Pensacola Computer Help Technoblog

It has been a long month of fighting the latest wave of viruses, and replacing many blown power supply’s and fixing power related issues (it always happens in Thunderstorm season). One of the most common things I have seen in the virus/spyware battles is that a majority of them are coming from social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Malware writers take advantage of high traffice sites such as these and target the unsuspecting. One of the biggest dangers that I see from these type of sites is that they allow users to insert custom coded objects on their sites (the Pimp my page kind of thing). This leads to people getting their ‘free’ media players and such to add to their pages, and most people have no idea that these things they add to their pages can harbor all kinds of malicious code.

Tip of the day: If you go to a site and get a pop-up telling you that you need to update your Flash Player, or Quicktime player – do not click yes, or install!!! For anything such as this, always go to the source – for Flash, or Shockwave, go to Adobe.com to get the latest updates. For Quicktime, go to Apple.com. Once you have updated your player to the latest version, if you go back to a page and get a popup telling you that you need to update, you can be pretty sure that it is a scam to get you to download malware.

With this being the time of year when we get frequent Thunderstorms, there are a few prudent steps that should be taken to protect your computer and electronic equipment. First, you should definitely have a rated surge protector (one that is rated for electronics – remember a power strip is NOT a surge protector!). Also, people need to realize that even a surge protector cannot protect your equipment from everything. If you are in the middle of a really bad storm, the best protection is to turn off and Unplug your system.

I was at a business the other day, all the computer’s there are PC Workstations, connected to a server, except for one person who decided they wanted to use their Mac in the office. Talking to one of the worker’s there, I asked them – “what does that person use their Mac for?” They told me they honestly didn’t know. The Mac can’t run any of the business applications that are on the PC’s because they were written only for Windows, it has problems connecting to the Windows Network, the business was not going to pay for the few ‘Mac’ versions similar software that other computers were running (and even then there were only a few of those). In the end, they told me “I guess they just brought it in to ‘play’ with”

And yes, that is what this particular Mac is – really not much more than a visual toy. The sad thing is, it can’t even play most of the cool games that are out there. While Mac’s do have a few nice applications, and back in the day, they certainly were great for graphics and such, they just can’t cut it in the business world – not because of their hardware, but rather that it is just a matter of numbers – most businesses are running Windows on PC’s (or at least their workstations are mostly Windows – although many large scale enterprises are running Linux flavored servers). Even though the Mac market share has creeped up a bit over the past couple years, it will be a long time if ever before I would consider using one for a business computer.

Now if Apple were smarter, they would design an operating system that would run on a PC – but wait, then they couldn’t charge all that extra premium for their Mac hardware (which is exactly the same hardware as found in some PC’s that cost a lot less). If anyone is running a monopoly here it is Apple – if Microsoft suddenly went into the hardware selling business, and then made it so that Windows would only run on their ‘official’ hardware, there would be a shitstorm that would make previous EU scams seem like nothing.

Of course, for those who haven’t ponied up the $$$ for their own Mac, you can always buy an iPhone – just be careful with those text messages that can hack your phone!