Sadly scams targeted at your computer have become all to common. We have become accustomed to attempts to steal credit card or bank details. However the number of computers we are seeing in our workshop with fake security software is almost reaching epidemic proportions. This month and next I have created a pair of articles on the subject of computer scams. I hope that having read these articles you will be able to avoid these scams or have the confidence to put the phone down (more on that later).

Email Scams

This is the scam you are most likely to come across, there are various ways that email is used for scams, the most common ones I have seen are:
Password Notifications – Emails that appear to be sent by anything from Facebook to your bank, they tell you there is a problem with your account and you need to click on a link to fix it. Of course the link goes to a fake website.
“We couldn’t deliver your parcel” – Bogus emails from Fed-ex or UPS with “important documents” attached, these actually contain a virus.

Phone Scams

In these worrying new cold calling phone scams, you receive a call from the “Microsoft Security Department” or the “Windows Security Department” and inform you that they have found a virus on your computer.
You are told to go to a website and they can fix your computer (for a fee).
The callers are persistent, and we have had difficulty convincing customers that these are scam. Put simply there is no way to relate your computer to your phone number without you supplying information in the first place.

If you get a call like this hang up and if you are worried call your usual computer engineer or call me (number below) and get honest professional advice.

As with all things on the internet, the best advice is to think before you click, and if you are worried get expert advice. Next month I’m going to cover fake anti-virus software and how to spot a fake website.

Going further

If you are fortunate enough to live in Bristol or South Gloucestershire and wold like help with your computer why not give us a call? You can call us on 01454 616365 or use our contact form and we will call you back.

Online shopping is one of the great conveniences of modern life, you can find almost anything, anywhere in the world and have it shipped to your door. However shopping online can be a worrying and confusing experience, if you are not confident that the website you are going to buy from is real, secure and well regarded.

Internet shopping is at least as safe as buying over the phone and in some ways gives you better rights than buying on the high street. I have put together my top tips for making sure you only deal with genuine honest websites.

If you know the name of the company you want to buy from, search for their name, all companies of a reasonable size will be listed 1st 2nd and probably 3rd when you search for them. The scam websites don’t want to invest the time and resources required to appear at the top of the search rankings.

An online search also allows you to check the reputation of the company you plan to buy from, along with the official sites of the company. The search results will also turn up other mentions of them on the internet. This allows you to see what others are saying about them. If you are using a service like Froogle (Google shopping) you will get a star rating based on user reviews

Once you are on a website there are still more ways to check you are safe. Firstly pay attention to any warnings from you computer’s security system, most of the anti-virus companies include fraud prevention systems that will warn you if you are on a suspect website.

Finally before you enter you card details look for a padlock in the bottom right hand corner of your screen, this shows that only you and the website can see what you have typed, preventing others from stealing your details.
To make things even easier the padlock has now been joined on new computers by a green address bar. When you see the padlock, the bar at the top of the screen with the website address in it should go green.

Going further

If you are fortunate enough to live in Bristol or South Gloucestershire and wold like help with your computer why not give us a call? You can call us on 01454 616365 or use our contact form and we will call you back.

The coming of the internet has given us much greater access to information, it is now possible to find out almost anything about anything of the slightest significance. Anyone can put information on the internet and there is no editorial control. How in that case do you know the information you are reading is accurate?

First lets deal with teachers favourite website, Wikipedia (not to be confused with wiki-leaks, a totally different website). Wikipedia is billed as the people’s encyclopaedia, anyone can contribute to, and edit almost any entry on the site. In some ways it is a fascinating website, you can spend hours reading pages on a rich variety of topics. The problem as you can guess and teachers know full well, is items from wikipedia can often be taken as fact, even thou the author could be less than authoritative.

So how do you find good information on the internet, well to start with Wikipedia isn’t totally useless. While its “facts” can’t always be trusted, the better articles on the site link to supporting material on other more authoritative websites and equally Wikipedia can give you hints as to what you should be searching for when looking on the internet as a whole.

The trick to getting good information is to look for authoritative websites, a popular choice for general world information is the CIA’s World Fact Book (most easily found by searching for its name). The Fact book is prepared by the CIA, to keep the US government up to date with general facts about the world. While it tends to reflect the US world view, its content is widely considered to be accurate.

If you would like to move to a modern equivalent of your old encyclopaedia most of the encyclopaedia companies now have online versions. While you often have to pay to use the sites, you have access to the same quality of information as you are used to, with the added advantage that the information never goes out of date as it is updated regularly.

Going further

If you are fortunate enough to live in Bristol or South Gloucestershire and wold like help with your computer why not give us a call? You can call us on 01454 616365 or use our contact form and we will call you back.

I have noticed that fewer and fewer people are using the big printed directories. The Internet is slowly taking over as the primary way to find the trades people. Using the internet gives you a very wide choice, you can check reputation of the company you have chosen and often find out in great detail what they do before you pick up the phone, or email them.

So how do you find a company online? One option is to use the online version of your favourite big book. Thomsonlocal.com, yell.com, btphonebook.com are the services from Thomson, Yellow Pages and BT respectively, most of the directory enquiries services also have an online service for example 118118.com (The Number) 118500.com (BT Directories).
There are hundreds of independent services on the net, from local edited directories, to national and specialist directories. Lastly the big search engines offer company listings along with their general internet search. That’s a lot of options, I have found the best place to start is in your local edited directory,then move on to the national directories if needed,

You have chosen a company, are they any good? Once again there is an online solution, with a few quick searches you can find any online reviews of the company you have chosen. These could be on the directory sites, on specialist review sites or messages posted in online forums. With a little practice it is possible to get a very good impression of your chosen company in 5 minutes. You can try this now, type a company name and the word review in to an search engine.

You have found a company, they have reviewed well, and you want to know more about them, time to look at their website. Most online directories will include a link to the companies website, if not a quick search for the company name should turn up their website. A website tells you quite a lot about a company, apart from the information it contains, its look and feel will tell you a lot about the type of company you are calling.

When you next need a service, look online and find out far more about the companies on offer than you ever have before.

Going further

If you are fortunate enough to live in Bristol or South Gloucestershire and wold like help with your computer why not give us a call? You can call us on 01454 616365 or use our contact form and we will call you back.

The modern use of digital photography has led to a change in the way we relate to photographs. While it is possible to get high quality prints off our digital photos, either from our own printers or from numerous high street shops that are replacing their film developing equipment with digital photo printers, most of the time our pictures just remain trapped on our computers looked at whenever we remember they are there.

While this isn’t so different from the way we treated our snaps in the film days, locked in albums that are only got out for birthdays or Christmas, digital photos give us many more options.

The digital photo has lead to the digital photo frame, so now as well as the special pictures that you have chosen to frame and put on your walls, you can now have selected digital photos on display, changing every few seconds or minutes.

Digital printing now makes it easy to have pictures printed on to fabric, glass, or pretty much anything else. So how about curtains printed with your favourite view, or a “stained glass” panel of the garden in full bloom in your window on a cold winters day.

Digital photos copy perfectly every time so why keep them to yourself. Three years ago I used to suggest sending pictures of events to friends and relatives on CD, now I suggest putting them online, with services like picasa web and Flikr you can post pictures and albums onto the internet. These can be open to the general public or passworded so only friends can see them.

Have you ever fancied being a publisher? How about making a book out of your pictures as a special present for a friend? Well I hadn’t until I saw the picture book services provided by Jessops, Flikr and I’m sure many others. These aren’t just printed sheets folded with a staple, these are proper hard back books, with glossy pages filled with your pictures. The software is straight forward to use and the results are breathtaking.

There are so may ways to use your pictures to amazing effect, I urge you to get on your computer and see what you can do.

Going further

If you are fortunate enough to live in Bristol or South Gloucestershire and wold like help with your computer why not give us a call? You can call us on 01454 616365 or use our contact form and we will call you back.

The technical innovation of the last 10 years has been the group of technologies known as “social media”. At the turn of the century the idea of keeping up with what your friends are doing week by week via the internet was barely considered, now it is is possible (if you want) to keep up with your friends activities on a minute by minute basis.

So what do those in the know mean by social media? Good luck finding two people who agree. Social media seems to be anything that involves a few basic themes, sharing what you are doing , sharing photographs, videos and discussing pretty much everything. There is nothing new in these activities, they happen where ever you have a group of people, the new bit is it is now happening on a global scale.

That’s the theory done, so how do you actually use this? The two most famous social websites are Twitter and Facebook, both in different ways allow you to gather a group of friends and then share information. You then have sites like flikr, youtube and picasa web that allow you to share and discuss pictures and videos. One other new thing is that all these sites will allow you to share information from one to the others so the discussion can flow with out borders.

When talking about social media it is also important to talk about personal security. The temptation is to share more and more information, after all it’s your friends that are reading it, and you trust them, don’t you? And even then its only trivial stuff you are giving away, like it’s your birthday, how old you are, what your parents and grand parents names are, etc. Before you know it you have given away enough information to fill in a credit application form, oops. So you need to think about what you are sharing, and who you are sharing it with, find out how to control who can see your information.

While there are pitfalls and it is easy to have lazy friendships, the new social technologies make maintaining good friendships easier, and provide a daily source of news and gossip to rival the newspapers, so give it a try.

Going further

If you are fortunate enough to live in Bristol or South Gloucestershire and wold like help with your computer why not give us a call? You can call us on 01454 616365 or use our contact form and we will call you back.

It’s December that means pretty much whatever religion you follow, or even if you don’t follow a religion, there’s a festival to celebrate. This generally involves cards, presents and good wishes. This is now the age of the computer so what is the ‘tech savie’ way to spread goodwill? This month I will point you in a few directions that will give you an easier or more interesting time.

Shopping on the web, unless you have been living under a rock you will have at least heard others talking about online shopping. If you know what you are looking for hours of leg legwork can be reduced to 10 minutes clicking. You have online specialists like Amazon.co.uk who seem to sell everything you could possibly need. Equally your favourite shop almost certainly sells on the web, so why not pop their name into an internet search engine.

eCards are a fun alternative to real cards. The idea is simple, you can create a colourful, possibly animated card which can be viewed on the computer. A quick search for eCards will get you hundreds of options, one that is regularly recommended to me is www.jacquielawson.com primarily for its range of ideas and ease of use.
One note, when you have finished your card you will be able to send the recipient an email notification, bogus notifications are often used by virus writers, so I suggest the following, 1. Let the recipient know the card is coming by another means, e.g. personal email. 2. If you can include a personal message to be sent with the notification, that way it’s clearly from you.

Custom Cards, eCards are great but you can’t put them up on the mantelpiece, so another fun option is the custom card. Moonpig.com have lead the way here. There are other sites available now, once again the idea is simple, you design your card on the web, when you are happy the card will be printed and sent either to you or the recipient.

My team and I wish send you our Best Wishes for a Joyful Holiday season, and a Happy and Successful 2011.

Going further

If you are fortunate enough to live in Bristol or South Gloucestershire and wold like help with your computer why not give us a call? You can call us on 01454 616365 or use our contact form and we will call you back.

I don’t know about your but I’m fascinated by aerial photographs and maps, I love looking at where thing are, and how they relate. You can follow old road ways or marvel at the beauty and elegance of the design of the gardens of a stately home.

While maps have been easily available for a very long time, most of us only saw an aerial photograph when some one turned up at the door offering to sell you a picture taken from a plane. A lot of us have these photos and they are very interesting but they are a bit … local. It would be nice to be able to look at pictures from all over the globe. Well, now you can.

Online mapping sites have been around for a number of years. One of the most popular sites was multimap.co.uk; through this site you had (and still have) access to street maps from all over the world. They were also the first site that I can remember offering satellite pictures and a handy overlay service so you could see the street names marked on a real picture of the roads. There are now may companies that offer online mapping, Google and Microsoft primary amongst them.

These online services are now very rich with many landmarks and businesses marked on the maps with links to relevant websites. You can ‘drive’ round the maps with pictures taken at street level. I’ll save going into detail for later articles as I can’t do them justice in one or two paragraphs.

A decade ago you could buy CD-ROM atlases. These were mostly replaced by the online services; now, however, you can download a new generation of atlases from these websites. This new generation of atlases has all the features of their online relatives and are updated every day. However by being on your computer they can do a lot more. You can see how a place has changed by viewing older maps and aerial pictures. You can add tags to a place so you can find them easily or remind of an event that occurred there. You can produce customised maps that follow the route of a trip.

There are so may things you can do I have barely scratched the surface. Now it’s over to you to find your place in the world.

Useful sites
maps.google.co.uk
bing.co.uk/maps

Going further

If you are fortunate enough to live in Bristol or South Gloucestershire and wold like help with your computer why not give us a call? You can call us on 01454 616365 or use our contact form and we will call you back.

Email has been around for decades, but in recently years the number of ways of communicating have been multiplying. You can now send instant messages,hold debates on forums, phone friends over the internet, hold video conferences, find out what old friends are doing with social networking. There is a lot of noise out there but how much of it is actually useful?

Well, the obvious answer is it depends on what you want to do. As any one with family around the world will tell you, email is a blessing now with services like Skye & Windows live, it is possible to hold a phone conversation and see moving video of people thousands of miles away, virtually for free.

With the instant messages & real time chat you can have a typed conversations with friends while you are looking at the news, or checking the price of a holiday (or even while working if you can get away with it). Because there is no noise teenagers love instant messaging because they can talk to several friends while listening to music (or when they’re meant to be doing something else).

The newest innovation is Social Networking, which is a horrible marketing name for something we have all be doing for hundreds of years. What used to be done with letters, birthday and Christmas cards, can now be done on sites like facebook.com with the click of a button. While this can be very useful, it can also lead to very lazy and impersonal ‘friendships’.

It can only be a good thing there are so may ways to keep in touch; families can keep in touch and friendships can endure over thousands of miles. However, with so may ways of communicating, many people mistake producing a large volume of messages, for communication. There are may editorials that bemoan the way technology is killing the arts of conversation and letter writing. I think it is possible for technology to improve communication but it will take some time. We are still learning how to best use the new technology.

So its over to you.Try all the technologies available to you and start learning how you can make the best use of them.

Going further

If you are fortunate enought to live in Bristol or South Gloucestershire and wold like help with your computer why not give us a call? You can call us on 01454 616365 or use our contact form and we will call you back.

If you think about international calls, I’ll bet you think of long numbers and high bills. If you have relatives that live abroad, it is a real pain, especially if you also have to think about time differences.

While it has been possible to talk to someone over the internet for at least 10 years, until recently it wasn’t easy. Slow connections meant call quality was poor, even getting a connection seemed to require a degree in computing, certainly not for the general user. What we want is a service that is easy to use, tells us when our friends and relatives are available, it would even be nice if we could see the person we are talking to.

Funnily enough as I’m writing about it, now you can. Broadband has inspired a sudden advance in technology. Skype was the first service to allow everyone to make free calls over the internet easily and at very hight quality. There are now may services competing with skype from the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo, they work in a very similar way, although of course they don’t work with each other (when is technology ever that easy?).

In general these services are worked in a similar way, you add friends and colleagues to a contacts list. The contacts list allows you to see who is available, then all you have to do to make a call is click on the contacts name and press call. By clicking on additional names you can start a second call or a conference call. You can open text chat windows, useful for leaving messages or sharing website links. You can also send files to the person/people you are talking to.

There is one obvious snag in that you’re stuck at your computer. So the more recent innovations have been phone sized hand sets, and software for mobile phones. The ability to call standard land line number (world wide) at very good rates, and finally to get a real phone number for your PC so you can be called from a normal phone.

While calling from your computer is not for every one, it can be invaluable if you need to talk to some one is a different country, or collaborate with one or more people over the internet.

Going further

If you are fortunate enought to live in Bristol or South Gloucestershire and wold like help with your computer why not give us a call? You can call us on 01454 616365 or use our contact form and we will call you back.