Wow, what a year! It doesn’t seem two minutes ago that we were complaining about how hot it was – now we have the log burners on and are sitting shivering under the blankets at night! This month, given its a New Year I thought it might be nice to review what we covered last year in our monthly articles. Read this entire article »
There, I said it – three times in fact! It’s simply the most important thing that you could be doing when using your computer. Every day I see people who have lost precious photographs, important documents and music collections, all becase they didnt take the time to back up their data.
The story is often the same, “I didn’t have time”, “I didn’t know what to do” or “I was going to do it next week” and the concequence is often the same, i.e. the loss of some or all of your important or personal data. Read this entire article »
I was recently asked to give a talk to the association of retired police officers (ARPO) about Internet security i.e. Anti Virus and all that sort of stuff – they must have been stuck for someone interesting to talk to them so in a fit of panic asked me to!
Anyway, in doing research for the talk I came across a very interesting fact – AVG is no longer the best free antivirus out there – and I thought you should know about it.
I regularly review statistics on anti-virus products in an attempt to keep up with current trends and to offer my customers the best advice that I can. Every time that I have checked over at least the past 8 years, either AVG or Avast have been the best free antivirus products with Kasperskey usually topping the list of products that you have to pay for. Well this month to my suprise there is a new guy that has knocked AVG and Avast from the top free positions – its name is Panda antivirus. Read this entire article »
A reader in the UK forwarded me an article from the BBC this week – it relates to the Crypto Locker virus that we have dicsussed a few times before.
It seems that some security experts have managed, by luck really, to gain access to the encryption key used to encrypt unfortunate victims data, enabling them to use this information to help other victims decrypt their own data!
If you are unfortunate enough to have been affected by the Crypto virus and still have your encrypted data, you can visit the portal at www.decryptcryptolocker.com and use the information there to gain access to your data again. The portal asks for your email address and one of the encrypted files. It then uses the information found by the security team to generate a recovery program (an antidote) that will repair all of your infected files – great stuff! Read this entire article »
Ok, so unless you have been living under a rock for the last few weeks, you will have heard about this bug (also referred to as SSL or secure certificates). A bug is a mistake in the programming code that has been around for over 2 years. This is the first thing that you should be aware of. The problem has already been around for over 2 years, so although it’s now receiving a lot of publicity, the chances are that if it was going to affect you then it would have already done so. Read this entire article »
On the 8th April this year Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP (and Office 2003) – that is, if you read the popular press and believe everything that the “guy down the pub that knows computers” says then your whole computing world will end. Famine will sweep across your hard drive, a plague of locusts may well emerge from your CD ROM drive and every single hacker in the whole world will go to town on your bank account details. Or will they? Read this entire article »
Sounds obvious really doesn’t it, but I have recently visited a number of customers who didn’t realise that this process wasn’t automatic, so I thought I would write about it this month and just highlight the pitfalls and what you should do / expect when paying for the AVG anti-virus product.
As many of you know AVG have a free product that is available to download and use to protect your computer from nasty’s however every year they release a new free version and although it’s not mandatory it’s a good thing to update to the latest version to stay protected – and its free so why wouldn’t you? Read this entire article »
If I had a euro for the number of times I have been asked whether Google, one of the world’s biggest companies (worth over $289 billion) was closing in November, well I would be at least a decent meal with a nice bottle of wine better off! Read this entire article »
Last month, on the 4th September, AVG released their latest instalment of their free anti-virus program; this one is called AVG Free 2014 (how do they come up with these version numbers?!!).
Anyway the new version is very similar in look and feel to the old version (AVG free 2013) so you shouldn’t have any difficulty using it. Read this entire article »
This month we look at little tips and tweaks, things that we all have on our computers but that you might not realise even exist.
You may not be aware, but a new icon appeared with Windows 7 to allow the desktop to be quickly shown whenever needed. Read this entire article »