When you purchase software, you either purchase it on CD or DVD, or you download it from the Internet. No matter how you get the software, it’s important to keep your media, purchase information, and licenses in a safe place where you can find them because you never know when you might need to reinstall the software.

The hard drive on your computer might fail or you might get a new computer. In those cases, you’ll need to reinstall the software. And for that, you’ll need your media, order info, and license info. When you purchase software on a physical media, it’s pretty easy to save. Keep all of that kind of stuff together in a box, bag, file folder, large envelope, or drawer.

But when you purchase online and download software, it’s not quite as strait forward. I used to print out order info and license info, burn the software to a CD and put it all in a file folder in the filing cabinet. But I don’t do that anymore. Now I have a folder on my hard drive called Software. Under that, I create a sub-folder for each piece of software I purchase. I put everything that has to do with that software purchase in that sub-folder.

When I purchase software and download the installation file from the internet, I copy it into that sub-folder. After I have placed my order, I save it to a text file and save that in that same folder. To do that, all you have to do is click on File and then Save As in your browser. Choose a file type of text. Select the correct sub-folder where you want to save the information and give it a name. Then click OK to save it. There may be some extra information in the text file from the web page, but all of the information you need is there too. If I get an email for the order, I save that into the same folder. The same procedure for saving the email as a text file is pretty much the same as it was for saving the order information.

Saving your information like this only works if you back that information up. My software folder is backed up every night so even if my hard drive fails, I can still get the information.

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When you shut down your computer it closes all of your programs gracefully, exit Windows and turns off your computer. If you want to turn on your computer again, you have to press the power button to turn it on.

A restart or reboot does all of the same things as a shutdown, except that it doesn’t turn off your computer, instead, it starts Windows back up.

When you shut down or restart Windows XP, it would pop up a little window for each program that wasn’t closing as fast as Windows thought it should. The little window would give you the option to “End Now” or “Wait”.

With Windows 7 or Windows Vista, you will instead see a black screen that tells you it’s waiting for programs to close down before it shuts down. It’s supposed to have a list of programs that it’s waiting on, but sometimes that list is blank. This screen has two buttons. One labeled “Force shut down” and the other labeled “Cancel”.

What is happening is that Windows has told all of the programs running that Windows is going to shut down. All of these programs should then exit normally and Windows waits for them to do so. However, sometimes a program can’t shut down because it is waiting for input from the user. For example, let’s say you had a Microsoft Word document open and you had made changes but hadn’t saved those changes. If you try to exit the program, it will ask you about saving the document. When you shut down and windows tells Microsoft Word to exit, Microsoft word will ask you about saving the file. But you can’t see it because of the screen I described above. In that case, you would click the “Cancel” button. Save the file, or exit without saving, and then shut down again.

Actually, the best thing to do is close all programs yourself before you shut down or restart. That way you won’t run into these problems.

The “Force shut down” button should only be used if your computer hangs on this screen for more than a minute or so. In general, it’s best to wait for Windows to close down on its own.

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Several of our customers have accidentally infected their computers recently by opening up SPAM email. These most recent infections have come from emails claiming to be from UPS/FedEx/DHL. Open the attachment and you have just infected your computer. Another one we’ve seen recently is the one that talks about problems with your ACH transfer. Again, open the attachment and you have just infected your computer. Other fake emails to watch out for include email from the IRS, greeting cards, and many other companies.

With all of this going on, we thought it was high time we reminded you of our recommendations for email users.

Guidelines for reading email

1. Turn off reading pane or preview.

2. Don’t even open an email if you suspect it’s SPAM.

3. Don’t click on any links in any email, even if you think it’s legitimate.

   Spammers are good at making their emails look official. Even if the email is from someone you know, it could be there computer is infected and sending out email to try and infect other computers. If the email appears to be from a company you do business with, instead of clicking on the link in the email, just manually go to that company’s website and login and take care of your business that way.

   Sometimes you really have to click on a link in an email. If you have to click on a link in an email, before clicking on it, hold the mouse pointer over it. A little pop-up will come up and show where that link really goes. Look at that link to make sure it really goes where it says it does. For example, let’s say you have purchased items at Amazon.com and you got an email that looks like it’s from Amazon.com saying that there is a problem with your order. Let’s further say that they provide a link in the email that takes you directly to your order so you can resolve the problem.

   Hold the mouse pointer over the link and look at where it says it’s really going. These website addresses can be long and complicated, but if you know how to break them down, it’s really pretty easy. It’s basically broken down into two parts.

   Hold your mouse pointer over the link below. Don’t click! Just hold your mouse over it. You will see a little box pop up and show you where the link really goes. Here’s the link:

   http://www.amazon.com

   You should have noticed that what popped up in the box was the same as what is listed in the email. Now hold your mouse pointer over the link below.

   http://www.amazon.com

   Notice that although it looks like the link goes to amazon.com, when you hold the mouse pointer over it, you see that it really goes to walmart.com. These are the types of tricks spammers use to trick you into clicking on links.

   The links above, however, are very simple links. Now consider something more complicated which is the type of thing you would see in an email. I have disabled the link below, so you can’t hold your mouse pointer over it or anything. But look at the link:

   http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Fire-Amazon-Tablet/dp/B0051VVOB2/ref=amb_link_358864022_2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_r=1BQ3KB86EMTSCB48BSRD&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1331677602&pf_rd_i=507846

   Don’t freak out on me. It’s long and overwhelming, but it’s actually pretty easy to check. They will all start with http://, so you can ignore that. The next section is the name of the website which will consist of words separated by periods. Read that until you get to the first slash (/). In our example, the last thing you see before that slash is amazon.com. That means it really goes to amazon.com. What you have to watch out for in SPAM is that they often try to make a link look legitimate by tricking you. Look at the link below which I have modified.

   http://www.amazon.com.de/Kindle-Fire-Amazon-Tablet/dp/B0051VVOB2/ref=amb_link_358864022_2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_r=1BQ3KB86EMTSCB48BSRD&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1331677602&pf_rd_i=507846

   At a glance, you will still see amazon.com and you might think it’s really going to amazon.com. But look again. What matters is what’s closest to that first slash after http://. And in this case it’s amazon.com.de. This link doesn’t go to amazon.com. It goes to amazon.com.de.

   So again, avoid clicking on links, but if you want to click on a link, hold the mouse pointer over it first to see if it really goes where it says.

4. Don’t open any attachments.
   Again, even if the email is from someone you know, it could be there computer is infected and sending out email to try and infect other computers.

5. Use Anti-Spam software
   If you use an email client like Outlook Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, Incredimail, Eudora, or any other email client, don’t rely on the rinky dink junk mail filter that is part of that email client. Putting someone on a block list won’t stop SPAM from getting in your inbox because spammers are always changing where they send SPAM from.

   Many Internet Security Suites include Anti-Spam software. There are some free Anti-Spam packages that work well, but they only work with certain email clients. If you use Outlook or  Outlook Express, then we recommend using a free product called SpamBayes. You can get it at http://Spambayes.sourceforge.net.

   If you use Thunderbird, then we recommend ThunrderBayes. It’s SpamBayes that has been converted to work with Thunderbird. You can get ThunderBayes at pieces.openpolitics.com/thunderbayes.

   TIME OUT! OK, earlier we said don’t click on links in email and then we put links in our email. It seems contradictory. Maybe it is. Here’s the rub. We could tell you about SpamBayes and then just tell you to Google it to find it. But there are lots of fake websites out there. If we tell you to Google something and to download it and install it, you might actually end up going to a fake website that looks like that product and what you end up downloading and installing is an infection. So it’s like we can’t win either way. So we include links. We know our links are safe to click on, but you have to be careful because the email might not actually be from us. So you can check the link like we showed you earlier in this email, or you can Google it and then compare it to what we told you to make sure you are going to the right place. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

   We haven’t found a free Anti-Spam product for the other email clients. If you use Windows Mail (Vista only), Incredimail, or Eudora, we recommend that you switch to Windows Live Mail. And for Windows Live Mail users, we recommend Spambully.  As I said, it’s not free, but they do have a free 2 week trial so you can try it. And Spambully is reasonably priced at $29.95/year.

When sending email you don’t want your email to get marked as SPAM. And you want to make it easy for the people you are emailing to identify your email as not SPAM. You also don’t want to annoy those you send email to because if you do, they won’t even bother to open future emails from you. They might even block  you.

So with that said, here are some guidelines for sending email.

1. Use a descriptive subject.
   Never leave the subject blank. Always make the subject as descriptive as possible, but not too long.

2. Don’t use all capital letters.
   Writing in all capital letters is the internet equivalent of shouting. Don’t shout at people. People don’t like to be shouted at. And it makes you look like an internet novice.

3. When you forward email, clean it up.
   When you forward an email, edit the email and clean out all of the junk so that only the important part is in the email. Leaving all of that stuff in there not only makes it easier for people to read, it saves bandwidth on the internet.

4. Remove nested emails when forwarding
   Depending on your email settings, when you forward an email, it may include the email in-line, or it may put the email in as an attachment. When several people have forwarded an email as an attachment, you get emails within emails. The receipt has to keep clicking on attachments several time drilling down until they reach the subject matter of the email.

   The best way you can handle this is to use Copy and Paste to get the email content you want. Paste it in your email and delete those attached emails.

5. Don’t be a spammer
   When sending or forwarding email, don’t just send it to everyone in your address book. Think about. Think about who would be interested in this particular email and only send it to those people.

   Don’t forward more than one or two emails a day to your friends. If you send out too much email, people will stop opening your emails.

6. If you use an email signature, don’t put graphics in it.
   Having graphics in your signature increases the likelihood of your email being identified as SPAM. In addition, many email clients block images for security reasons, so any graphics in your signature will likely not be displayed anyway. And images are much bigger than text. That means they take up more bandwidth to transmit, and more storage space in your sent folder and in your recipient’s inbox.

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According to StatCounter’s worldwide data, as of November 2011 Firefox and Chrome are now more popular than IE8. Chrome has nearly 25% of the market. Firefox has about 24% while IE8 is at 22%. Of course, when you add all versions of IE together, IE has 38.5% of the market, so Chrome and Firefox still have a little way to go to totally beat IE. These statistics, however, are a lot like polls. The numbers quoted above are from StatCounter. But according to NetMarketShare, IE has 49%, Firefox has 21%, and Chrome has 17%.

You may be wondering how these statistics are collected and why they would differ so much. The agency’s that collect the data have some code on a bunch of websites. When someone visits that website, it can see what browser is being used and it saves that information. The service that collects statistics from the most websites is considered to be the most accurate. NetMarketShare collects data from over 40,000 websites. That’s a lot. But it’s a drop in the bucket compared to StatCounter’s over 3,000,000 websites. That’s why StatCounter’s statistics are the ones the media always quote.

On a related note, if you use Chrome or Firefox, you probably know that they automatically update themselves. You can turn that feature off, but by default, they update themselves automatically. IE, however, doesn’t. It’s updates have always come through Windows Update which is under more control by the user. That’s changing though.

It almost seems like Google is taking over the world. Google Chrome is on the fast track to become the most popular browser. Their smartphone operating system, Android, is more popular than the apple’s iPhone now. They are hands down the most popular search engine with 91% of the market. Their closest competitor is Yahoo with just under 4%. Google has just entered the social media market with Google+, but they have a long road ahead of them to beat Facebook which has 63% of the market. Twitter only has 5%.

And while we are talking about statistics, we reported to you in a previous newsletter that Windows 7 is now more popular than Windows XP. As of November 2011, Windows 7 was at 41%, XP was at 38%, and vista was at 11%. In case you are wondering, Apple’s Mac OS was at 7%.

XP is declining rapidly. And that’s a good thing. Not that XP isn’t a good operating system. It is. But Microsoft will stop releasing security updates for Windows XP in April of 2014, so most everybody needs to be off XP by then because at that point, the risk of using XP on the internet will begin to rise.

Vista is declining very slowly. Windows 7 is rising rapidly. Mac OS is rising very slowly (about 1% in 2011).

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For quite some time, Vipre has been one of our recommended security packages. Recently, there have been some changes in the Vipre world that we thought you might want to know about. There used to be two versions of Vipre. They were Vipre and Vipre Premium. There are still two versions, but their names have changed. The two versions are now called Vipre Antivirus and Vipre Internet Security.

The Internet Security version of Vipre adds Anti-Spam, a Firewall, and web protection. For most people, the firewall built-in to Windows is plenty good. There is a free utility that you can download that gives you similar web protection. And, most people don’t want to use Anti-Spam software. And those who read their email on websites like yahoo.com, Anti-Spam software won’t work with that anyway. So although Vipre Internet Security is a good product, we general recommend Vipre Antivirus for most of our customers.

Recently, version 5 of Vipre was released. With this new version, the user interface for Vipre was totally redesigned. And Vipre got a new icon as well. With all of these changes, I bet you can guess what else changed. That’s right; the price. Vipre Antivirus has gone up $10 to $39.99 for 1 year. The Vipre Home Site License has changed too. It used to be for an unlimited number of computers in your home, but now it is limited to 10 computers, which seems totally reasonable. The other change to the Home Site License is the price. Again, it went up $10 to $59.99.

It appears that GFI, the company that makes Vipre, has also done away with their short-lived lifetime license. You can purchase Vipre or the Home Site License for 1-3 years. The more years you purchase at once, the cheaper it is for each year. The 3 year license for Vipre Antivirus, for example, is $79.99. That comes to just under $27 per year which is a savings of $13 per year if you purchased 1 year at a time.

Even with the price increase, Vipre is still a very good deal. In fact, it’s the same price as Norton Antivirus which is not currently on our recommended list.

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When Internet Exporer  version 9 (IE9) first came out we advised our customers to hold off upgrading due to issues. Recently, we changed that advisory and now recommend that systems with Windows 7 or Vista be upgraded to IE9.

Today, we are going to show you how to get IE9 set up the way you like it.

Right after upgrading to IE9, the top part of IE9 will probably look like this:

(Note: if you are looking at this on our website, you’ll probably have to scroll to the right to see the whole picture)

Notice there is no menu, no print button, and not much else. Very minimal. There are three buttons over to the right. The first button that looks like a house goes to your home page. The star lets you access your favorites, and the gear shows a menu with options and so forth.

See that big blank area between the tabs and those three buttons on the right? Take your mouse and right-click on it. You’ll get a pop-up menu. On the top part of the menu, it lists menu, favorites bar, command bar, and some others. If you want the menu, click on menu. The menu is now displayed in IE9. Right click in that big blank area again to get that pop-up menu again. Notice there is a checkmark next to menu now. That means it’s turned on. If you clicked it again, the checkmark would be removed and the menu would disappear.

The favorites bar is a bar that goes across the top of IE9. You can put favorites there. They are always visible and to access them all you have to do is click on it. If you turn this on, you can add websites to it by dragging the website icon just to the left of the website’s address and dropping it on this bar. You can change the name by right-clicking on it and choosing rename. You can also delete from the favorites bar by right clicking and choosing delete.

The other option here  you might be interested in is the command bar. The command bar has icons for Home, RSS, print, page settings, safety settings, help and so forth. You might think that this is the only way to print, but there are actually several ways to print. You can simply hit Ctrl-P on your keyboard to print a web page. Ctrl-p means hold down the Ctrl key on your keyboard and press the P key once. Another way to print is to right-click somewhere on the web-page. You’ll get a pop-up menu and one of the options on that menu is print. But if you don’t like any of those, you can turn on the command bar.

If you turn all three of them on, then IE 9  should look something like this:

Here you can see the menu. On the right you can see the command bar with the Home button, RSS button, Email button, print button, and so forth. To the left of the command bar you can see the favorites bar where there are some favorites like Facebook.

You may also have some addition things up here. For example, if you have the google Toolbar, you may see that under the Favorites bar. Some security software, like AVG, puts a toolbar in IE 9 to help with security, so you might see that. You can disable and enable these toolbars by right-clicking in that same blank area I told you about.

The other thing you might notice about IE 9 that is different from IE 7 and 8 is that there is no search box in the upper right-hand corner. That’s because the address box and the search box have been combined into one box. In the picture above, see where it says http://www.ct-cp.com. That’s the address box. But it’s also the search box. Left click once in that box and the whole address will be highlighted. Then just type your search terms and hit enter.

There’s more configuration that can be done, but there’s not enough room in this article to cover all of it. That should give you a good start to get IE 9 looking and working the way  you want.

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Here’s what to expect in 2010 in terms of computers and other technology

Solid State Disk (SSD) drives will continue to come down in price and become more and more popular. We’ve covered SSD’s extensively in this newsletter, but in case you missed it or don’t remember, an SSD replaces  your hard drive. It doesn’t have any moving parts so it’s more reliable. And it’s really fast. What’s been holding them back is price. In 2012, the price of SSD’s will continue to decline and so their popularity will continue to rise.

Although we have no official release date from Microsoft, it’s likely that Windows 8 will be released by the end of the year. Again, we have covered Windows 8 in this newsletter quite a bit. Just know that when Windows 8 comes out, it’s going to be huge. It’s very different from any previous version of Windows. But it’s not going to be huge just because it’s different. It’s going to be huge because it’s the first operating system that will pretty much look and work the same on a whole range of devices. Apple has their IOS operating system which is pretty standard between iPhones, iPads, and iPods. But it doesn’t run their desktops and laptops. Windows 8 will run on your computer, your laptop, your tablet, and your cell phone. And on each device it will work and look pretty much the same with only a few differences.

The cloud will continue to gain in popularity as well. When we say the cloud, the idea here is that your data and applications are not stored or installed on your computer. Instead, they are on the web. If you use Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, or any other web-based email, then your email is in the cloud. Your contacts are too. All of these services also provide a calendar. If you use that calendar, it’s in the cloud. It used to be the standard was that your email, calendar, and contacts were stored on your PC and you would synchronize your smartphone to your PC. With the cloud, it’s all stored on the web. There’s no need to synchronize your phone to your computer. And you can access your information from any internet connected device.

If you listen to Pandora, you have probably heard the BMW commercials about how you can listen to Pandora in your BMW. More and more car makers will be adding this capability to their cars in 2012. Ford, for example, will be adding this feature in their 2012 line of Trucks. Other car makers are planning to do the same.

Computer infections used to be created by sadistic people with too much time on their hands. Nowadays, however, computer infections are big business. Companies make a lot of money infecting computers and either stealing information or tricking you into giving them sensitive information like credit card numbers or login information for financial websites. Because so much money is being made, the proliferation of these types of infections is on the rise and security companies are having a hard time keeping up.

Security software pretty much only protects your computer against known infections. When a new infection is released, it first must infect some computers. Then that infection has to be reported to security companies who must then analyze the infection and then release a definition update for their software to detect and remove the infection. The time period from when an infection is released to the time that security software protects against that infection is called zero-day. Because of the sheer number of infections being released, the security companies are having a harder and harder time keeping up. So the time between when an infection is released and when your security software protects against that infection is getting longer and longer. So infection rates are going up. This is why it is so important that every computer user be very careful when reading email, surfing the internet, and so on. Your security software can’t 100% protect you.

The trend in the last few years has been towards more mobile computing. That is why sales of tables, smart phones, and laptops have been on the rise and sales of desktops have been declining. That trend will continue in 2012. Don’t worry. Desktops won’t go away.

Have you heard about mobile payment? When you buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks, you would normally whip out your cash, credit card, or gift card to pay for your coffee. But more and more people are whipping out their smartphone to pay for their daily caffeine fix. You can actually do this today at Starbucks. Starbucks is one of the very few retailers that currently support this technology, but in 2012 mobile payments will make big gains.

As you know, if you purchase online from many stores, depending on where the store is located, you often do not have to pay sales tax. However, in 2012, some states will be changing that so more and more online stores will be forced to charge sales tax. This will negatively affect online sales.

Have you heard the term Hacktivism? Basically, it’s hacking into computers and networks to make a point in order to promote a political agenda. The group “Anonymous” gained notoriety in 2011 with attacks against Zimbabwe, Tunisia, Egypt, Brazil, and other governments. But most of the press was around attacks in the US including the government of Arizona, Department of Homeland Security, and FEMA. Anonymous has threatened PayPal, Fox News, Mexican Drug Cartels, Facebook, and many others. Hacktivism will continue to be a growing trend in 2012.

2012 will undoubtedly be an interesting year in terms of technology.

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If you have Windows XP on all of your computers, this
article does not apply to you. It only applies to computers with Windows Vista
or Windows 7.

Back in March we told you about the release of Internet
Explorer version 9. At that time, we recommended that you wait to install it
because there were issues. We are now happy to report that the issues with IE9
have been ironed out. So we can now recommend that you upgrade to Internet
Explorer 9 if you haven’t already.

Your next question is going to be, “Should I upgrade?”.  There are lots of reasons why you should
upgrade. It’s faster. It’s more secure. It has some new features. The only
reason that might make you consider not upgrading is the fact that Internet
Explorer 9 is different from previous versions of Internet Explorer so there is
a learning curve. We have had a few customers have us remove Internet Explorer
9 from their computers because they didn’t like it. But for most people it
probably won’t be a big deal.

So we do recommend that you upgrade to Internet Explorer 9.
If you don’t like it, you can always uninstall it and go back to the previous
version. You can install Internet Explorer 9 through Windows Update. Or you can
go to www.microsoft.com/IE9.

If you need help with it or want us to take of this for you,
just let us know. We can install IE9 remotely.

One thing, if you do install IE9, you will need to reinstall
Web of Trust. Web of Trust is a utility we try to put on all customer
computers. It’s a free browser add-on. When you do a search on Google or any
other search engine, it puts colored circles next to each website to let you
know if they are safe or not.

If you don’t see those colored circles when you do a web
search, then go to www.mywot.com and
download and install it.

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Watch out for a fake email from Adobe Update Notification. It looks pretty official and tells you that Adobe is proud to announce a new version upgrade for Adobe Acrobat Reader and tells you about all the great new features. It tells you that all you have to do to apply the new update is to open the attached file. Now that is a red flag, isn’t it. I don’t have to tell you not to open the attachment.

Adobe Reader is something you should have on your computer and it is also something you should update regularly. But Adobe never sends email like this and they certainly would not have the update attched to the email like that. Normally, a little icon will appear in the lower right-hand corner of the screen near where the time is displayed that tells you about an update to Adobe Reader. You can also update Adobe Reader by going to Adobe.com.

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