Startupware: Craplets & Malware Removal

A starting business will not typically focus on developing their technological infrastructure. There are so many other pressing issues in those formative stages, such as advertising, finding clients, networking, and other activities aimed at survival and modest growth. After these initial steps have been taken, it’s time to expand and consider the technology a business needs for efficiency and growth. This is the time where savvy business owners need to face up to their outdated desktop solutions and look into servers.

Growing businesses will find uses for servers to fill needs they didn’t even know they had. Servers can be used to host a company’s web site, Active Directory infrastructure for user organization and security, SQL and Oracle database applications for efficient data organization, file servers to track and maintain important spreadsheets, letters and other business documents, and more. Worried about price, growing businesses might be hesitant to take the leap from standalone desktops to servers. Contrary to what some business owners may think, servers can be actually be quite affordable.

The best manufacturers stay in business through their flexibility and ability to offer custom solutions, so it’s no wonder the major server hardware companies offer products for smaller scale setups and the largest corporations. Dell servers are available for businesses of any size and budget, making them a good place to start your shopping research.  If a growing business actually needs multiple servers to truly expand, another affordable option is virtualization.

Virtualization applications run on a physical server and allow this one computer to “host” several virtual servers. These virtual servers are actually just user environments, but they appear as separate harware components. With their own computer names, full-fledged operating systems, and file systems, these virtual machines are functionally impossible to differentiate from independent servers. Users can log into them remotely, client applications can interface with them, and their data can be backed up, just like a normal server. A business owner can buy one affordable piece of hardware with some extra disc space, processing power, and memory and create several virtual servers. Leveraging the abilities of virtual servers stretches an expanding business’s budget very effectively.

Every company hits that period of growing pains where they have outgrown their old systems, but seem too small for a full fledged upgrade to the next tier. However, this infrastructure expansion is most likely necessary. Adding servers to a business’s technology will assist with growth, creating efficiency and saving time and money. Servers can help automate tasks, organize data, and improve security. Business owners who make the leap to server technology usually find themselves wondering how they got along without it.

by Jerry Stern
Computer Tech and Webmaster at PC410.com
  
Most computers run far more slowly than they should. Either they’re infected, or loaded with startupware, or they’re running too much old junk. The key to cleaning these up is knowing what software is running, and managing it. If the computer is infected, the cleanup is a bigger topic, and not always possible for a computer user that isn’t a computer tech. But slow is another matter, and can be dealt with by anyone who is comfortable running an UNinstallation program from Control Panel.
  
Here are the basics of why Windows PCs slow down and what to do about each:
  

• Hardware: Usually, that’s not as common as it sounds. Most PCs can stay usable into a seventh year of service. Yes, SEVEN years, IF the software that must run is reasonable and not hardware intensive. Ask a local tech if your processor and memory and hard drive are still OK for the programs you run. It is always a good idea to use a top online backup service or a back up drive to keep copies of your data.
• Fragmentation: Make sure you’re defragmenting the C: drive at least four times per year, and after any big software upgrades. I frequently see old XP computers that have important settings files or the mail storage file broken into several hundred pieces–that costs time, and speed suffers.
• Software Age: Follow my rule of hardware/software matchups: The software you run, other than security products and browsers and browser plugins, should be of a similar age to your hardware. This year’s big office productivity suite won’t run fast on a five-year-old computer, but the same product from the year you bought the computer will be quite usable, and there are faster, smaller programs available for most tasks. Big software means slow, and software ‘suites’ means big, slow, and expensive. So moving backwards a few years to an older version of a big program will generally improve speed; consider the option if you don’t need every hot new feature in the new versions.
• Security Suites: For security products, suites are more than just slow; they’re evil. They do everything under the sun, and take all the processing power your computer has got to keep them going. Dump every security program that uses ‘suite’ or ‘internet security’ in the name. Switch to a simple antivirus program that doesn’t attempt to interfere with Windows’ built-in firewall, built-in parental controls, or communications in general. Just scanning; that’s all you want. Keeping a computer safe is done by keeping all patches up-to-date, and running a good antivirus program. Suites are not useful; they move spam filtering onto your computer instead of keeping it safely at the professionally-managed server run by the mail service, they tamper with Windows security settings, they interfere with the local network and VPN configuration, and they shut down mail and internet access with no notice. Go small. Avoid security suites.
• Toolbars: Uninstall every toolbar. These are known by other names–technicians refer to them as ‘browser helper objects’. There was a time when these were useful, and added features that browsers did not have, back around the year 2000, like popup blockers and on-page search features. Those features are built into every modern browser, and browser toolbars are a major slowdown, and having multiple toolbars is a major drain on a PC. This is the most important system change you can make for speed–remove all the toolbars. Use Control Panel, Add/Remove programs to take out all toolbars except anything that’s part of the installed antivirus product, and then turn off the antivirus toolbar by going into Internet Explorer’s View menu, choose Toolbars, and uncheck the remaining toolbar item there.
• Search programs: Windows 7 has a good built-in search program–it’s the box at the top-right corner of every ‘Computer’ window. Uninstall all others. These especially include Nero’s built-in search program and Microsoft’s Search 4.0 add-in program, but slower machines also don’t do well with Google Desktop, and as of now, Copernic does not run properly in any 64-bit version of Windows. In general, remove every search program that you can’t live without.
     If you find one search program that you really must have, and there’s only one, OK, but be sure to set it to never index the computer during hours you’ll work on it–don’t rely on the defaults, which will set it to build indexes ‘during inactivity’ which means ‘as soon as I start typing, GO’.

Those are the most likely and the largest computer slowdowns on Windows systems. If the hardware remains in good shape, and you keep the installed software simple and small, most modern PCs can last seven years for internet surfing and email. And that’s what I always here from home users. It’s all they run. That, and Freecell, Picassa, and Hoyle Casino….
  
Still slow? It may be time to get expert help from a local computer tech. If you’re near Westminster, Maryland, call me. Elsewhere, take a look at ComputerRepairLocator.com to find a local repair shop.

by Jerry Stern
Computer Tech and Webmaster at PC410.com
  

Dear Friend–

I’ve received your latest forwarded message about the virus that is going to destroy the internet as we know it if we open that email with the urgent-sounding title. Please don’t forward these to anyone–they create FUD. That’s Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. They do nothing positive.

The message was, to begin with, old. When it was new, it had a few almost-true near-facts in it, like the name of a real email subject line. Everything beyond that was like listening to technology news on my local television news stations–it’s last week’s news, or last year’s news, with the important parts left out.

What you need to remember about forwarded messages that arrive in your mailbox is that they’ve generally been out and about being forwarded, for years. Decades, even–I’ve received forwarded jokes and cartoons that also showed up on my desk by fax in the 1990′s, and by interoffice photocopy-of-a-photocopy in the 1980′s. Forwarded emails are old, old, old.

And security news is meaningless after five days. All good antivirus software blocks every known threat that’s more than three days old. The bad guys know this, and they change their approaches to getting your system infected constantly, sometimes twice a day on some of the big families of rogue malware. Now, while there are bad emails going around that will infect your computer if you haven’t patched it, or that contain evil infectious links, the bad guys change the subject lines daily to keep their messages from being caught by SPAM filters, so trying to block them by not opening an email with a specific subject line isn’t remotely practical or safe.

So by forwarding this old message, you’re scaring people, and encouraging them to get their security news by watching for it to fall into their mailboxes from the sky. There are valid sources of security news, and forwarded email isn’t on the list.

Several points to keep in mind–every one of these tells you this is either a hoax or badly-reported ancient history:

• Microsoft and Norton don’t need your help to report news. For that matter, neither do CNN, Neiman Marcus, or Homeland Security.
• The message is undated.
• It asks you to forward the message.
• It claims knowledge from a credible source, but it’s a generic source that can’t be reached, like ‘Microsoft’ or ‘NBC’.

The best thing to do with these forwarded messages is to delete them. Don’t spread the FUD.

The REAL Microsoft security news is here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/default.aspx

The REAL security news from the US Department of Homeland Security is here:
http://www.us-cert.gov

And here’s an article by Rob Rosenberger on ‘False Authority Syndrome’, to help you recognize hoax emails:
http://vmyths.com/fas/

From today’s mail, slightly sanitized enough to protect the companies whose names or contact data are being abused:

Hello, We want to place an order for 500 units new Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA/600 (WD5000AAKX) 7200RPM 16MB Hard Drive (OEM).
Do get back to us with your price quote which should include FedEx next day A.M shipping to our I.T location in Deerfield Beach, FL ____.
Method of Payment would be net 10 terms. We look forward to your immediate response.
Thanks,
Kevin Douglas
Puchase Manager
The Twister Group
________
Glenview, IL 60025
Phone: 855-_________ext 374 Fax: 877._______
Email: _______

Yeah, right. 500 hard drives, net 10 terms, shipped to Florida by early-day overnight delivery–hot rush, but billed to Illinois on credit terms to an unknown company, when your web site looks like this:

The fax number provided goes to a real electronics distributor in Indiana, no relation.

So I’m just wondering…. Are there companies stupid enough to ship this order?

For anyone selling computer hardware on the internet, expect orders for hardware to fall from the ‘net, and expect them to be fake. I had one last year that needed 6 notebook computers and 3 network routers with VPN support, drop-shipped to Florida, with a credit-card billing address in Georgia, and would you please bill it to these three credit cards in equal amounts? What? The numbers are consecutive? Really?

I called the bank on that one, after looking up the first 4 digits of the card numbers to identify them, and had a chat with their fraud department. They told me, short version, “Unbelievable. Impossible. Felons.” Words to that effect.

Fraud on the Internet goes both ways. It’s not just shady Internet vendors–every possible opportunity to have a transaction is being attacked.

Yesterday was Patch Tuesday. That’s the monthly release date for Microsoft to push out patches for Windows; it’s always on the second Tuesday of the month. Today, I’m getting phone calls about computers being down.

First call: “When I looked at the computer this morning, the screen said it was shutting down. It just sat there, so I rebooted. Nothing. Blank”

My questions: Does that computer run all the time? (Yes, it backs up at night to an external drive.)

So it hasn’t rebooted in a while? (I guess.)

“OK, unplug the external hard drive and any other USB storage devices, and reboot.” That fixed it.

Why? Because PCs of a certain age, circa 2003-2006, frequently dislike booting with a USB storage device plugged in. The machine is never turned off, until Windows Update comes along and forces a reboot.

Second call: “I thought I broke it. It was just sitting there with a spinning message forever. I let it run and it eventually shut down. My husband says I broke it again. You repaired it last week!”

Answer: LOTS of big patches last night. Slow shutdown was normal; patches were installing.

Hey, Microsoft! Automatic patching is clearly doing more good than evil, BUT clear communications would really help. Like “Your monthly security patches from Microsoft are installing right now. These happen on a regular schedule. Learn more at: (simple link that can be remembered for later)” NOT “Your computer is shutting down” or “Installing… Do not turn off your computer…” Clear messages that say that you’re working to improve their security are better than techie messages that say their systems are going DOWN.

Don’t scare your customers. That’s the job of the bad guys.