Professional Computer Consulting

I will be out of town until April 3rd. I f you have an emergency that cannot wait until I get back, please contact Tim Arrowood at 828-231-0809. Tim is A+ and MCSE certified.

I've noticed a marked increase in virus activity over the last week. The main virus is a variation of Virus.Win32.Rbot.gen. When a system is infected, it will make changes to the root of any drive letter it sees. All of the folders are marked as system and hidden so that the user with standard Windows settings will no longer see them. It then replicates itself, taking on the names of the folders it just hid and giving itself an icon that looks like a folder icon. The unsuspecting user will click on the virus thinking that he is opening his own folders.

I will be in Nicaragua September 14 through October 2nd. While I am gone, you can call Ken Forgie at 828-775-0457. He will be serving my clients until I get back.

Thanks,

Tim Sanders

If you receive an email with the subject "Alert! Your email will be blacklisted soon." just delete it. It is a phishing email. By clicking on the link inside the email, you are verifying to the spammer that your email address is valid. They can then sell your email address for a higher price than one that is not verified. So just delete the email.

First they did away with the Facebook Share button for external web sites. This forced everyone to use the Facebook Like button. Now they are making changes to it as well. Hopefully, the dust will settle down and the people who wrote the Facebook Like button we use will update their software to the new format. If not, we may have to look for another module. I plan on waiting a few days to see what happens before jumping to something else.

On this web site and many of the others I design and host, I've included a Facebook Share button. This button makes it easy for anyone reading your website to share it on their Facebook page. Today, all of my Facebook Share buttons suddenly disappeared. It seams that Facebook wants us to use a Facebook Like button instead of a Facebook Share button. They do basically the same thing. Now a user can like a page on your web site and that is recorded on their Facebook page and is in the news-feeds of all their friends. So here is the new Facebook Like button.

I am out of town until July 3rd. I have no phone connection and Internet connection is very limited. If you have a computer issue that cannot wait until I get back, please call Ken Forgie at 828-775-0457.

I set up an IPhone and ICloud so that Outlook contacts, calendar, etc would sync with the phone. I learned that if the PC is running Windows 7, ICloud will not work if the default "Documents" location is on a network drive.

I've battled with the Parite Virus all weekend on a Windows 2003 server. The virus lost.

If you have an old Cisco Pix Firewall and your users are complaining that they intermittently cannot get to the Internet, then it may be time to retire your firewall. The old Pix firewalls were sold with a license for either 10 or 50 Internet users. Back then, when not everyone used the Internet, that was not a big problem. Today, when everyone uses it including your copy machines and all of those iPhones and Android devices, 10 licenses is not enough. The first ten will get a connection and everyone else is out of luck.