errors that show whenever the Decomposer function in Symantec Endpoint decompress or unpacks files.

“On the 11 I noticed that the log files on the server were filling up with LiveUpdate errors, I contacted Symantec support who ran through a few things with me and he went away stumped, promising to get back to me soon. So I turned to the Symantec forums, the replies came flooding in, looks like every Symantec customer worldwide has been affected by the issue, it turns out they posted corrupt Decompositer definitions and it’s broken the client on people’s machines,” said a The Register reader.

Source: The Register

Details has been released by Microsoft on their newest server operating for small businesses. It is called Windows Small Business Server 2008.

It is designed for simplified deployment and administration from one management console where administrators can control the operating system remotely.

It was formally known as Cougar and it will also come with a premium edition for companies that need more features.

“Based on our conversations with customers and partners, we felt the mid-market IT is a much different customer than a small-business owner, so we wanted to respect that in the way we designed the management UI for each product,” said Steven VanRoekel of Microsoft.

Source: Washington Post

Something that most technicians are familiar with is the whole backup process before a computer format. Backup the My Documents folder, favorites, address books, the desktop and find your way to the Outlook Express email storage which is hidden under many subfolders etc.. It would be great if there was a program that could do all this for you.

Well, there is. AutoBackup is a small, portable application that allows you to pick and choose what you (or your client) want to back up with simple check boxes. The program does the rest. After the format, you can also use AutoBackup to restore all the files back to where they should be. For a list of what AutoBackup supports backing up and restoring, read on.
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A blog article has been posted on news.com about Bill Gates’ statement on the next Windows operating system.

“The version after Vista is a big step forward in terms of speech. It’s a big step forward in terms of ink. It’s a big step forward in terms of touch,” he said in an interview at Stanford University.

He added that, “The likelihood is that touch will become mainstream on certain form factors very quickly because we are working hand-in-hand with the hardware companies. Speech and ink it’s a little harder to say.”

Microsoft has not released any official information when Windows 7 will be released.

Source: News.com

The second release candidate for the third service pack of Windows XP is now available for the public. It was released earlier today at 5:00 PM Pacific time.

“We’re broadening the availability of the release candidate in order to receive further user feedback prior to the release of Windows XP SP3,” said a Microsoft spokeswoman in an email.

It was released to approximately 15,000 testers on February 7. The first release candidate was released to the public last December.

Users who are interested on downloading this update can do so at the Microsoft Download Center.

Source: COMPUTERWORLD

Ars Technica has reported that the newest server operating system from Microsoft, which is Server 2008, will be released with the first service pack that is already installed in the operating system.

“So, it’s [Windows Server 2008] called SP1—in retrospect i should just say its called that so you don’t have to wait for SP1 for it to be right like people have before,” said the director of the project management for Windows Server, Ian McDonald.

The first service pack that will be released after the launch of the operating system to the public will be called SP2.

Source: Ars Technica

This is a guest post written by Nathan H from our forums. Nathan has written us a quick reference guide on what you can/should do for a computer maintenance task.
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Sophos has posted an entry on their blog about a valentine’s day e-card malware.

Spammers send users an email which contains a link that redirects the users to a main.php web page of the same domain name. The trojan in that webpage was detected by Sophos as Troj/Flamgo-A.

Once users have been infected, they will be redirected to the legitimate AmericanGreetings.com website.

The blog entry contains a screen shot of the spam. It shows four paragraphs and a link. The domain extension of the link has been blacked out by Sophos.

Source: Sophos