Over the past few weeks, we’ve ignored a lot of the competition – big and small “box” stores, but this is one of those things that we just have to comment on.

Staples has recently been touting a “Free Tuneup”. Well, we’re here to share exactly what this means…

The free tuneup by Staples means that they have a quick look-see at your computer. It also mean they don’t actually fix anything that they find…. That happened to a customer of a Protocol16 partner company in NY.

Our partner had a customer that decided to take advantage of the “free tuneup”. Oddly, when she went to retrieve her computer, she got told that she had a huge amount of viruses and that her computer wasn’t worth fixing. Read here about the customer experience.

On top of that customer experience, Staples specifically says what they do:

We’ll boost the speed and performance of your PC by removing trial ware, adjusting key settings that may be slowing it down, and disk defragmentation and cleanup. When done in store, a PC Tune up also includes removal of dust and dirt buildup. Source (note: click “Details” under the Free Tuneup Heading).

That say’s a lot about how things go with them. They specifically say that they’ll look at your computer, but they won’t do anything other than a “defrag” and removal of “Dust and dirt buildup”. WOW – now that’s SERVICE! Sorry, if we take the time to bring your computer in and you have a virus or something nasty, we typically try to work it into the price for you. Windows crashing a lot? We’ll solve that issue, remove any malware/spyware/virus issues and we’ll solve your failed Windows Updates without trying to sell you a new computer.

Give us a call and see what Protocol16 can do for you…
Justin

You read that right! Businesses throughout Portland and other areas need to watch out about their licensing. The downturn is hurting everyone and let me tell you, everyone is trying to find out how to keep that money coming in.

An article hit the internet the other day out of Europe, but it’s a very good news item for anyone that will read it. It basically states that everyone needs to be careful about their licenses because a lot of software companies are starting to turn into the “dirty cops that sit at the bottom of the hill, behind a bush, simply to generate revenue.” Most of you don’t know, but during the installation process of almost any piece of software you install, you open yourself up (ie: agree) to be audited. Even Microsoft audits companies on occasion, and they are so serious about it, they PUBLISH who they audit to partners to keep us all in line. On top of that, you don’t even need to agree to be audited as Copyright Law plays into software piracy.

Now, is a Software Audit really that serious? YES!!!

There is a reason Software Audits are called “Software Raids”. Businesses generally receive 1 to 2 weeks notice, at most, of an upcoming software audit. Imagine having to look at every single program on every computer and determine if you’re licensed or not. Then, after you find out how many programs you’re illegally using, you find out just how hot that water can get(“illegal” is a general use term here as you’re required to show purchase receipts. Software keys, boxes, etc are “suspect” because YOU may not have bought them, legally, etc…). Auditors don’t come in and just look through your computer, they use automated tools that search your computer for software, but they also tend to focus on just the programs they know about. Tell them a little too much info and your investigation will get larger. Also, the fact that you’re being audited means something to other companies, so expect to have other companies knock on your door as well.

Think it won’t happen to you? Think again. There are several companies that perform software audits for various businesses and they pay rewards to people that report you and your business. That means that if you’ve ever fired any employees, or have any that just really don’t like working for you, the prospect of making money can be too great. Rewards are paid out when there is a a successful audit and the amount depends on how much you’re fined.

Software licenses are governed by contracts with vendors, and by U.S. Copyright law. You as an individual and your company may both be at risk for civil and criminal penalties for software license violations. Fines for corporations can reach $150,000 for each illegally installed copy of software. As an individual, you could be criminally prosecuted, fined up to $250,000 and even face jail time — up to five years.

Here’s another article you should read concerning software audits/raids. It explains how they happen and what you should do. I’ve worked with a guy that was at two different companies that got audited and he even stated that the people that show up are lawyers that act as sales guys. Because of how audits work, Protocol16 will actually recommend that you speak with a lawyer about your situation before contacting any company about a software audit. There is an Client/Attorney confidentiality law out there that may help you during your audit. Bringing in a company, such as us, will not legally help you and we may find more things wrong as well.

This entire situation is one of many reasons that Protocol16 always recommends that business customers setup Standard User Accounts on all employee computers. It’s hard to tell what each employee may have installed without you knowing. You could have illegal software or even MP3′s on your computers and network – bad news.

Now that I may have scared some of you, I won’t leave you hanging. There are ways to protect yourself and your business. Mostly, just taking an interest in what you and your employees install can make the biggest dent. I’ve mentioned that you shouldn’t install products such as the free version of antivirus packages, such as AVG, before and this is where those decisions count. If you have more computers and users than you know what to do with, there are self auditing tools out there that can help you as well. One great program is Microsoft SAM. This program will allow you to audit up to 150 computers, which classifies as a smaller”large” business. This product will help most businesses to get a handle on their issues. Don’t put it off until it’s too late!

As always, let us know if you have any questions.
Justin

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

Today, we’d like to cover something that happens all over the country, but we’ve seen it happen here in the Portland metro areas as well.

Warranty repairs, are completely normal. When something breaks, you take it into the company you bought it from and they fix it, right? Typically, that’s how things go, but what can actually happen in the case of computers, is that your data disappears when it shows back up in your hands.

Imagine sending your computer into a company to fix a screen that messed up. Not a big deal, by PC repair standards, but something that most companies require that the computer be sent to a service center. While in that service center, many things can happen. The company may decide that something else is wrong and replace it as well, like a recalled hard drive… Or that the computer needed the motherboard replaced which causes windows to no longer work – so they hook that hard drive up to a machine and replace Windows within minutes – along with all your valuable pictures, music, documents, etc. All gone.

This is why it’s so important to use some type of backup. While Protocol16 uses a service we like called Carbonite, any type of backup will do, whether you burn files to a CD or DVD, throw files on a memory stick or an external hard drive or you use some type of automated backup solution (in the Apple world, I personally use Time Machine). If you use your own backup solution, make sure that the data is physically located somewhere else in case something major happens – your backup can’t help if it’s destroyed in the same fire that kills your computer…

Anytime you give your property to anyone else, whether a friend, a repair company, a relative, etc. MAKE A BACKUP of your data. It’s too easy for a Caramel Latte to be spilled on your PC by your friend or family member, it’s too easy for someone to accidentally  drop and it’s too easy for the guy at the repair depot that some big company uses to not care about YOUR data and “accidentally” overwrite it with a fresh install of Windows.

Whoever you choose, be careful and perform a backup. As always, if you have questions, give us a call at 503-524-9047.
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

While roaming the internet, I found that there are a lot of sites listing the ins and outs of nearly everything, but I couldn’t find anything locally that reviewed software specifically from the business aspect. So I thought to myself “Would I suggest a business use something like a free anti-virus program like XXXXX?” The answer was “no”, but how would your typical business owner know about that? Why would they go out looking over the internet at 6,000 sites when they can just look at a local computer repair company to get some basic answers and perhaps talk to more to see about their specific situation?

Well, now you can look to a local computer repair company for those answers. So, Protocol16 now offers a Software Review Category as well as a Hardware Review Category.

With the Software Review category, I’ll start with a review a popular “free” antivirus program and explain why your business should shy away from it. I’ll also go on to suggest a product Protocol16 has been testing recently and am very happy with.

For the Hardware Review category, I’ll discuss the pricing difference between building a custom server or buying a named-brand server. I’m actually in this exact situation right now with a client. Believe it or not, the difference between a name-brand vs a custom built server can be a huge amount of money – but there are downfalls as well.

The Review categories will probably be a once-a-month post, but depending on time, I may post more. If you’re a business, or consumer and you would like something specific reviewed, please let me know and Protocol16 will do it’s best to review it.
Justin

PS: First post is tomorrow, and I’ll discuss that free antivirus software…

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

It’s no secret that we’re a mobile computer repair company in Portland. We drive all over and see a lot of stuff, but when we’re done with a customer and on the way back to the office, we sometimes stop in to computer shops long the way. While in those shops, we do a few things that includes seeing how our customer service stacks up against the shops as well as check pricing to ensure that we remain competitive and are not overcharging – it’s called Secret Shopping.

Well, I personally got to do a “secret shopper” trip with my wife and we were not impressed. While I waited for 5 minutes to even be acknowledged at one computer shop, all while standing 5 feet in front of the shop owner, I got to listen to a personal conversation – not a professional one. My wife decided to look a display that included a touch screen computer and as well as a Netbook (we like Netbooks here at Protocol16). The display failed to work  and the Netbook was dead as well with Windows errors. Yikes…

When it was finally my turn to talk, I asked how much they were charging for a memory upgrade for a laptop – a service we do at customer locations. Now, I didn’t act like a geek, I honestly acted like a lot of our customers that know just enough to tell someone what they want.

Sadly, the markup the shop was charging was a heck of a lot more than we do and I was told that I needed to let go of my laptop for an entire day so that they could upgrade it. And in the end, they’d only charge me $10 as labor, to perform the upgrade. That’s crazy because we charge much less, even if we were to charge for a 15 minute block of time. The thing is, for this specific service, we don’t charge our time if that’s all you want – just parts since we take your laptop, turn it over and install the hardware and start windows up to make sure everything’s peachy. This type of upgrade literally takes about 3 minutes to do everything, including start Windows all the way up to see if it’s seeing all the memory.

I’ll be honest, when I find out people are taking advantage of others, I get upset. My poor wife had to listen to me complain while we drove all the way back to the office. I understand markup for a boutique computer shop, but not that much for 1 customer, especially after making me wait 5 minutes just to talk.

In this secret shopping experience, I think we’ll keep our rates where they are.
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

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We’ve been busy with new clients around Portland, but a lot of small business owners that I’ve personally talked to have wondered why a business should repair their computer vs having a family friend look at it for them.

Our quick answer is: there are sometimes people that are qualified to work on a business computer, but not always. If you know someone that is a “computer whiz”, make sure they understand your situation. If they come in and clean up your computer, they may accidentally uninstall a program, remove an important backup or just plain cause more problems.

Again, we don’t have problems with others working on computers, but make sure they’re qualified. Our technicians are certified by Microsoft to work on server environments (large, medium and small) as well as workstations and home desktops/laptops. We’ve seen small and large environments and understand those unique needs.

The other option you need to think about is experience. Our experience has taught us a lot of things that businesses specifically focus on. Someone that comes in that doesn’t understand the business can really end up costing more money in labor than Protocol16 would charge you. This is because we specifically understand the security requirements of the business environment. In this case, you could pay someone off the street to install windows on each computer and customize each one, or use Protocol16 to customize one computer to be “perfect” and mirror that to all the other computers (there are specifics to this, but we can generally do it).

One last thing you want to think about when bringing in an outsider that’s not associated with a company is insurance. Ensure that whoever you bring in is Licensed, Bonded and Insured. This protects both you and the person you bring in. What would happen if someone broke the company server and your email was down for a week?

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to call 503-524-9047 or email us on the Contact Us page. We’re here to help the Portland Metro areas.
Justin