GuruNews, Volume 10 Number 4, 2-18-10

Thu Feb 18 18:15:15 PST 2010

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Vol. 10, No. 4                           

2-5-10

1 Website roundup II 

2 Look out!

3 Google Buzz, patchwork, the sky is falling, WGA getting more disadvantageous   

4 Lightweight launcher

5 Email WAV

Friends send old jokes via email as if they were fresh and hilarious.  Unfortunately, they also send virus warnings and missing children/medical/crime alerts.  The problem is 99% of these are completely bogus.

www.snopes.com is the place to check these missives for accuracy.  Just visit the site, type a partial sentence from the email in question into the search field and, assuming it’s a hoax, you’ll get analysis of the message and a history of it’s spread over the Internet.  Some of the messages go all the way back to the days of the fax.

Also for email, sometimes you’ll receive a message from a friend with a really odd syntax, or maybe no message body at all.  These usually contain an attachment that is likely a virus.  Generally this indicates either your friend or someone who has your friend in their address book is infected, but it would be nice to know what it is.

That’s where www.virustotal.com comes in handy.  Just save the attachment (NEVER open it) and upload it to Virus Total.  Your sample will be scanned by a total of 39 different antivirus programs and the results will be posted for you to review.

It’s hard to beat www.fark.com/geek_ext, www.slashdot.org and www.theregister.co.uk. All three are purely tech related.   

Every morning I try to visit these three websites before 10:00.  This is especially important while at work, since all three carry information that may be helpful or even crucial to my job.

Just last week I caught an article on The Register about BSODs related to a recent Windows updates just minutes before encountering that error exhibited by a PC in for repair.  And just today I discover an article on SlashDot that features and explanation from Microsoft that blames the error on the presence of a rootkit infection.

Keep in mind that SlashDot and Fark feature article headlines and sometimes articles written by users and The Register is British, so all three may have some off-color language, but they are well worth the occasional chuckle or blush for legal, security, privacy and malware related content.

That out of the way, I want to again apologize for the dearth of newsletters and email responses over the last few weeks.  After last night’s update I was smothered with email and I had to ignore it for the moment to get the NL out tonight.

I’ll start wading through a few of them after I put this to bed and get caught up tomorrow, just be patient if you emailed me :)

Kevin Mefford, Editor

microdome at seidata.com (for now)

Terry Wise

www.ratland.com

Tech News of the Week

The Buzz was around Google as they announced their most current foray into social networking: Google Buzz:

http://www.google.com/buzz

A patch from Microsoft last week may be causing blue screens of death.  If you have automatic updates turned on, you may turn them to download only for now:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9155419/Windows_patch_cripples_XP_with_blue_screen_users_claim

Since we're in KY, it'd be remiss of me if I didn't mention the current crisis our state is in.  Colonel Sanders is missing:

http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2010/02/08/Col-Sanders-statue-stolen-from-KFC/UPI-77411265668934/

Microsoft is looking at beefing up anti-piracy measures in the Windows 7 operating system:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10451133-56.html

Daniel A. Williams

daniel at thepcgurus.com

Download of the Week

JumpTo provides a fast way to launch programs and open files without using much in the way of system resources. If you're after a no-frills customizable launcher, JumpTo may be the tool for you. It's free and you can read more about it here: 

http://tinyurl.com/pcgurus-jump 

Carlita Lupino

Cards57 at gmail.com

Email Question of the Week

Q:  I recorded some old record albums in my computer as WAV files and now would like to email them to my son. Do you know an easy way to do that?

A:  Since WAV files are rather large and most e-mail services won't allow for larger attachments or the quantity of them, I would suggest using a service like YouSendIt (http://yousendit.com) that will allow you to upload a file that's up to 100MB and it will send a link to the recipient so they can download it.  If the files are larger than 100MB, you may look at setting up a program called Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com) which when installed on both computers and logged into the same account, as soon as you copy a file into the dropbox folder, it will start syncing with the second computer.  You could move the files through a few at a time that way.  The other thing that you may do for either of the above solutions is to zip the files up and see if that brings the size of them down any.

Hope this helps and let me know if you need assistance with either of those solutions

Daniel A. Williams
daniel at thepcgurus.com

Contact info and legal stuff

If you have tech support questions or ideas and/or submissions for our newsletter please submit them by visiting www.thepcgurus.com and click on the “Email the Team” icon. 

Copyright 2001-2010 The PC Gurus, all rights reserved.  Publication, rebroadcast or storage is prohibited without prior consent, however you may freely forward this publication to friends as long as A) it is forwarded in its entirety and B) no fee is charged.

Information provided in this publication is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied.  Although the information provided is known to work on most systems, it may not work on ALL systems.  Make use of any information supplied at your own risk.

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