WyzGuys Tech Talk

Just a quick note that IBM is celebrating 50 years of mainframe computing.  So we have gone from mainframe and dumb terminals, to minicomputers and smarter terminals, to personal computers to client/server, and finally to “cloud services.”  In an interesting way that sort of gets us back to the beginning, where everything we want is located on the biggest “mainframe” of them all – the Internet.  But instead of dumb terminals we have smart everything, ubiquitous high-speed connectivity, and the ...

For the last eight weeks it has been my privilege to train twenty students in the fundamentals of computer and network support.  I have been working as an independent instructor in association with A Critical Path, CompTIA, and their non-profit foundation Creating IT Futures.  The eight weeks of instruction that I delivered is designed to provide lecture and hands-on instruction in computers, networks, protocols, operating systems, security, user administration, and the like.  All of the instruction ...

If you read my earlier article about the end of support for Windows XP, it was missing an important fact.  If you are running Microsoft Security Essentials on Windows XP, support for MSE is going to end for you as well.  This is from the Microsoft website:

As a result, after April 8, 2014, technical assistance for Windows XP will no longer be available, including automatic updates that help protect your PC. Microsoft will also stop providing ...

Windows XP is thirteen year old, which is old for dogs, cats, and really old for computers.  Evidently Windows XP systems still claim about 25% of the active operating systems worldwide.  Several of my business clients still have at least some Windows XP systems running on their network, and a decent percentage of my residential clients as well.  After thirteen years, official support for Windows XP ends Tuesday April 8, 2014.  So what does that mean?

Continue Reading →