Hard Drive Manufacturers Slash Warranty Periods

That’s on new drives.  So, from now on, more than ever, always have an external drive (or two) for backups.

From: Steve   Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2011

I’m fed up with Mozilla Firefox. I switched to it, but recently, it’s been that I can type faster than the program can put letters on my screen. There’s always [something coming up on] my computer to show something is going on. I go to the Task Manager and all it shows is Firefox. I have to wonder if there’s something monitoring my keystrokes and thus it’s busy. I don’t want to feel I’m just getting paranoid but this weekend, I couldn’t get into my bank account online. I called them up and they said that somebody was trying to get into the account repeatedly and they shut it down because of that.  I installed AdAware again and it removed some things, but that didn’t solve the problem.

Actually, this is a test to see if the same thing would happen as I’m in Internet Explorer. It’s keeping up with  my typing.   So, do you know of another browser to use that’s not Google or some other suspicious organization?

ANSWER:

Internet Explorer is always a good second choice.  If you have Vista or Win 7 you can upgrade IE to IE9, but it’s not available for XP.  I use Chrome a lot, but I understand your concerns about anything to do with Google.  That’s why I tapered off my Chrome usage as well as my Gmail usage.  Another good browser that no one seems to be aware of is Opera.  Mozilla makes another browser called Sea Monkey, but it might have the same problems as Firefox.  Safari for Windows is half-decent.  Here’s a list of several alternatives.

As to someone monitoring your keystrokes, it could be true these days.  Are you using Malwarebytes?  They’re the best, you just have to keep it up to date and do a FULL scan every once in a while (bi-weekly?) and a quick scan  weekly if not more often.

Something else you should do is to make regular backups to an external drive and scan that drive regularly for viruses with any antivirus other than Norton or McAfee.  ClamWin and Avira aren’t very good, either.  Microsoft’s Security Essentials is installed on all of my PCs exclusively, and it’s free.  Also, I recommend Acronis backup/imaging software.

Get 15% on Acronis True Image Home 2011 with MJJATIH15 coupon code. Expiration date: 07/18/2011

Apple Macs Targeted By Crimeware Toolkit

I hope you keep good backups!

This looks very useful.  I’ve been using DropBox for at least a year, but I just now installed it on my Blackberry.  I like it!

Dropbox – Online backup, file sync, and sharing made easy.

If you’ve been infected or corrupted and can’t run executable (.EXE) program files in order to fix your problem, here’s the fix:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555067

If that doesn’t fix it, using Notepad or any text editor, create a .REG file as shown below.  Name it EXEFIX.REG, or whatever, doesn’t matter so long as it ends in .REG:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.exe]

@=”exefile”

“Content Type”=”application/x-msdownload”

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.exe\PersistentHandler]

@=”{098f2470-bae0-11cd-b579-08002b30bfeb}”

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.exe]@=”exefile”"Content Type”=”application/x-msdownload”
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.exe\PersistentHandler]@=”{098f2470-bae0-11cd-b579-08002b30bfeb}”

Then double-click on it and answer any prompts that come up.

We promise to never do anything even remotely similar to this!

Man loses $20 million after taking laptop for repair | ITworld.

http://ask-leo.com/how_long_should_a_hard_drive_last.html

Comp-U-Plus big deals page or something

This could come in VERY handy! I very reluctantly plug anything Microsoft does, but this is a great service. It’s called SkyDrive. Free 25 gigabytes worth of storage. The only thing required is that you create an account. You don’t even have to create a Hotmail or MSN account. I used my gmail account.  It’s not the same or as good as online backup, but, hey, 25 gig!  And if this is all you have as a backup, you’ll thank me if/when your hard drive crashes.  The only question is, do you trust Microsoft with your personal documents?

Here’s the link: http://windowslive.com/online/skydrive

Probably ought to save things to other computers and/or external hard drives and/or sign up for an online storage account.

Here’s the article:  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/8711747.stm

Several things to try, depending on what the computer allows and how far it gets you:
————————–

• Boot the computer with the original Windows installation CD and do a “Repair” or “Reinstall.”
  • Do an online search for more detailed instructions.  Here’s an excellent one:  http://pcsupport.about.com/od/operatingsystems/ss/instxprepair1.htm
• Buy Acronis True Image which will create a hidden backup partition that is easily restored if Windows is bad but the drive itself is OK.
• Sign up with Nordic Backup to save your most precious files online.

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• Boot from a bootable Linux CD.  Several here (I’ve used all of these successfully):
  http://puppylinux.com/download/
  http://www.pclinuxos.com/
  http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
  http://slax.linux-live.org/
  http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/
  • Do an online search for more detailed instructions.
  • Try to find one that includes an antivirus program.  You might be able to kill any viruses on the Windows hard drive (through Linux) without attaching an external drive or taking the internal hard drive out. › Continue reading…