WyzGuys Tech Talk

Another story from a computer user, courtesy of Tech Support Guy.

“One of our teens had, unknown to us, not just one but four of those under her login on her dad’s computer. She knew it was illegal but, like her friends, did it anyway. One downloaded file carried a Trojan that turned off the antivirus file definition update feature. Ended up having a professional wipe off the hard drive to get rid of it.”

Nothing prevents the clever cyber-criminal ...

We received an email Monday that looked like it was from Intuit, and was about making sure that our QuickBooks account had the correct FEID (Federal Tax ID) number.  Clicking on the link would have downloaded a Backdoor Trojan Horse program from a Turkish web server. 

We recommend that you DO NOT CLICK ON  THE LINK.  If fact, any time you get an email from a service provider with a link, just skip the link and type the web address ...

I have wanted to have my own business since I was quite young.  I started my first business while going to the University of Minnesota back in 1973.  I started two other businesses before I finally started WyzGuys Computer and Network Support in 2001.  2001, for those of you who remember, was the LAST recession, the bursting of the Dot.Com bubble.  I was one of the tens of thousands of technology professionals who got pink-slipped that year, and knew that ...

One of my favorite features in Windows 7 can be found at the bottom of the Start Menu.  Click on the Start button, and look for the “Search Programs and Files” box.  Simply typing the name of your program or file in the box will open it.  once you start to use this method, you may give up rooting around in the Start Menu or the All Programs Menu forever.  This works the same as the old “Run” dialog box ...

Happy new year friends and clients!  Here are some technology resolutions for you to implement (finally!) in 2012.  

1. Backup your files– Let’s all do this one in January.  A good backup solution basically provides for 3 copies of your data:  The original copy on your computer, a local backup of your data on an external drive, flash drive, or another computer in your operations, and an automated remote backup over the Internet, such as Mozy, Carbonite, or WyzBackup, the one ...

For those of you who have had an experience with the Fake AV or Fake Anti-Virus scam, you know how annoying it is to be tricked into paying $40 to buy something that makes you computer worse.  Well the Federal Trade Commission just wrestled $8 million from Mark and Maurice D’Souza and their company Innovative Marketing for perpetrating this fraud on about $320,000 victims.

And the biggest surprise?  The FTC is actually sending $20 to each know victim from the settlement.  ...

We have been busy at WyzGuys over the last two weeks with an unusually large number of malware infections that have come into our shop.  in almost all cases, you have to help the malware get on to your machine by clicking on a link in an email, or getting it from a fake look alike web site at the end of the link, or from a legitimate web site that has some been infected, or from a legitimate web ...

Anyone remember Netscape?  The browser that started it all, but was quickly overtaken by Microsoft’s internet Explorer in 1998, and dominated the browser market with a 95% market share until 2004.  An article on Ars Technica revealed that total browser market share for Internet Explorer fell to 49.59% in October 2011.  Mozilla Firefox has a 21% share, and the Google Chrome browser in third place with a 16% share, and Apple’s Safari bringing up 4th place with a ...

When I got my Android phone it was obvious to me that I needed something to handle the hundreds of spam messages that were making finding important emails in my smart phone inbox an exercise in futility.  I went to the Android Marketplace and signed up for SpamDrain.  Nothing to download or install, they just grab you email messages and filter out the spam before it drops into your inbox.  What I didn’t realize was that it would also keep ...