I was reading one of the SANS OUCH! newsletters today (which I have discussed in this post) and saw a nice little article with some telltale signs of a computer infection.  Initially, I thought to myself “How could anyone not know?”  But after reading the article and thinking about it for a little bit, I realized that most people probably just assume it’s the computer’s fault.  Whether it’s age, the slowness of Vista, running many programs at once, or a shortage of hard drive space, something else gets to be the scapegoat while the infection continues to worsen the machine’s condition.  Included below is the article from the newsletter (which can be found here).  Click to read more…

Being the computer nerd that I am and having written a book, created this website, and taught courses about better computer use like I have, you can imagine that I fill the role of personal tech support to many friends and family members.  I usually welcome the opportunity to help the people that I care about, though sometimes I definitely face challenges when helping them out.  This post describes the work I did on a notebook that belonged to my wife’s friend and colleague Bobbie.  Her problems consisted of serious infections, poor system performance, instability, and an excess of unneeded programs.  Click to read more…

One thing that every computer user should always have in mind when doing anything on their machine is security.  Yes, even you Mac maniacs and Linux lovers.  Windows is still the most heavily targeted operating system by malware, but as OSX and Linux gain popularity and marketshare new threats are being created to exploit any weaknesses in these platforms.  Simply put, no one is safe from attacks (unless you never install any programs or connect your machine to a network 🙂  Click to read more…