Every once in awhile, while we’re out on a call around Portland, someone asks who we’re insured by. I figured I’d just put this out in the open, for everyone, and I’ll add it to the website as well.

Protocol16 is insured by The Hartford. They fit the requirements of our business for on site and in shop insurance requirements and they offer more protection, in terms of computer repair work, than any other insurance company out there.

The next response is normally: “Oh, I hear they’re expensive…” Yup…
Justin

The last month has been busy, but it’s quickly paying off! We just got notified that Protocol16 has made the Angie’s List Honor Roll with all A’s!

According to Angie’s List, fewer than 2% of the company’s listed with them get to the Honor Roll status, and we’re excited to be there!

Lets hope Protocol16 continues to climb up the virtual ladder on all the review sites.
Justin

While researching competitors online recently, I noticed something. A lot of places are offering “free consultations”, whether they’re 20, 30 or 60 minutes. Well, here’s my take on that – they’re in the door just long enough to see what’s broke or what you need, then the sales pitch starts. If they get you hooked, they throw in a line “we can do it in x minutes/hours”, then later, the sinker comes in with “we went over our planned time…” or “well, we didn’t anticipate this extra cost”.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that we don’t always get estimates right, but we give discounts for going over the estimate amount. We also don’t charge for every single minute that we’re on a customer site, unlike other companies. Lastly, if you need something done on site, that can be done at the shop to save you money, we’ll recommend that instead. If it can be avoided, you won’t see a $1000 bill from Protocol16 for something like a hard drive recovery, just because the call was for on-site service, when the fee should have probably been half that (something we’ve seen a local business do). We really shine when it comes to saving our own customers money.

But, there is something that you need to know about Protocol16, something a recent customer found out. Protocol16 takes new customers seriously. While I’d love to talk about how much time we just spent consulting for a new customer, I’m afraid to even publish it as I don’t want Protocol16 flooded with requests of people expecting massive amounts of free help.

A real consultation report for a Protocol16 customer.

If you call Protocol16 for a consultation, we’ll talk things out about your specific situation, dig around a little to see what type of hardware and software you’re working with, and more, before turning around to talk business. If this takes a few hours, so be it. With that, I’ll say that Protocol16 will offer a 1 hour consultation for any business, but we do reserve the right to take longer to learn about your situation. If you have a complicated situation, Protocol16 may spend many hours just learning about the issue, doing research, then you get one of these pretty reports.

The above technical report, is a real report done by Protocol16 for a mid-sized business having specific problems. The details have been blurred because Protocol16 takes privacy very seriously. We will not publish names of companies or individuals that we’ve helped. It is the decision of the company or individaul to make that information public. While we love saying “We helped xx and yy”, that’s just something we won’t do.

Over the last few days, we’ve had a rash of calls from home based customers, which we call “Residential”. One of the first questions that people typically as is: “Do you work with regular people at home?” or something similar.

The answer: YES. Protocol16 works with both business and residential customers. While we cater to the business side of things, with all their servers, workstations and more – we do service residential customers with the same customer service as the business side.

We, or rather I (explanation coming soon…), have been very busy over the last week. It seems someone turned on a virtual faucet this Monday and I’ve been running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off! While work is getting done, and on time, I may not be in the office 100% of the time.

I’ll also say, that due to this situation, I will personally bend over backwards (Ok, I’m not quite that flexible) to ensure that you get seen as quickly as possible. I’m known to stop by your location on the way to or from the office or schedule a pickup time (pickups are always free) that is convenient to you.

Our normal office hours are:

Mon-Fri: 8AM to 6PM
Sat: 1030AM to 5PM

We are always on call for businesses and there is no additional fee for middle of the night calls.

With that said, please call ahead before heading to our office, as we don’t want to miss you. There are some changes afoot, an explanation here and there and a few odds and ends that we’ll talk about in an up-coming post.
Justin

It’s been a nice and rainy week in Portland, but that doesn’t mean you need to let your guard down!

Today’s post, is brought to you by the letter “R”, for Ransom-ware. Ransom-ware is software that makes it onto your computer, usually mysteriously, then holds your files captive until you pay a fee. This can be a product that’s sold or a virus that holds your MP3’s hostage.

Recently, Sunbelt Software – Protocol16’s recommended anti-virus company, discovered a new “in the wild” ransom-ware package that encrypts the contents of your hard drive (this is actually arguable as to if it encrypts or just causes problems). This means that your hard drive cannot be read within minutes of having the software installed.

After installation, you’re left with the following message:

Ransom-ware from Data Doctor. Shutdown message.

If you get this, it’s too late… The hard drive (specific files, actually), has been encrypted and you’re left with a Windows mess that barely works.

After you see this message and your computer shuts down, you’re stuck with a message stating that “Windows has recovered from serious error. Some files can be corrupted. Disk checking is strongly recommended.” This is NOT a Windows error.

Upon attempting to access a file that’s been encrypted, you’re met with another error message stating: “Unable to open the file due to data corruption.” Upon clicking the “Repair” button, you see the next screen:

Data Doctor 2010, Requesting Payment.

Hey look everyone, my favorite topic! Software asking for credit card information…

Some files may or may not be encrypted, but the software will continue to nag you to purchase it. They’ll even charge you an activation fee so they don’t need to pay any fee’s for the credit card being run.

Don’t install this program. PLEASE don’t.

I’ll fire up a Virtual Machine here shortly and make an infection video for everyone to see how this works as well.

If you’re reading this and curious what we recommend for anti-virus software, we heavily recommend Vipre. We are a local reseller, so if you’re interested, give us a call and we should be able to get you a discount.
Justin

Protocol16 works closely with other computer shops across the country on a forum where we can all talk, share ideas and alert each other of problems. In this case, our early warning system worked. It just so happens, that a computer shop in the northwest happened to pick up, locate and alert everyone to the virus issue.

This virus causes redirects from Google to other websites. For instance, if you do a search for McAfee or something else anti virus related in Bing, Yahoo or Google, you may or may not be redirected to a random website instead of the intended page.

It’s been noticed that most anti virus solutions are not correctly identifying this issue yet, and if you have anti virus loaded on your machine and you’re infected, your anti virus software will not find the infected files.

If you have this type of problem, please give us, or your local computer repair company – if you’re not around Portland, a call.
Justin

While I’ve seen the commercials over the years, I always thought there was something more to the “I’m giving away free classes” commercial. The whole “Try my product” at the end just made it cheesier.

Well, this week, the stuff hit the proverbial fan about Video Professor.

The service basically acts like many other types of scams where you are charged for shipping and handling for one item. After that, if you don’t return that item within a “review period”, you are signed up, and charged for, a much more expensive subscription service. This charge is not detailed on the checkout, but instead on a link detailed next to a Checkbox that states “I have read and agree to xxx” (The same type of agreement no one reads…). If you click the link, you get a decent amount of text that details this: “we’ll conveniently bill your credit card just $189.95” – direct quote from here.

While you can certainly learn things from this series, I would not recomend signing up for anything with this company. The company is known to be deceptive and has even attempted to get people wanting & needing jobs to sign up for the scam as well.
Justin

A common misconception among a lot of my customers here in the Portland area is that computer companies and the technicians never have problems, this will help correct that assumption.

Protocol16 runs a Small Business Server (SBS 2008) for our internal shop. It has everything that we need, all in one nice “little” package. Well, that nice little package can mean that if one bad thing happens, nothing works (rare, but possible). That was the case on today.

Last night, after I returned home from a family event, I decided to go ahead and install the latest Microsoft Updates. We don’t automatically install updates on the server since they can cause problems for a number of things. Well, last night, the updates installed, I allowed the server to restart and went to bed. The next morning, I fired up my email and got nothing, along with a “Disconnected” message in the bottom right corner of Outlook. To a lot of people, this is where they start picking up the phone. I had to turn around and log into the server, to which it promptly locked up. Oh, what fun…

A reboot later, I found the problem and corrected it. Another reboot and the server was up and running. Goes to show that we’re not impervious to problems ourselves.

On a side note, the problem was a simple one, but caused all kinds of problems on the server – everything was throwing errors, locking up, etc. I just might hobble our server when we start interviewing for our next technician to see how they perform in a real-world scenario… Again, we hire the best technicians, if a simple server problem like this throws them through a loop, they’re not going to make it with our customers either.

Hope everyone has a decent Black Friday. We found some really nice deals ourselves and will be passing the savings on to our customers later.
Justin

GOOOOD MORNING PORTLAND!

I found an interesting piece of news today that really caught my attention, and I wanted to comment on it.

The other day, the NSA testified that it had “worked on Windows 7” in conjunction with it’s release cycle. They basically stated that they worked with Microsoft during the build of Windows 7 (they did this with Vista as well) to make it more secure.

Well, the next day, various people started putting a few dots together and ended up screaming about back doors, black helicopters and government agents – you get the point.

While I know, for a fact, that Antivirus companies look the other way for specific things on computers – due to law enforcement, I haven’t seen anything on that fact for the government. As an ex-government employee, working around computers, I can say that the changes in security from XP to Vista to Windows 7 have been things the government had been doing for awhile.

There are certain ways to secure Windows, as well as other operating systems. The government has it’s own way of doing those things. I personally use some of these methods in my every day usage of my own computers. Protocol16 even uses some of these methods when securing client computers. One of the biggest things done is separating the Administrator from the User. Most people using XP or Vista use the computer in Admin mode. I’ve talked about this in the past, as well as how I think you should leave Universal Account Control (UAC) on, for security. Windows 7 takes that a step further by separating the tasks that someone does into 2 categories: User and Admin. Internet Explorer, when fired up – even from an Administrator, is started as a normal user. Even things like the Command Prompt (the older DOS looking screen with a black background and white text) is started as a User instead of Admin. These are things that I’m guessing came out of the recommendation from the Government.

I’ll give away another secret as well. The NSA is not the only organization that worked on Windows, and won’t be. Microsoft takes recommendations from thousands of companies every day. For instance, Dell worked on Windows 7 as well… They recommended changes to both Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 when they found issues with their own hardware. Even Microsoft’s current TV campaign of “I suggested X feature” tells that they do listen to feedback.

But, don’t believe all the hype. Many of the features in Windows 7 where, in fact, in Vista. I got worked up the other night (read: Yelled at the TV again), when I listened to a commercial talk about how Windows 7 has new child monitoring and the actor talked about how he had suggested it. That feature has been in Windows Vista since the beginning.

Make your own decisions based on what you think is right. The NSA doesn’t just work on Windows, they work on Linux and Unix too…
Justin