Pensacola Computer Help Technoblog

The past few weeks have certainly been quite active in the technology world. From the much overhyped release of apple’s ipad to the pending release of Microsoft Office 2010, the press has certainly been filled with reviews, opinions and a lot of conflicting reports. There has also been an increase in Malware and virus attacks on the web, with more people’s computers falling victim to them – yes, even Apple computers are not immune to the bad things, and I had a good laugh when I saw that someone had hacked the new ipad less than 24 hours after its release.

I got a chance to play around with an iPad, and overall I was underwhelmed and not very impressed. Although the touch features do seem to be quite good (something that Apple is great with), the things that the iPad lacks are just too much to make it anything but an overpriced toy. the iPad’s lack of Flash support means that a lot of sites on the web are unviewable, as are the majority of video’s and web based games – of course Apple would be more than glad to sell you apps for games and such (while taking a nice 30% profit from the developers pockets).  Then there is the fact that there are no USB ports, no camera, and the Wifi and battery have some serious issues. Also, Apple has now announced that they are going to be even more godlike in their control of what you can do with the hardware that people spend so much money to ‘own’ – sure, you own it, but Apple decides what you can and can’t do with it and what you can and can’t run on it. Personally, I will wait to see what the HP Slate tablet and Dell’s new Android based tablets will do as they are much more likely to actually have a value in terms of usability.

Microsoft has officially RTM’d Office 2010 (RTM=Release to Manufacturing) and it is looking like a pretty good product – stay tuned for a review as soon as I get the final copy! Microsoft is currently offering a great deal where if you buy a copy of Office 2007 in the next few months, you are eligible to get a download copy of Office 2010 when it is released, see: http://www.microsoft.com/office/offers/home/2/ 

I have recently noticed a big bump in Pensacola computer malware infections, with fake Antivirus applications leading the pack. These kind of infections are what they call ‘ Scareware ‘ – malware that is designed to scare you into either buying a worthless product, or in some cases trying to get your credit card number for nefarious purposes, and I have seen quite a few of these infecting computers in Pensacola FL the past few weeks. These scareware infections are designed to look like common security applications and come with names like ‘ Antivirus 7 ‘ (which resembles AVG), ‘ Antivirus 360 ‘ (which resembles Norton’s 360).

Win Antivirus 7 Malware screenshot

One of the most common ways these applications are installed are when you are directed to a page, or get a popup warning you that you are infected with something nasty and to download a tool to help you  – the tool of course is the infection and it completely takes over your computer with even more false scary warning on how badly your machine is infected. The  real bad downside of these infections is that they open the door for even more infections that are even nastier in what they do. Many times if you catch these infections as soon as you get them, you can do a System Restore to help deactivate them. However, once they become rooted in your system they do all kinds of things to try to stop you from removing them like disabling system restore, disabling task manager, disabling your antivirus and also blocking you from downloading tools that can help kill them.

 For links to free and paid for antivirus/antispyware/antimalware software that can help protect you and remove some of these nasty infections visit Pensacola Computers Tech Page

Lately I have been seeing more computers infected with the Vundo Trojan, which as one of the ill effects constantly bombards users with Antivirus 360 messages that their computer is infected. This program should not be confused with Norton’s 360 (which in my opinion is almost as bad, but not malware). The infections it tells users are on their machines are bogus, and are often critical Windows Files. Of course they want you to buy their product in order to ‘clean’ your system, however what you buy is actually more spyware/malware. Unfortunately, in many cases if your computer is infected with this, there is a chance that you also have other infections, and while there are tools such as Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and Spybot S&D that can help remove some of these, they often cannot get everything (it is a hit or miss kind of thing).

The best thing of course is not to get infected in the first place, which can be done by keeping up to date Windows updates, a good antivirus, and usually a couple anti-spyware products, and of course not downloading anything that you aren’t sure of what it is. Many of these spyware products are installed when you install supposed ‘video codecs’ or by viewing infected videos and even music files (stay away from the file sharing sites). You can also be infected by malicious code that can attack your computer from social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook (never click on a link that you aren’t sure of, nor download any kind of ‘media viewer’ from these sites).

If you do get infected, you can try a system restore (hopefully you have a restore point that is before you got infected), as well as run full antivirus and anti-spyware scans. Many times it is best to run these scans in Windows Safe Mode (press the F8 key when the computer is first booting). Safe mode will load only essential drivers and services and often the antivirus/antispyware software will have better success at killing these pesty infections. Of course, before attempting any cures, it is a good idea to make sure you have critical data backed up (and make sure you scan your backups for viruses/spyware before putting it back on your system once it is cured!)