Tag: Microsoft Outlook Specialist
Is Pinterest the perfect camping grounds for viruses?
Pinterest is an online pinboard.
Organize and share things you love.
Now, love that virus you’re about to download.
Think you already have a virus?
Click on the black button to the right of this post to book an appointment!
And now you can send your friends right to viruses, too! Many of you might not know this part of Pinterest, but when you find a picture you love and “Pin it”, you’re basically telling your fellow pinnners to love that pic, too and that they need to click on the picture to pin to their boards. Pinterest hosts the pictures, but then when it is finally “pinned” it can take people right to the website that is hosting the virus (after clicking on the image). The website that is hosting the pictures could have been attacked by a virus and now it’s camping out on the picture, just waiting for pinnners to pin, click and download a virus in less than a minute.
What can you do? Not much. If you pin the picture virus free you will never know. If the site becomes tainted, your future pinners will probably get it after clicking on the image, unless they have awesome protection. My client that called in this a.m. had McAfee protection and it sailed right past the security features McAfee offered. He didn’t even click on the image, he typed it in manually. If you get a virus, call us at 612-865-4475 immediately!
Watch our Youtube video to find out what you should watch out for now that you know this is a possibility.
Research has turned up little information on the laws regarding Pinterest and this issue, although I did discover another virus report. To read more, I found this blog about a clever Pinterest virus sneak.
http://doktorspinn.com/2012/03/18/clever-pinterest-virus-a-first-for-the-booming-image-site/
How to survive the Windows 7 White Screen of Death (WSOD)
Goodbye blue screen of death, welcome white screen of death! If you haven’t experienced it yet, consider yourself lucky. (It is annoying.) I get them when I use Outlook 2010 and I have a fast computer, or so I think. My laptop at home that gets the WSOD has 4 gigs of ram. My computer at work has 8 gigs of ram and I get the WSOD occasionally on that computer, too. I do not believe it’s caused by lack of memory. I have tried to troubleshoot this issue for months now and for the most part I have concluded that it’s pushing the bigger programs that are using Windows 7 to their max.
Now, let’s begin with what the WSOD is.
Sometimes while working in the internet or especially in Outlook 2010, or just doing too many things at one time, your computer will start to look cloudy and everything you worked on looks transparent. The application you were working in is totally in a white screen of death mode and frozen up. If you go to the bottom tasks, you can usually continue to work in those, as they aren’t frozen up.
Do not start clicking, clicking and clicking in the white screen of death application. Clicking more only causes the computer to stay frozen or continue to white screen. Your best recourse of action is to just let it ride out. If you don’t need the application and data you were working on (like internet surfing, etc), you can end the task in windows and re-open a new browser window, or do what I do (as I am very impatient!), open a new browser all together, such as Firefox or Chrome. If you do need the data you were working on, the best thing to do is just ride out the storm. Most of the time in Outlook 2010 it will figure itself out and be back to normal in a few minutes. If after five or ten minutes it’s still there, you probably have to hard crash it and the email you were scripting up may be in your drafts or might not be.
If you are getting these WSOD’s often within Outlook, you may want to book some time with me as I have a few setting changes that can help lift that problem, or your email folder size may be too large and you will need to slim it down a bit. The WSOD with Outlook can also come from IMAP settings. I love and adore IMAP, so I had to clean up a lot of my email that was synching with IMAP, works much better now.
What I have learned to do is change settings, clean up the computer more and delete and manage my email better. For IE white screens, it is just using fewer tabs. All simple solutions to make the WSOD become less frequent.
If you are experiencing the WSOD and would like us to take a look at it, call us at 612-865-4475 or send us an email – info@callthatgirl.biz.
Comcast users should avoid installing Norton/Symantec
If you are experiencing a problem with Norton and want assistance, feel free to submit a ticket by clicking here….we know both Comcast and Norton well and can help you with this, quickly and with an affordable rate. Get 20% off your call by mentioning this blog post.
As most of the Minneapolis/St. Paul readers of this blog know, our choices of getting high speed internet are limited to pretty much 2 corporations in town. Comcast and Qwest. As a residential computer repair tech, here is how I see the choices being made.
- Home users with a phone/landline, have Qwest.
- Home users without a phone/landline have Comcast.
According to my website statistics, in the past month out of almost 4000 visitors, 1800 are cable users 951 are DSL. This also includes visitors from around the world too, so it’s not just local stats, but interesting nonetheless.
Now, on to my latest Comcast rant. According to their press relase dated Jan 20th, 2010
http://www.comcast.com/About/PressRelease/PressReleaseDetail.ashx?PRID=957
-
Comcast Partners With Symantec to Offer Award-Winning Norton Security Suite to Its High-Speed Internet Customers
-
Norton Offers Superior Protection, Robust Family Safety Tools and Fast Scanning Speeds
Call That Girl has a problem with this press release. Norton/Symantec is far from “Award winning” in our computer repair shop. Norton/Symantec is one of the antivirus programs that I see in the shop BY FAR more than any other. Not only are they not catching the latest Malware viruses, but the program is so slow for some users, that they call us to figure out why it’s slow…only to have me SHOW them, their Norton/Symantec is killing their computer. Of a slow painful death. I also have to add, I call it far from ROBUST. Sure it has all the bells and whistles, but it doesn’t work.
- Pay us to remove it? Sure
- Remove it yourself? Great!
- Never install it? BEST CHOICE
- Install and purchase a Malwarebytes Anti Malware license? Most awesome choice! Click on the image below to get Malwarebytes with CTG’s anti-virus protection plan.
Mind you, I also wasn’t a fan of the McAfee product they used to give away either, but if I had to make a choice of one over the other…I would probably chose McAfee.
To close, I will add that Qwest used to (not sure if they do now) offer Windows Live One Care, but they probably won’t be in the future, as it’s being discontinued.
http://onecare.live.com/standard/en-in/default.htm?mkt=en-in
Microsoft’s replacement product though is is quite nice. Read my blog a couple down for a review on that.
If you are here and want to start your own computer repair business, check out my blog series about How to start a computer repair business
