You know how to search the internet to find a website. Many websites have a search function to help you find the page in their website that has the information you are looking for. But once you get to that page, how do you find the information you are looking for?

If a web page has a lot of information in it, you might want to search the current web page for a key word to find what you are looking for. Most people don’t know how to do it, but it’s pretty easy to do.

All you have to do is hit control-f. That is, hold down the control key on your keyboard (often labeled ctrl) and then hit the F key on the keyboard. That will bring up a search box for searching for key words in the currently displayed web page. You can then enter words or phrases and find them in the web page.

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Banner ads are usually rectangular advertisements at the top, bottom, or side of a website where an advertisement is shown. Don’t confuse these with pop-ups, although those are often advertisements too. Thanks to pop-up blockers built-in to most web browsers, pop-ups aren’t as big of a problem as they used to be.

Banner ads have never really bothered me that much. I don’t like it when they flash and I don’t like it when they talk, play music, or beep. But other than that, they never bothered me much. They do, however, slow down the loading of the web page you are visiting, but I have a fast internet connection and I always figured they allowed the website I was visiting to make some money thus keeping their service free to me.

But in the last few months we have seen several customer’s computers become infected from banner advertisements. One of my own computers became infected from a banner advertisement as well. Actually, using banner ads to infect computers isn’t anything new. They have been doing it for years. But that was mainly on questionable websites. Now it appears that some reputable websites have had some infected banner ads. So those of us that try to avoid the seedy websites are more at risk now.

To understand how a reputable website can have an infected banner ad, you have to understand how banner advertising works.

Let’s say Sam puts a website up on the web and wants to make money from advertisements. So he signs up with an advertisement provider. These advertisement providers get paid by companies to put their advertisements on websites.

The advertisement company gives Sam some code to plug into his website so that the advertising company can put a banner ad on his website. When someone visit’s Sam’s website, they see the content Sam put there, but they will also see the banner advertisement. The information in the banner advertisement is not actually on Sam’s website. It’s loaded from the advertising company’s website.  Each time someone visits Sam’s website, the banner advertisement can be different. The advertising company can change the ad anytime they want without contacting Sam.

Now that you have an idea how it works, here is how it’s abused. In some cases, the advertiser is corrupt and intentionally allows advertisers to place infected banner advertisements on their customers websites because it is very profitable. But reputable websites don’t use these advertising companies. What happens is that the advertising company’s website is hacked and an infected banner advertisement is put there so that any website using their service will show the infected banner advertisement.

When you go to a website and it has an infected banner advertisement, you may get a pop up message similar to this: 

If you get this, don’t click on anything in that pop-up message. Don’t even click Cancel. Some of these messages don’t even have Cancel. Use task manager to kill internet explorer. If you don’t know how to do that, just reboot your computer. However, you may not get any message. Depending on a lot of different factors, it may be possible for these banner ads to just infect your computer without popping up a message and tricking you.

That is why we are now recommending that all our customers use software to block banner advertisements. Before you install banner advertisement blocking software, there are a few things you should be aware of.

When you view a webpage that normally has banner advertisements on it, if you are blocking banners, the website may look funny or it might be confusing because part of it is missing. In addition, some non-advertising banners may be blocked. Another long-term drawback is that everyone blocked banner advertisements, a lot of free services on the web would go away or won’t be free anymore.

But these drawbacks are minimal when compared to the security of your computer. That’s why we recommend installing banner ad blocking software. There are commercially available ad blocking software packages you can purchase, but there’s no need to do that because there are some good one’s that are free.

If you use Internet Explorer, go to www.simple-adblock.com where you can download and install Adblock for Internet Explorer.

If you use Firefox, there is an addon that will block banner advertisements.  To install it, open Firefox and click on Tools and then click on Addons in the menu. In the search box, type adblock plus and click on the little magnifying glass.  By the way, if you can’t seem to find the option for searching for and installing new addons, then you probably have an old version of Firefox. If that’s the case, just go to getfirefox.com and download and install the latest version of Firefox. Once you have found the Adblock Plus addon that has the red stop sign with ABP in it, then click on it and then click the “Add to Firefox” button and install it. You’ll need to click the “Restart Firefox” button.

If you use Google Chrome, open Chrome and go to https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom and click the install button.

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We all get emails forwarded to us by friends and family that warn of a big virus coming or about a certain email that you shouldn’t open. One email claims that Microsoft will pay you money for each person you forward the email to. Any time you receive an email that has been forwarded to you by a friend, before you forward it to all of your friends, stop and check it out first to make sure it’s legitimate before  you send it out.

To check out an email to see if it’s legitimate, first, look at the email to see what’s unique about it. Then go to snopes.com and type in some unique keywords about the email and search for them. Then you can click on the correct search result and it will tell you if it’s true or false.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you get an email that says that U.S. cell phone numbers are going to be released to telemarketing companies and that to prevent getting a lot of telemarketing calls on your cell phone, you should register your cell phone on a do not call list by calling a toll free number from your cell phone. Go to snopes.com and enter “cell phone telemarketers do not call list” in the search box and click search. The top search result says “Cell Phone Numbers Given to Telemarketers”. Click on that search result and snopes.com will tell you what the claim is, it will tell you if the claim is true or false, it will give you examples of the email, it will also give you a history of the email.

Based on the information on snopes.com, you should be able to determine if the email is worthy of being forwarded to your friends and family.

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The taskbar is that bar that is usually at the bottom of your screen. It contains the start button, icons for running programs, and the time. It may also contain other things since it is pretty configurable.

We occasionally get a call from a customer telling us the task bar is in the wrong place and wondering how to get it back to the bottom of the screen. Many people don’t realize the task bar can be on any side of your screen. It can be on the top, bottom, left side, or right side of the screen.

What seems to be universal is how shocked everyone is at how easy it is to move the task bar. It’s so easy, in fact, people accidentally move it without realizing it.

So here’s how to move your task bar. First, the task bar has to be unlocked. To unlock your taskbar, simply right-click on an area of the task bar where there aren’t any icons.  You will get a pop-up menu. One of the options on the pop-up menu is “Lock the task bar”. If there is a checkmark next to “Lock the task bar”, then your task bar is locked and can’t be moved. If there isn’t a checkmark there, your task bar is not currently locked. Click on “Lock the task bar” to add or remove the checkmark.

Once you have unlocked your task bar, right click on a blank area of the task bar where there aren’t any icons, and drag the task bar to the side of the screen where you want it. Then let up on the mouse button and the task bar will now be on that side. Be sure and lock the task bar after moving it.

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When you hear the word RAID, you probably think of the bug spray. Us techno-geeks, however, think of Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. Originally, RAID was invented so that you could put together several small, less expensive disks and make them work as one larger disk which would cost more than the cost of all of the smaller disks combined. Later, RAID was expanded to include other uses. One of those uses is Mirroring.

To perform RAID mirroring, you need to identical hard drives. You set one up to the primary, and one to be the mirror. Everything that gets written to or changed on the primary also gets done to the mirror. The big advantage to mirroring is that if the primary hard drive fails, you can simply boot off the mirror and work like nothing bad every happened. Then  you come back later and replace the failed hard drive and put the mirroring back in place.

Many consider mirroring to be the best type of backup because it automatic and always up to date. However, RAID mirroring isn’t without its problems. For one, it slows down writes to your hard drive a little since it now has to write it to two hard drives instead of one. In addition, some implementations of RAID are buggy. Another problem with RAID is that many computers do not support RAID. Sure you can purchase a RAID controller to install in your computer, but they aren’t cheap.

Luckily, there is an alternative. Bounceback is a software product that kind of does the same thing as RAID mirroring, but without using RAID. With BounceBack, you still have to have a second hard drive, but that hard drive doesn’t have to be identical to your primary hard drive. In fact, it can even be an external hard drive which anyone can install.

BounceBack will create a mirrored copy of your primary hard drive on a secondary hard drive. You can set it to check every few minutes, or every hour, so it’s not always updating. That’s better for performance.  Just like RAID, if your primary hard drive fails, you can boot off of your secondary drive, and continue to work.

BounceBack comes in several different editions including BounceBack Essential and BounceBack Ultimate.  If you just want to mirror your hard drive, the cheaper BounceBack Essential will do the trick. If you want to do more fancy things like synchronize folders between computers, you’ll want to get BounceBack Ultimate.

If you are interested in BounceBack, click on the link below:

http://www.cmsproducts.com/products/backup_software/bounceback/default.html

One important note about all of this. When you backup to another hard drive, or any media, that stays in the same building as your computer, you are protecting yourself against hard drive crashes, but you aren’t protecting yourself against disasters. If your computer and your backup are in the same building and that building burns down, you’ve lost your data. Hurricanes, tornados, floods, war, or burglary can also rid you of your data along with their backups. This is why we recommend that you have a remote backup in addition to having a local backup. For more information about that, see our website at www.ct-cp.com.

By the way, Computer Troubleshooters is not affiliated with BounceBack or CMS products in any way. We just like their product!

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2009 was an interesting year in many ways. Recently, PandaLabs released some statistics about computer infections for 2009 and we thought you might be interested in some of them.

According to PandaLabs, more than 25 million new strains of infections were created in 2009! Would you ever have guess it would have been that high? That’s over 68,000 new infections a day!

66% of these new infections in 2009 were bank related trojan horses. These programs aim to steal your login and password information for your bank.  The next most popular type of infection in 2009 were the fake security programs which are often referred to as ScareWare. This is by far the most common infection we have seen here at Computer Troubleshooters so far in 2010, but it’s a more visible infection. Most people don’t know they have a banking trojan horse until money goes missing from their account.

In years past, infections usually got into a computer by taking advantage of security holes in Windows, or software running on Windows. This is often referred to as hacking a computer. However, in recent years, the trend has begun to shift away from hacking the computer and more towards hacking the person using the  computer. In other words, instead of trying to infect a computer by taking advantage of a security hole, they just try and trick the person using the computer into infecting their own computer.

If you are doing something on your computer and a window pops up, most people just quickly click on the OK button on the pop-up window without reading what it said just to get rid of it so they can continue what they were doing. It’s human nature, but it’s also dangerous.  If something pops up on your screen, take a few seconds to read what it says and be careful what you allow.

Another trick that has gained popularity in recent years is the phish. They send you an email trying to trick you to going to the website of a company you do business with. They provide a convenient link for you to click on to go directly to that company’s website. How thoughtful. Except that link doesn’t go to that company’s website. it goes to a fake website that looks just like it. So when you enter your login ID and password, you just gave them  the ability to go to the real website, login as you, and access your account.

Reading all of this, you might think that banking or shopping online is more dangerous than banking or shopping in person. But it’s not. At a restaurant, you give your credit card to a waiter who goes off with it. That waiter could be writing down all of the information from the card for all you know. Merchants and other companies often throw papers out in the garbage with your identifying information on them. Anyone can dive into their dumpster and get information about you.

We don’t want to scare you and we aren’t saying that the sky is falling. We are just saying, be careful. In addition to being careful, it’s still very important to make sure you maintain your computer. Make sure you have good security software. Make sure that software stays up to date. Make sure it doesn’t expire. Make sure you regularly update Windows with all of the latest security updates. Also make sure you update Flash, Adobe Reader, Java, and Silverlight with the latest updates. More detailed information is available on our website (www.ct-cp.com).

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In a recent newsletter we told you about our HOST plan. This week, we wanted to tell you about our REST plan. The REST plan is just like the HOST plan, except it doesn’t include the monitored security software or free infection cleanup.

 In case you were wondering, REST stands for Residential Enhanced Support Technology. It’s a great plan for residential customers, home businesses, small businesses too. And all at a great price! Just look at all of the features of the plan.

• Monitoring and Alerting
  Out software will monitor the health of your computer and alert us to any potential problems, often before they cause downtime.

• Priority service scheduling
  As a customer on a service contract, you will be given priority over non-contract customers.

• 25% discount on remote service
  If you need us to work on your computer remotely, you will receive a 25% discount.

• Remote access to  your computers on the REST plan
  You can remotely control your computer just like we do when we work on your computer remotely. That means that you can access and control your computer from any internet connected computer. Visiting someone and want to show them something on your computer? Or maybe you need a file or want to read your email. Just connect to and control your computer and you can do all of that and more.

That is a long list of great features. And the best part is that it only costs $10/month per computer. For one year on this plan, you would pay $120 to cover one computer. If you signed up for remote access to your PC with a service like GoToMyPC or LogMeIn, it would cost you just under $20 a month or $240 a year. This functionality is included with our REST plan which only costs $120 a year. In addition, if you had an issue requiring a 2 hour service call, it would cost you $195 normally, but if your computer was covered by our REST plan, it would only cost $120. That’s a savings of $75.

If you have questions about the REST plan or want to sign up, please contact us. By the way, our H.O.S.T. plan has all of the features of the R.E.S.T. plan plus it includes monitored security software and free infection removal. It’s $20/month per PC.

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Can someone spy on you using your own laptop’s webcam?

You’ve probably seen it on your favorite law enforcement TV show or movie and you may have heard about it in the news. Some bad guy spying on someone using the webcam and microphone on the victim’s laptop. You may be wondering if this is possible. The answer is that it is technologically possible, but not likely.

There are only two ways someone could do this. If you happen to be transmitting video and audio from your laptop over the internet, then it’s possible that someone could intercept it depending on what software you are using. The key word there is possible. But you should know that it’s extremely unlikely.

The other way someone could do this would be if they installed some software on your computer and set it up so that it allowed them to activate your webcam and microphone and view remotely. This could be achieved in one of two ways. Either they would have to have physical access to your computer to install and set up the software, or they would have to somehow infect your computer remotely by sending you an email, instant message, or something like that. Both of these cases are very unlikely.

If your child uses a school issued laptop, or you use a laptop issued to your by your employer, then this issue becomes much more complicated. It’s not your laptop. They own the laptop so they can configure it however they want. However, they don’t have the right to spy on you when  you are on your own time. Let’s not go there.

If you are worried about it, here are some things  you can do:

1. Make sure you have good, up-to-date, unexpired security software (we recommend Vipre or AVG). Everyone should do this on every computer.

2. If your laptop has a web cam and microphone and you never use them, disable them. Due to the wide range in web cam’s and microphones, we can’t include instructions for doing this here. In this case, we would recommend you give us a call so that we can do this for you.

3. Some laptops have a light next to the webcam that comes on when the webcam is activated. This is a good feature and allows you to know when the webcam is active. If you notice it is on and you aren’t using it, we recommend giving us a call so we can find out what’s doing it and stop it.

4. When you aren’t using the computer, close the lid half way (not all the way) so that the webcam is pointing down. That way, if it is on, it’s just getting a picture of your keyboard. If you close the lid all the way, the laptop will either shut down or go to sleep. it’s best to leave computers on and not shut them down when not using them. There are several reasons for this which I won’t go into right now due to space limitations.

To summarize, even though this is sensationalized in TV shows, movies, and in the news, you really don’t need to be worried about it.

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Computer Troubleshooters is proud to announce that once again, Franchise Business Review has chosen Computer Troubleshooters as the 6th best franchise and the #1 technology franchise!

If you or your business want the best computer service, give us a call!

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Several customers have contacted us about a news story regarding the F1 key on Windows XP systems. There have been stories on the news and emails circulating around that it is not safe to press the F1 key on a Windows XP system. The stories claim that pressing F1 on an XP system could infect your computer.

The truth is that there is a vulnerability in Windows XP systems with the F1 key (which is the standard help key in Windows). This vulnerability does not exist in Vista or Windows 7.

However, it’s not as scary as it sounds. The bottom line is that it’s safe to use the F1 key when running software on your Windows XP system, but if a Website or an email pops up a Window and tells you to press F1 for some reason, DO NOT DO IT! If you encounter one of these pop-ups and you can’t get rid of it and the only way out seems to be to hit F1, don’t do it. If you know how to use task manager, end all tasks called iexplore. If you don’t, just reboot.

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