The Backstory In December of 2007 I built my wife a very nice PC – Gigabyte AM2 motherboard, a fast AMD Athlon 64 x2 CPU, 4 Gb of dual-channel DDR2 RAM, an nVidia-based PCI Express video card with 512 Mb of onboard RAM, two SATA hard drives (a 160 Gb boot drive and a 750…
One of the questions I hear most often from my residential clients as they drop off an ailing PC is, “will I lose all of my pictures?” In many cases, I am able to save most, if not all, of the data on their hard drives (pictures, emails, addresses, browser bookmarks, etc.) My commercial clients…
Well, it’s Oct 22, 2009, and Windows 7, the latest operating system from Microsoft, is here. And, too, are three new “Get a Mac” ads from Apple. The new ads are, of course, available on YouTube (see the embedded videos below). I did receive my full retail package of Windows 7 Ultimate via UPS on…
In Beware of Social Engineers, I wrote that I’ve recently had several clients that have contracted nasty malware that masquerades as security software and claims that the victim’s PC is infected. It then offers to clean up the infections – if you pay for the software. Of course, by that time the damage is done,…
This is a technology-focused blog, so I’m not talking about those folks trying to affect our general society using political means. I’m talking about the ones who practice social engineering for the purpose of gaining some control over or unwarranted compensation from your use of your computer. In this context, Social Engineering has traditionally meant…