In this article, I talk about one of my troublesome clients expecting free phone support and an incredibly simple way to deal with them.
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Sophos has posted an article about a free fake antivirus that uses VirusTotal’s reputation to lure its victims. VirusTotal is a free virus and malware online scan service.

The message is included in the article. It says that the user’s computer has virus activities. It threatens the user that if he or she does not scan his or her computer for viruses, he or she will be reported to his or her internet service provider. A link is included in the message which directs the user to site which is supposedly a legitimate free spyware removal online service.

Source: Sophos

The latest beta version of Opera 10.5 has been released. Mac users can also download a beta version for their operating system. This is the first time that a beta version of the web browser has been released for OS X.

Not much of new features are in the latest version according to the article at webmonkey.com. It’s primarily released for bug fixes.

The latest beta for Windows is 10.5 beta 2 while Mac users can only download 10.5 beta 1.

The article notes that native HTML5 video is working in this version.

Source: Webmonkey

A reminder has been posted at the official Windows Team blog regarding support for Windows 2000, Vista RTM, and XP with Service Pack 2. The support for these three operating systems will end soon.

Vista RTM will be the first one out of those three, which will not receive support anymore starting April 13.

For the other two OSs, July 13 is the date of their support termination.

Windows Vista RTM users need to use Windows Update to install the latest service pack.

Source: TrustedReviews

A common problem that occurs with just about all modern Windows operating systems is when a Windows user loses access to their data and settings. For some reason, Windows no longer recognizes a profile belonging to its user and the next time that user logs on, it appears as a fresh account. This can be caused by a hard drive error, joining/leaving a domain, file system issues and a change of username.

Reprofiler is a small, freeware and portable tool designed to reassign the data and settings of a Windows user account to another account. There are ways for technicians to do this with some registry tweaks and by changing permissions (which I have personally had to do a handful of times) but this application makes it much easier so all you have to do is press some buttons.
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Internet Explorer version 6 will no longer be supported by YouTube’s services starting on March 13.

Those who are using it are now seeing a warning which says, “On March 13, we are dropping support for your browser. You’ll still be able to watch videos after that date, but new features may not work properly.”

In a relevant issue, Google Docs and Sites will no longer be supported on IE6 by March 1. By the end of the year, Gmail and Calendar would also follow suit.

Source: The Register

Adobe released an update to fix a vulnerability in its Flash and Reader Download Manager (DLM) software.

The patch is listed as critical and Windows users are the only ones that need to have the new version of Adobe DLM.

The vulnerability allows an attacker to install unauthorized software on a user’s PC. According to the person who disclosed the issue, there is also a remote code execution vulnerability but Adobe’s bulletin does not mention any detail regarding this hole.

The update needs a computer reboot.

Source: PCMAG.com

Last Friday, I only had a few computers on the bench (which didn’t take long to repair) resulting in me having much of the afternoon free. I took this time “seal some business leaks”.

I like to think of my businesses finances as a Styrofoam cup with holes in the bottom. I pour water into the top of the cup (which represents my income) and some of it leaks out of the holes in the bottom (which represent my expenses). If the cup is filling up faster than it is leaking then I am making a profit.
The cup is always leaking because I have the ongoing expenses of running a business like utilities, fuel and web hosting. It is the web hosting leak I wish to talk about in this article.
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Adobe users can upgrade to the latest Acrobat and Reader versions. The latest versions, 9.3.1 for both softwares, fixed serious flaws that existed in the previous versions. One of the flaws are cross-domian requests.

According to a survey by ScanSafe, malicious PDF files made up about 80 percent of web attacks last quarter of last year which it blocked.

The security operations at nCircle said, “…Adobe’s effort to update this patch critical vulnerability outside their normal patch cycle will undoubtedly draw lots of attention from attackers.”

Source: The Register

While technically not a “repair tool”, SSDTweaker is an application designed to tweak an operating system to get the most out of a Solid State Drive.
Solid State Drives (SSD) have a massive speed advantage over older hard drives because there are no moving parts. However, one of the disadvantages of SSD’s is that each data block on the drive has a limited amount of times it can be overwritten (about 10,000 vs a Hard Drives 1-5 million cycles). Windows constantly writes information to the hard drive such as indexing the files to make file searches faster, creating a page file and more. This will reduce the performance of an solid state drive over time.

This is where SSDTweaker comes in, SSDTweaker allows you to tweak the following:
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