This April first, don't be made a fool, update your security tool!

Windows users across the globe have been worried sick about the Conficker worm striking this Wednesday, April 1.

Those of you who've been reading my blog and newsletters for some time (over 5 years now can you believe it!) know that I'm not the chicken little, sky is falling type, but this time the threat level is, as they might say, Orange maybe even RED!

Anti-virus and security solutions providers like AVG, Microsoft OneCare, Symantec, Mcafee, F-Secure, Avast! and others are assuring us that a computer with up to date security and anti-virus software will be safe! But is yours?

What's this Conficker worm anyway?

The 'C' variant of Conficker worm set for release This wednesday, infects Windows machines (XP and Vista) and disables them from getting security updates or patches from Microsoft and other security software vendors. In essence it gets in and closes the door behind itself so others can't help.

While nobody knows what exactly Conficker will actually do, most likely, the worm will be used send SPAM, steal IDs and direct users to online scams and phishing sites.

So what can be done to protect a computer from this worm?

First of all, update your anti-virus software. Especially late on Tuesday March 31st, make sure that your anti-virus program is actually running when you start your computer on Wednesday the 1st.

Secondly, make sure that you have the latest Windows security updates. (http://update.microsoft.com)

Third It's not a bad idea to do a complete backup today or Tomorrow (Mon or Tues) and then leave that backup unconnected when you start your computer on Wednesday.

It's important to realize this threat can't be avoided simply by sticking your head in the sand, Changing the date of your system will not help avoid this worm. Keeping your computer shut off on Wednesday April 1 won't help either. The only way to get past this worm is by updating Windows and your anti-virus software.

This April first, don't be made a fool, update your security tool!

If you're still unsure if you're protected, if you're anti-virus is up to date, what version you have or if your computer is receiving updates from Microsoft properly, feel free to give us a call, we'd rather hear from you before, then after!

What do I do with an old computer?

For years I’ve been collecting computers and donating them to people and organizations that can use them.

There’s nothing I’d rather tell you than, “reformat, reinstall, and do various things to clear your hard drive before giving your computer to someone really needing the system" But from a small business and even a personal computer standpoint, I just can’t do it, Frankly because it's bad advice.

The steps required to properly dispose of all of the information on your computer properly are lengthy, sometimes complicated and mistakes can be made that put your personal and professional information at risk.

How many systems have I received from people that say their hard drive is clear and empty only to find that’s not the case? Way too many!

There’s just too much opportunity to do it incorrectly or partially and the risk can be huge.

My suggestion is to remove the hard drive from the system, then dismantle and destroy it.

It’s not what I would like to suggest, but it’s what I do with my recycled systems. It costs a little but buy a completely new hard drive.

The cost is nothing near what it could be if customer information got into the wrong hands.

Never ever give your hard drive away. Remove it, dismantle it, and destroy it.

If you're not sure how to remove, dismantle and destroy a hard drive drop us a line, we can walk you through the process or if you prefer the technology coach can properly dismantle and dispose of the system for you.

How To Convert DOCx Files?

A customer asked "One of my friends recently emailed a attachment which had a DOCx extension, I am not sure how to open this file, can you please help me out with this."

The answer to question is pretty simple, to open DOCx file you will need to either have Microsoft Office 2007 installed on your computer, or convert the document to a compatible format, that you can open in other Microsoft Office versions or convert the file to a HTML format itself.

If you are looking to convert DOCx files there are quite a few options, two of which include the MS Office compatibility pack and Zamzar, a online file and document converter, which we had talked about in a earlier post that told you How to Open or Convert DOCx files.

In addition to those options, one of them being Docx-converter.com which can convert a Microsoft Office .docx file into a simple html file. It strips out some of the formatting, but now supports bold, italic, and underlined text. Left, right, center, and justified alignment. Unicode characters.

Another option is to use a Freeware tool called DocX2RTF which will convert DOCx files to Rich Text Format (RTF) files.

All in all, you do have a lot of options to convert DOCx files so that you can view them in older editions of Microsoft Office, if you do not have Microsoft Office installed, you can try out one of the Free Microsoft Office Alternatives to view word documents.

Setting Up E-Mail Reminders in Outlook 2007

In Microsoft Outlook 2007, you can set up a reminder to respond to or follow up on e-mail messages. If you know your way around the Calendar and Tasks windows in Outlook 2007, you know that the Reminder message box appears when an appointment or meeting is about to take place or a task deadline is about to fall. Similarly, you can put the Reminders dialog box to work in regard to e-mail messages.

To set up a reminder to reply to or follow up an e-mail message, note these steps:

1. Select the message you need to be reminded about.

2. Click the Follow Up button and choose Add Reminder.

You see the Custom dialog box. You can also right-click a message and choose Follow Up --> Add Reminder to see the dialog box.

3. On the Flag To drop-down list, choose an option that describes why the e-mail message needs your attention later; or, if none of the options suits you, enter a description in the Flag To text box.

The description you choose or enter appears above the message in the Reading pane, and message window, as well in the Reminder message box.

4. Choose the date and time that you want the Reminder message box to appear.

By default, the Reminder message box appears 15 minutes before the date and time you enter. To change this setting, choose Tools --> Options. On the Preferences tab of the Options dialog box, enter a new setting in the Default Reminder drop-down list.

5. Click OK.

When the reminder falls due, you see the Reminder message box where you can click the Open Item button to open the e-mail message.

Similar features are available in previous versions of outlook as well as many other email programs, for details or instructions on creating your own out of office reminder or automated reply call The Technology Coach Today!

How to Configure Your Laptop for a Remote Desktop Connection

With Windows Vista, it’s amazingly easy to set up the Remote Desktop feature so that you can work between your laptop and desktop computers. Keep in mind that you should use Remote Desktop only in a secure environment — say, over a local network and not over the Internet.

Set up a PC for Remote Desktop

You can configure either the desktop or laptop computer for remote access; either way works fine.

1. Choose Control Panel from the Start menu, and open the Control Panel's System icon.

2. In the list of tasks on the left side of the window, choose Remote Settings.

   

   If a User Account Control (UAC) dialog box appears, click the Continue button.

3. In the System Properties dialog box, on the Remote tab in the Remote Desktop area, choose the item labeled Allow Connections from Computers Running Any Version of Remote Desktop.

4. Click OK, and close the Control Panel window.

That's it. The computer is now open to sharing its desktop remotely with another computer on the network.

Create an exception for the Windows Firewall

For the Remote Desktop to work, you have to create an exception for the Windows Firewall.

1. Choose Control Panel from the Start menu, and open the Control Panel's Windows Firewall icon.

2. In the Windows Firewall window, click the link that says Change Settings.

   

   Click the Continue button if prompted by a User Account Control warning.

3. In the Windows Firewall Settings dialog box, click the Exceptions tab.

   

4. Scroll through the list to find the item called Remote Desktop, and place a check mark by that item.

5. Click the OK button, and then close the Windows Firewall and Control Panel windows.

What you can do with Remote Desktop

When the remote desktop is set up and connected, what you see on your laptop’s screen is actually the display of another computer on the network. Moving the mouse on your laptop moves the mouse on the other computer, and ditto for the keyboard. It's just as though you're sitting at that computer, when you’re actually working things from a remote location.

The remote desktop can be displayed on a full screen or in a window. In Full Screen mode, a strip appears across the top of the screen and acts as a sort of window control. In Window mode, the remote desktop appears in a window on your laptop’s screen.

Sadly, you cannot copy files and folders between the remote system and your own computer by dragging things into and out of the remote desktop's window. The Remote Desktop Connection is more of a control and access feature than a file exchange utility.

For information on a more feature right software that allows for both copying of files and folders and provides the security needed to use tools such as this over the internet, call The Technology Coach today!

12 Ways to Get the Most from Your BlackBerry Smartphone Camera

The latest BlackBerry^® smartphones come equipped with cameras that include a digital zoom function, a built-in flash, and lighting options. They're perfect for capturing spur-of-the-moment events. In this issue of BlackBerry^® Connection^®, we show you how to take better pictures—and avoid common mistakes—plus provide some additional tips on how to organize, share, and edit your images.

1. Get Closer
While you can capture panoramas with your camera, you'll take the best possible photos by getting close to your subject matter. Go ahead and take a few extra steps toward what you're shooting—the images you capture will be much more engaging.

Don't worry about getting an entire person—or animal—in the frame. In the picture on the right, we got in close and captured an image with a much different feel than the one on the left.

2. Hold Steady
Camera shake is the primary reason for blurry photos, whether you're using a cameraphone or a digital SLR. To capture a crisp, clear image, hold your smartphone with two hands or use one hand to brace your arm. If possible, hold your smartphone on top of a desk or other object to reduce camera shake.

The photo on the left was taken by holding the smartphone with one hand; by bracing the phone against a table, we were able to substantially reduce camera shake and capture a much sharper image.

3. Be Patient
There's often a short delay between the moment you depress the shutter button and when a photo is taken. Be sure not to move your smartphone during this time; doing so will result in a blurry image.

4. Use the Flash
Taking good photos is easy on a bright clear day, but don't let that keep you from snapping pictures in less-than-ideal conditions. Your smartphone camera's built-in flash will even out lighting in partial shade and low-light situations. If you're not sure which setting is best, take multiple snapshots—deleting the ones you don't want from the memory card is simple.

Your smartphone's built-in flash works well in tight, enclosed spaces. When in doubt, take multiple photos, some with the flash and some without.

5. Snap Photos as Reminders
While we typically take pictures in order to put them in an album or post online, you can also use your BlackBerry^® smartphone camera as a way to create visual reminders as you go about your day. Snap pictures of a phone number on a storefront, a restaurant you've been meaning to go to, or a gift you want to purchase at a later date. Shopping and can't decide between two items? Send a photo to your best shopping advisor.

Use your smartphone to snap pictures of things you have to do—and never again forget an important event!

6. Stay Organized
Don't forget to add a descriptive file name to your images; image_0005 won't be of much help when you want to search through your photos. You can also create folders within your BlackBerry^® smartphone to organize your pictures by location, theme, or content.

7. Share Your Work
Photos are meant to be shared. To get your photos out into the world, download and use one of these mobile applications for BlackBerry smartphones^{1, 2, 3, 4} including,

MySpace^®: Download »
Facebook^®: Download » | Learn how to use Facebook, click here »
Flickr^TM: Download » | Learn how to use Flickr, click here »

8. Use a Photo Editor
Don't worry about composing the perfect image. Smartphones are great for capturing surprising, unexpected moments. Crop your picture, fix shadows, and adjust contrast with the help of a free photo editor. Flickr.com, for example, includes a straightforward image-editing program on the site that will improve your images with just a few button clicks.

The photo on the left doesn't capture the car's true color, but with a simple photo editor you can make your images appear just as they should.

9. Experiment with White Balance
The colors you perceive with your eyes are different than those captured by the sensor in your camera. White balance will help you better re-create what would be considered natural colors. By default, your camera will automatically adjust white balance; however, if you prefer to have more control over your images, select White Balance from the Camera Options menu and choose the option that's closest to the lighting condition you are in. The best way to learn more about white balance is to experiment. Try taking a photo of the same object with different white balance settings.

10. Remove Color—And Add Drama
By switching to black and white or sepia, you'll create a dramatically different feel with your photos. You change your color image to black and white or sepia in the Camera Option menu prior to taking a picture.

By choosing to shoot in sepia rather than color, we drastically changed the mood this stand of trees evokes.

11. Tag Your Location
By enabling geotagging¹ from within the Camera Options menu, you automatically embed location information within an image file. With geotagging, you can easily keep track of where you've been. It's a great way to recall locations in vacation photos, and many photo-sharing sites making it easy to discover photos based on geotag data⁵.

12. Increase Image Quality
To get the very best photos, adjust the camera's Image Quality setting to superfine. Increasing image quality increases the file size of a photo, but by using a micro SD^TM memory card, you can augment the storage capacity of your smartphone. For detailed information on how to do this, go to the Tips & Tricks section of this issue of BlackBerry Connection.

Because we are shooting at maximum image quality, we were able to capture the texture of this plant.

Even The Best Hard Drives Die. Do You Back Up?

Businesses of all sizes are witnessing an explosion in the volume of data they hold. Whether it is the result of the Internet, email, or increasingly heavy and media-rich application software, there is a massive growth in the volume of data all around.

Conservative estimates place data growth at approximately 80% per year. Data is increasingly being recognized as one of the real assets of a company, and losing this data would cause severe damage to any organization.

Data loss can be very costly, particularly for organizations in the small and medium business (SMB) market where the difference between survival and closure can rest on the ability to recover from a disaster. At the very least, critical data loss will have a financial impact on companies of all sizes:

Recreating Sales and Marketing data can take as much as 19 days at a cost of over 17 Thousand dollars.

Accounting data can date 21 days and over 19 thousand.

Engineering data, a whopping 42 days and over 98,000!

The financial impact on a company is a combination of loss of business, low productivity, legal action, and the cost of re-creating data. A study showed that the cost of re-creating just 20 MB of data can be extensive!

Now imagine that most Small businesses have approximately 500MB of raw data per employee within that organization.

Your best solution, is a solid, reliable and tested backup. Whether that backup is an online storage site, a hard drive to hard drive copy or a CD/DVD/Tape based solution, some backup is better than none at all.

Pickup the phone and call the technology coach today, put the right systems in place to protect yourself from data loss, because an ounce of prevention, is worth many pounds of cure!

PayPal offers no cost online course on email scam avoidance.

These days, fake emails are getting more sophisticated, so it can be tough to know whether an email is real or not. But PayPal is here to help. Test your knowledge with the Fight Phishing Challenge to learn what to look for and how to avoid a scam.

and see if you're a....

Figuring Out How Spammers Get E-Mail Addresses

Spammers employ a variety of methods to acquire e-mail addresses. Some methods take advantage of the e-mail addresses readily available on the Internet, whereas others employ different levels of trickery, from harvesting to outright stealing.

Harvesting from the Internet

Spammers (and their assistants) utilize a technique called harvesting to acquire e-mail addresses. While harvesting requires a lot of bandwidth, it is ingeniously simple: Simply download the right pages from select Web sites and extract the e-mail addresses that are there for the picking. Some of the tools and sources employed in harvesting e-mail addresses from the Web include the following:

• Web spiders: Spammers employ Web crawlers and spiders that harvest e-mail addresses from Web sites. It's common for Web sites to include mailto: URLs as well as unlinked user@domain addresses. Put your e-mail address on a Web site, and you're spam bait.

These spiders are not unlike the spiders and Web crawlers used by Yahoo, Google, and others that scan the Internet's Web sites in order to keep Web search indexes fresh. Except that e-mail address harvesting spiders are up to no good. And where do these spiders get domain names? With over 90 million .com domains in existence, it's easy enough to just guess domain names in order to come up with quite a few.

• Newsgroups: It's a straightforward task to harvest e-mail addresses from Usenet newsgroups: Just pull in a big newsfeed and extract the e-mail addresses with a simple shell or Perl script. Newsgroup volumes are still increasing exponentially — at a rate of at least several gigabytes per day. This means lots of e-mail addresses are there for the taking. Any spammer with enough bandwidth can slurp up all those bits and just sift out the e-mail addresses.

• Groups, blogs, and discussion boards: Yahoo! and Google have their groups and mailing lists, many of which make their members' e-mail addresses available. There are thousands of blogs and discussion boards out there, too, that contain easily acquired e-mail addresses.

• Test messages: In this method, spammers send test e-mails to recipients whose addresses they simply guess — so-called test e-mail messages sent to addresses like service@, info@, test@, marketing@, security@.

Spammers at one time could reliably conclude that, if they receive no "bounce-o-gram" back from the domain, that the e-mail address must be legit. This is because e-mail servers used to routinely send nondelivery receipts (NDRs) back to the sender of a message sent to a nonexistent address. But that isn't necessarily so any more: More servers are opting to stop sending NDRs.

• Unsubscribe links: Many spam messages include an opt-out or unsubscribe link so that the recipient can request not to receive more spam. However, often the real purpose of unsubscribe links is to confirm a valid, active e-mail address.

• Malware: Spammers sometimes use Trojan horses, viruses, and worms to extract e-mail addresses from individual users' computers. If mass-mailing worms can extract the contents of a user's e-mail address book for the purpose of propagating spam, then it's going to be easy to perform the same extraction and simply send the list back to the hacker's lair. This would probably be easier, in fact, because this activity is far less likely to be detected than a mass-mailing worm.

• Unsubscribe requests: A good number of spam messages contain "unsubscribe me" links that a user clicks to opt out. However, many spam operators actually continue to send spam to e-mail addresses submitted to "unsubscribe me" links. When a user submits such a request, the spammer knows that the address being sent is a valid e-mail address. Do you think they'll actually stop sending spam to a known valid address? Not on your life!

Buying and stealing addresses

Among spammers and e-mail address brokers, e-mail addresses are a traded and sold commodity. If you know where to look, you can purchase CDs and downloads containing e-mail addresses by the hundreds of thousands or millions.

And of course, everyone has heard the stories of Web sites that collect your e-mail address and promise not to sell it (ha!). But they sell, trade, or give away e-mail addresses anyway, even when their privacy policy says they won't. A few high-profile companies have been prosecuted and/or fined for this practice.

Business and service provider e-mail lists are also stolen and sold to spammers. In mid-2004, a former AOL employee was charged with stealing 90 million screen names and 30 million e-mail addresses from AOL and selling them to a spammer for $100,000. This is not an isolated case, but it is a noteworthy one because of the size of the heist.

How Advertising Might Fit In with Your Blog Plan

Putting an ad or two on your blog is an easy way to earn some money doing something you enjoy. Advertising on a blog has benefits. The first thing to do is decide whether your blog is meant for an advertising campaign.

You should think about a few things before diving into advertising on your blog.

• Does your blog have a design that’s ready for ads?

• Does your blog software support the advertising system you’ve chosen?

• Will advertising earn you any money?

• Will your audience put up with ads?

You can use several kinds of advertising methods to turn a blog into a place where you can make a tidy profit. A multitude of advertising companies offer bloggers simple solutions to monetize Web sites. Most of these programs work in similar ways but have unique delivery methods.

Advertising programs range from text-only ads to flashy animations and even full-page advertisements that really get your readers’ attention! As a blogger, choosing an advertising program that works for your audience can make the difference between an increase in readers and turning off your existing traffic.

You can deliver ads to a blog audience in four different ways. Additional methods are available, but most don’t work as well in a blog. The most popular advertisement formats are

• Text-based ads: These ads are text-only and feature a link or links to the advertiser’s Web site or service. Each ad is very plain, and most advertising systems limit your ability to customize their look and feel.

• Graphical banner and button ads: Banner and button ads can be static or animated images. These ads usually have pre-set sizes but can be customized to fit your blog design.

• RSS ads: Ads are a new addition to RSS feeds; as the format has taken off with the public, advertisers have jumped on the bandwagon. Such ads can be text or images and are linked to the advertiser’s Web site straight from your RSS feed.

• Pop-up ads: Pop-ups tend to be everyone’s least favorite type of ad, but oddly enough, pop-up ads that open in a new window are still quite successful at getting people to click an advertiser’s Web site. The readers might be fairly irritated by the time they get to the site, but they do click.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau makes recommendations each year about ad sizes and standards. You might find the recommendations useful in planning for ads.