Viruses, Spware and Backup...the big three
I think if there were a hall of fame for letters that I receive it could be on three topics. One would be virus control, one is spyware and the other is backups.
So I thought I would cover them all in one column, to give people the basics.
First let’s cover viruses. If you own a Windows PC, you need to have a current anti-virus product installed and running. There’s no longer a debate about it, no longer a way to be “really careful what you open” and do without it.
There are dozens of products out there for you to use and even some excellent free ones like AVG Free and Avast. It is such an important issue that Microsoft will be adding anti-virus to the next version of Windows as a pre-installed accessory. Once you have it installed, you need to make it a ritual to update it once a week. I know that many programs claim to update automatically but don’t even trust that. Once a week just run the update program manually. Once you update it, kick off a manual scan of your computer’s hard drives.
The above may take 5 minutes but it will protect your data. The scan may take hours; I let mine run overnight on Fridays.
With an Apple computer, anti-virus software is purely optional in my opinion. I know there are some divergent opinions on this and there’s no harm in having it if you can afford it. But since there are no Apple viruses in the wild and the machine is designed to be more secure than a Windows machine, there’s little risk.
Ditto Linux, Amiga, and the Commodore 64.
On spyware, this also is a Windows machine issue. This is a far more complex issue depending if you’re already infected or trying to prevent an infection. If you already are infected, you may be able to eliminate the infection by using three or four products (there isn’t one that does a removal job effectively.) You can try AdAware, Spybot Search & Destroy and Microsoft Anti-Spyware beta for free, then add Webroot’s Spy Sweeper and perhaps PestPatrol.
Some infections require a pretty skilled professional to get rid of. Some require a complete erasure of the PC and reinstallation of the operating system and everything on it.
The motto of the spyware world is nothing is free on the Internet. When sites offer you “free” software understand the payment for that software is spyware that will be installed with it.
Again, Macs are mostly immune from spyware and pop-up issues.
Lastly we’re talking about backups. I know rare is the person who backs up their computer. However, you have to realize that hard drives fail (a lot of them, a lot of time) mostly with no warning at all. With today’s digital cameras, I have run into a lot of sad people in my repair business who have lost their hard drives and all of their photos. (Recovery is possible in most cases but can cost more than $1,000 in a special lab.)
So, today, copy your most important files to CD or DVD or buy a USB external hard drive and copy them there. (Or both, if the dat a is important.) Mac users may prefer a drive that has the FireWire interface.) You can get a large external drive for less than $100. And turn its power off when you’re not using it.
If you want to back up your whole PC, I recommend Acronis True Image, which will back up your entire drive to an external drive in 15 minutes. It is simple, easy and money well spent.
WEEKLY WEB WONDER: You also can back up your files to an external Web site for a monthly free. The leader in this technology is XDrive (www.xdrive.com)
James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm, and computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His email address is jim@cyberdads.com
Letters!!!!!
Letters are piling up and believe it or not, some are not ads for herbal Viagra. I’d like to get to some of them now as there are some recurring themes.
Q. I read with interest that you purchased an Apple after many years of using a Windows machine. I am considering the same road and I am interested if there is anything you miss about the Windows world.
A. Well, it’s not like I went cold turkey. I still use Windows machines daily and I still have several Windows machines. That said, when I reach for a laptop to use I nearly always grap the Apple. There is nothing yet that I have discovered that I cannot use with the Apple (except the online version of Quickbooks). I have installed Virtual PC on my Apple so if I am ever in a pinch I can fire up a Windows machine inside my Apple. That software isn’t nearly peppy enough to run a cutting-edge game but running Windows XP Pro on Ibook is plenty peppy. (Remember I added a 1 GB RAM chip from Crucial.com to mine, so I have 1.5 gigs of RAM)
All of that said, I don’t regret the purchase one moment.
Q. You wrote a couple times about repeaters for wireless routers and how you found them not to work. Well, I didn’t listen and bought one. I could not get it to work either, despite 8 hours on the phone on and off with Linksys. Now I still only have one bar or sometimes no connectivity.
A. What I would do in your shows is investigate Powerline networking solutions. I have written about them in the past (the brand I played with was Actiontec but they are available from many companies.) Basically you plug a small box into an electrical outlet and run a wire from it to your router. Then you plug a matching box anywhere else in your house and run a wire from it to your second device. The networking signals are passed through the powerlines in your house to the second device. The speed is just about the same as a native router connection and the ease of connection cannot be beat. You’d be up and running in 5 minutes and never have a dropped connection,
Q. I am preparing to sell my old PC and am wondering what to do with the hard drive to protect my data. I have some personal stuff on here and I heard just erasing it doesn’t do it. I am confused about the various wiping utilities out there.
A. You are correct to be concerned. The only surefire way to protect your data on your hard drive is to remove the hard drive, take it apart and shred the discs on the inside. (Seriously). I would sell the PC either without a hard drive or make sure you or your computer technician does a “three-pass binary DoD wipe” of the hard drive. If what you have on there is incredibly personal keep in mind that given enough determination and the right amount of equipment and knowledge, even that data could be recoverable (probably by the NSA or CIA type of spook.)
I’d consider buying a new hard drive and selling the PC with a fresh drive.
Q. My version of Microsoft Office that came with my new PC has expired. Is there a cheaper alternative to this product that is just as good?
A. The problem here is what you mean by “good.” There are plenty of alternatives out there including a free one, Open Office (www.openoffice.org) and other things such as WordPerfect and Microsoft Works that cost less than full-fledged Office. Keep in mind if you are a student or teacher you can get a discounted version Office, too.
WEEKLY WEB WONDER: Freshmeat is a great site that helps the open source community and also gives you a download of the excellent Mplayer free media player, which has all the codecs most will ever need included. See it at www.freshmeat.net
James Derk is co-owner of Cyberdads, a computer repair firm, and computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim@cyberdads.com
Get ready to buy new hardware for Vista
I am not by nature a grumpy person (ha!) but one thing that really annoys me about the technology world is format wars.
That’s because the only loser in these skirmishes is the consumer because a huge percentage of them will end up with expensive hardware that won’t survive. We saw that on a large scale with the VHS/Betamax war of a few decades ago, when movies had to be made available in two formats.
We’re about to be in the middle of another one when it comes to the new DVD format and our shining new flat-panel monitors and HDTVs. I’ll take the last one first.
As you are aware, unless you live under a rock, the movie industry is very powerful. And it has a product (movies) that lends itself to copying pretty readily. But instead of adopting the model that the music industry has (lowering prices and at least begrudgingly accepting online distribution, the movie industry has remained pretty protectionist.
Therefore they have convinced Microsoft and other manufacturers to include something called PVP-OPM (“Protected Video Path - Output Protection Management”) in Windows Vista (the next generation of Windows) that is designed to help prevent casual piracy of movies. However, unless your monitor is PVP-OPM compliant (which it’s not) you won’t be able to play high-definition DVDs on your Windows machine. (Ditto your video card and other components; all must meet the standard.) If not, the machine will either “downgrade the content” (make it fuzzy) or you will get a blue-screen of death telling you you’re out of luck.
If PVP-OPM sees a video capture device in your system, or an open analog port or anything, it will shut down the broadcast, even of a DVD in your drive.
That is, of course, if you pick the right DVD format in the first place. As of today, at least, there are two new formats on the horizon, one called Blu-ray and one called HD-DVD. Both have blue lasers instead of red (shorter wavelength, in case you weren’t paying attention in senior-year physics class) which allows the laser to make a smaller spot on the bottom of the disc, therefore allowing the same surface area to hold more data.
That’s 5 times or more more data; in some cases more than 40 gigs of data. That would be pretty cool, especially for backing up data and for high-def content for movies. If you have a high-def TV, like I do, some DVD content today actually looks far worse than live HD content. That’s because there’s not much room on that disk to store a lot of information.
Years of meetings between the two camps, (HD-DVD is led by Toshiba and Blu-Ray is led by Sony) has not garnered any kind of truce so it does appear we’re in for a battle again. Guess wrong and you’ll send up selling your DVD player at a garage sale along with all of your movies that won’t play on the winning format. (Remember laserdiscs?)
It all does not bode well for consumers. Even if there was no format war it is nice to have continuity in media; right now I have some 5 inch floppies I need to get some data off of and I am scrambling around to find a drive. I can imagine all of us doing this for our CDs and DVDs years from now (even if they are still readable) trying to find the right drive in the right format.
It’s silly.
WEEKLY WEB WONDER: Slide is a new way to share and index your photos. Give it a try at www.slide.com
James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair company and computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His email address is jim@cyberdads.com
New Apple bag rocks
In my two months of Apple Ibook ownership I have learned one of the key things involved in owning one of these gleaming white beauties. That is, how to keep it from becoming amazingly scratched.
The lovely white, somehow clear plastic does attract scratches like Lindsey Lohan attracts paparazzi, so you need to take precautions. My first, which I previously wrote about, was to get a laptop sleeve. This fleese-lined sleeve (mine is from STM) is good for when you have to cram your Ibook into a regular briefcase.
However on the days I don’t have to bring my large briefcase with me, I’ve found a great case designed for the Apple that not only protects the laptop but appears custom-designed.
The Booq bag (I don’t know how to pronounce it, either) simply feels great, like the old Domke camera bag I bought 25 years ago in college...handmade and solid. The stitching is doubled or tripled in some places and it just feels like a rock.
Inside the case is smooth and custom-sized for the size of the laptop.
The one I got was the Mamba XS, a very small case that would hold the 12-inch laptop, the power supply and a couple of magazines and a book. I took it on a recent trip and three people stopped me in airports and asked me about it.
I know cases are highly personal but a plus side of the Booq cases is they don’t scream “COMPUTER INSIDE” so if you do travel or have a college student they are a good choice from a security perspective because they don’t necessarily attract thieves for that reason.
So however you pronounce it, they are a good choice and worth a look. You can see the whole line at www.booqbags.com
----In other news, Microsoft plans to release Service Pack 3 for Windows XP but not until next year and reportedly after the release of Windows Vista, the next release of Windows. A beta of the service release floating around the Internet is not authentic, according to the company. Anyway, if you run Windows Update religiously and turn on automatic updates in Windows you’ll be pretty much up to date anyway.
---Apple is going to release SOMETHING cool this week, rumored to be an Ipod that does video. The company is the best ever at holding its announcements close to the vest (see the Ipod Nano). Can you imagine the fortune that will come the company that comes up with the single device that replaces the cellphone, Ipod, Blackberry, pager and Pocket PC? I am betting on Apple.
---A new trojan horse is making the rounds that if downloaded onto your Playstation Portable, renders it unusable, ever. Called “PSP.brick” it’s the first of its kind for the portable. It’s not something you can casually get but rather comes in the guise of a “hack” for your PSP. So be very careful before you download anything for any system from the Internet especially for unprotected systems.
WEEKLY WEB WONDER: All things Halloween is located at the all-new Halloween.com. You can see it at www.halloween.com
James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm and is computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His email address is jim@cyberdads.com
Google continues world domination
Google, you may have read in this spot before, is going to take over the world. I know, it’s just a modest search engine but give it a couple of more years and it will be a Google world and we’ll just be living on top of it.
To those who aren’t fully plugged in to the computing world, Google may seem like an almost blank white search page. And on some level, it is. What has been compelling about Google when compared to MSN, AltaVista and other search competitors, is the lack of ads on its home page.
What’s been lacking, until now, is personalization.
Now, however, if you load the Google home page you’ll see a tiny link in the upper right corner that says “Personalized Home”. Click on that, create an account and you will have a very cool, new experience on Google.
On the left side you can see all manner of content groups to choose from, ranging from news to weather to sports to stock. (These are not second-tier news outlets either; you can pick from such outlets as The New York Times and The Washington Post, for example.)
The best part of the page is you can literally drag and drop the content around the page until you have designed the page you like. The really nice part... no ads.
So how does Google make its money? Contextual ads in your search results mostly; you see those at the top of the search results sometimes and on the right side of your search results page. Advertisers pay to have their results there. Google also makes money from other sources, but that’s a hunk of it.
So big whoop, there’s a new search portal. But that’s just a tiny part of Google. Last week it announced it wanted to blanket San Francisco with free wireless access. Then there is everything else.
Enter http://labs.google.com into a browser and you’ll find Google’s lab, where you find the cool stuff Google is working on. The most impressive part of this is Desktop Search, which is the missing link in Windows. (It’s included in the latest version of Apple’s operating system). This utility lets you simply search every document, email and anything else on your entire desktop or laptop. With today’s cavernous hard drives, this will be a huge utility in the future. (I miss Lotus Magellan every day...my favorite software from my MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 days.)
Another “coming” technology is Google Video, the ability to search the growing number of video files on the Internet via keywords or via their closed-captioning. The trick of course is getting the rights to the video. (As always, the battle is in the field of digital rights ownership.)
What Google is angling to be, of course, is your one-stop portal for information on the Internet. And that will continue to be a huge business.
There have been huge wins for the company (its search technology remains the best) and some misses (its web accelerator created some problems for privacy) but overall this is a company that is firing on all cylinders when it comes to the niches that it chooses to exploit.
What it’s going to do is marginalize Microsoft; to turn Windows into the thing you need to have to run Google. And that has to make Bill Gates just a tad sad.
WEEKLY WEB WONDER: The site “Rate My Professors” is now so hot that lawyers are circling seeing who gets to sue for libel first. See it before it goes at www.ratemyprofessors.com
James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm and computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His email address is jim@cyberdads.com
