There is a new scam going around that everyone in Portland needs to know about. There is a new type of scam going around that computer repair companies are attempting that really don’t work, and could leave you in a serious world of hurt if you let these people into your computer.

A company called “Click & Fix” was spotted, over Christmas, making phone calls to random people stating that their computer was letting information onto the internet and that they would fix it for you, for a fee. All you have to do is hand over credit card information and open a file or web address to allow them access to your location.

If you’ve been reading my articles or seen the video’s I occasionally put up, you don’t want to give credit card information out to people you don’t know over the phone or in software that magically shows up and holds your computer for ransom… Please be careful, afterall, we have a whole new year to go through!

As always, if you have anything to share, anything you’ve seen or just have a question, please feel free to contact us!
Justin

Goodness we’ve been busy recently – calls out to Portland proper, West Linn, Tigard, Beaverton and more! The Google stats for the website have been picking up, and so has business. On top of that, the office in Beaverton is just about done, so things have been more than hectic to say the least.

This week, I had a customer request something that I didn’t have, so that’ll be offered here shortly – in the next post, in fact. I also managed to do a little charity work on a computer as well.

Anyway – we haven’t gone anywhere, we’re just busy!

Riddle me this?

What happens when your family dog decides to use your memory stick as a chew toy?

It seems that one owner found out the hard way. While this wasn’t from a Protocol16 customer, it is an interesting case of exactly how things can go wrong.

It’s absolutely amazing how drives can die. Dropping them, on the floor or in water, having them set afire in a horrible accident, run over after leaving your laptop on the car – we could go on, but we won’t.

This is why Protocol16 always recommends keeping backups. In this poor memory card’s situation, there wasn’t a backup. Luckily, there is a company called Drive Savers that managed to pull the data off the card.

Protocol16 has been a partner with Drive Savers for a bit now and we couldn’t be happier with them. Best of all, since we’re partners with Drive Savers, we have the ability to save you money. While we never want you to be in that situation, be rest assured that Protocol16 is always there for you.
Justin

It’s been a very busy day. Protocol16 had several computer repair calls in Beaverton today making it one of our busier days of the week – it’s always the end of the week.

It seems that people are so thrifty these days that, again, they are choosing to repair a computer instead of replace it. I’m all for repairing a computer as long as it’s worth it for the customer. If we get a call to repair a computer and the repair itself is going to cost more than an actual new computer, Protocol16 will always recommend replacing instead of repairing. In certain cases, specific parts can be hugely expensive on older machines.

Anyway – later on in the day, my wife and I were in Tigard to check on a few retail fronts to possibly expand our computer repair business here in the Portland area and my complaint about traffic just about caught up with me. While driving down Pacific Highway, a driver decided to all-out run a red light, cross 2 lanes of traffic, the center dividing lane and end up in my lane, right in front of my truck. Thank goodness my wife saw him since she was looking at some locations on my left and was able to get me to slam on the brakes (read: screaming “STOP!!!!”) in time otherwise that would have been a nasty accident. It’s amazing what your peripheral vision misses at times. Luckily no one was hurt.

In a double stroke of good luck, the Tigard police happen to be right behind the Protocol16 tuck. Within seconds of this driver pulling this stunt, they were pulled over and getting a ticket. While I know the police were just doing their job, it’s nice to see a blatant traffic violation that could have hurt many people get taken care of so quickly. In saying that, I’d like to remind everyone that Protocol16 offers an Emergency Responder discount for computer repair in Portland…
Justin

Well, yesterday, we started off slow. Ok, very slow. We figured things weren’t that bad in Portland and caught up on work. We were soo wrong…

Yesterday, around 1PM, we realized that I had forgotten to unforward the office phone to my mobile phone. We do this on evenings and weekends so that we can offer 24/7 service to our clients. I had left my phone on a very soft ring tone and no one heard it until someone heard a VERY faint ringing… That turned into a moment that I never want to repeat, nor will I repeat the words that came out of my mouth when I realized what happened.

We managed to return all the calls but two from local businesses that had phone systems, so we didn’t know who called. If you were one of those businesses, I’m extremely sorry and disappointed in myself.

Everyone makes mistakes. As long as you learn from them, it’s usually ok.
Justin

In an attempt to make things easier for our visitors, Protocol16 made an update yesterday that some of you may have noticed: the chat feature on the bottom right of the website. We haven’t deployed it across the entire site yet (later today), but we’re always looking for ways to make the experience better for our visitors.

If you have any comments about the site or a feature you wish to see, let us know!
Justin

In a continuation of yesterday’s story about spyware and virus issues stemming from websites, there is one thing that I said in the beginning that can stop nearly all issues before they start…

The Admin account on your computer is the very first account setup under XP or Vista. In XP, this account can do anything on the computer, including install software – if you can double click on an icon and something installs, you’re in the XP Admin account. In Vista, this account comes up with prompts that says “Click continue to allow xxxxx to install”. That prompt, without a password, means that you’re using a generic Admin account (there is another one that is disabled by default).

If you’re using Vista and have turned off User Account Control (UAC) to stop the annoying prompts, that’s bad… This feature, while annoying at first, eventually goes away (the first month is the worst). In Windows 7, the feature is still there, but not as annoying. If you’ve turned this feature off, you can infect yourself and not even know it by using the same lame-duck security in Windows XP.

By using a Standard User account, you stop most of the infection types out there. When that prompt comes up after you’ve hit a random webpage, you know right away to get away from that site.

If a Protocol16 technician notices that you’re using an Admin account, they will automatically recommend against doing so and offer to setup a secondary account for you, after explaining the situation.

I would list how to change your account type to a standard user, but there are many things that need to be done so that you can still use your machine and data without problems. This includes creating a new administrator account and “locking down” your current account. This type of lock down normally takes about 20 minutes, then another 20 minutes checking things over to ensure that everything is working correctly. While you don’t have to have Protocol16 set this up for you, any computer repair shop should be able to do this without any major difficulties. If they try to talk you out of doing this, as a security precaution, I’d worry a little bit…
Justin

There are a lot of people in Portland that have asked about alternatives to Microsoft Office. While I personally like Office, I know it can be a burden to those that can’t afford the licensing costs. Even businesses have problems meeting the licensing costs.

Alternatives
Well, there’s the Open Source alternative called OpenOffice and then there’s Google Apps. Some companies report decent success using both OpenOffice and Google Apps. Personally, I would move to OpenOffice out of the two. I would rather have the documents on my computer than on the web. Perhaps I’m paranoid about security, due to my training and what I’ve seen.

Office Web Apps
Well, now there is another option for you all: Microsoft’s Office Web Apps. You can test drive them, in limited form, at Skydrive.live.com (you’ll need a Windows Live account though.)

I played with it on Sunday evening while I had some downtime at home and liked the little bit that I was able to play with. Excel, looked just like Excel, even though I’m on a Mac using Firefox… If you create a new file, after you log in, you can play around in said file, just like the real program. While playing around, I noticed that Word isn’t working, but Excel is. I didn’t attempt anything else.

According to Microsoft and other news reports, Office Web Apps will be free to users of Windows Live. So, when it’s fully released, it might be a viable alternative to the Office Applications that you install.

This release of free Web Applications may also drive the price of Office down, but only time will tell.
Justin

So, it seems the big news in Portland right now is that Windows 7 is coming on Oct. 22. Yes, that’s very true, but there are some important things many of you need to know.

XP to Windows 7 = No-go
Microsoft has decided that Windows XP CANNOT be upgraded to Windows 7. I cannot stress this information enough. I really don’t want to see a lot of businesses and people needing to spend huge amounts of money on Windows 7 upgrades. Right now, the “easiest” way to “upgrade” is to use the Windows Migration Tool to copy your info before you install. (Note: Laplink has also decided to help out, for a fee.) Again, Windows XP going to Windows 7 must be a clean install – this means the hard drive is erased, but there are products you can purchase to help the upgrade.

Windows 7 Is Better
Windows 7 is considered, by many, to be Vista but with Service Pack 3. While mostly true, there are a lot of differences. The first thing most people will notice is that Windows 7 looks different. There’s no more green “Start” button, no more Circle start button – just a standard menu. A lot of people things it looks a lot like the Apple OS X menu.

Windows 7, at least in my personal experience, is actually faster as well. I’ve been testing it on a home laptop and have found it pretty speedy for startups and waking up from sleep. So far, we’ve noticed one issue with it, but it’s due to Toshiba not releasing the software for the problem.

Drivers
One thing that really helps in Windows 7 is that Microsoft has defaulted to the manufacturer for drivers. Drivers are the software that allows Windows to interact with your hardware. A driver would allow Windows to see your Webcam – without that driver, Windows doesn’t know how to work with it.Some people would call this a translation file to allow the two software pieces to talk with each other.

Older versions of Windows required you to visit the manufacturer and update your own drivers. This happened with Windows XP and all versions before it. Windows Vista allowed users to download new drivers from Microsoft’s generic driver repository. If Windows recognized your mouse as a standard mouse, it would update the driver for you. That’s all great, until you have a fancy mouse with 8 buttons… One day, it just goes back to a standard mouse again. Companies have done things to help guard against this, but it still can cause problems. It really causes problems with the component that controls your monitor: the graphics card.

Well, Windows 7 is doing something new. If you have hardware, Windows will see it and interact with it, but will only use the generic driver until your hardware manufacturer releases their version of that driver. Case in point: my wife’s laptop has a fingerprint reader. Originally, we couldn’t find the drivers for it (this is completely because Windows 7 isn’t officially released yet). Well, one day, Windows popped up and said “I found a driver for X device!” When I clicked on it, I figured it would be a generic driver – nope. Windows 7 redirected me directly to Toshiba’s website were I could download the driver directly from them. On top of this, I found other drivers that I needed as well that had just been released. Now, we’re waiting on one last driver that allows us to utilize the touch pad (mouse pad) to it’s fullest extent.

Performance
This is one of the most unique things for Windows 7. Windows 7 is one of the first Operating Systems (OS) that has been released that does not require a more powerful computer. If you remember, when you upgraded from Windows 95 or 98 to XP, you pretty much needed to purchase a new computer, or at least upgrade it. Well, not so with Windows 7.

Windows 7, technically speaking, is a toned down version of Windows Vista. It’s been cleaned up, run through an optimization process then given a few more bug fixes. When Microsoft did this, it actually caused Windows 7 to typically perform better than Vista. This means that if you’re running XP or Vista and your computer is basically speedy enough for you, you can keep on using it with Windows 7.

If you have any other questions about Windows 7 and what is going to happen with your computer, please let us know.
Justin

We recently had a client running Windows XP and disabled the automatic updates feature since Vista was out. They figured Microsoft wasn’t updating XP anymore, so they didn’t need to see the prompts.

Needless to say, there are still updates for Windows XP that users should install. There were even updates released this week for XP. If you’re unsure of how to run updates or if you’re currently in need of updates, type the following into Internet Explorer (due to how updates are, it must be Internet Explorer):

http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com

This address will test your system to make sure you have the latest version of the Microsoft Updater and it will allow you to see if your version of Windows is completely up-to-date, a 2-for-1 special, if you will.

As always, please let us know if you have any questions or are in need of help by giving us a call. We support the whole Portland Metro region to include Beaverton, Tigard, Lake Oswego, Portland, Gresham, Wilsonville, HIllsboro and more…
Justin