I ran a few quick checks on the computer and found no major problems or even minor issues other than Avast would not start properly. I removed the malfunctioning Avast program and then downloaded a new copy of Avast. Avast installed properly without a hitch and his malware protection was restored. I then checked for any common registry errors and found little other than leftovers from programs that had been removed.

This customer was able to realize when he was being scammed, but a few Google searches done for research shows that many were not that lucky. The moral of the story is that if you call customer service for an existing installed product and they want to sell you the fix for hundreds of dollars – Hang Up Quickly!

This week it happened again to one of my regular clients, an elderly woman. She called Time Warner’s Roadrunner help desk on several occasions as she was not getting any email. Each time she was informed that their service was just fine and that something must be wrong with her computer. She called me asking about changing email providers or fixing her computer.

I took a trip across town to check out her email problems expecting to find that her email client was somehow mis-configured or that her email account had been hijacked. Upon arriving at the site I was quite surprised to find that her internet connection was passing less than 5% of the packets and that all her internet programs were timing out. After quickly verifying that the computer and cabling was OK, I unplugged the Roadrunner modem that she leased from Time Warner and then plugged it back in. Knowing that she had called Time Warner on several occasions, I expected this to have no effect but did it anyhow. Imagine my surprise when her Roadrunner service started working and hundreds of backed up emails started coming in.

I asked her again if she had spoken to Time Warner about the problem and she assured me that she had called several times and each time they told her the problem was her computer. This was verified when I spotted several emails from Roadrunner Customer Service asking her to complete a survey about the service she had received. While I do not know what transpired on the phone calls, I do know that there was no customer service involved. How the agent involved could spend that amount of time on the phone with her and never suspect that her base internet service (bought from them) was not working is just mind boggling. So this poor lady ended up having to pay me for a service call in order to tell her that her Time Warner service was in fact broken despite several Time Warner customer service agents telling her it was OK. When I left, the client was contemplating cancelling her Time Warner accounts as she could not trust them. So not only did they screw over the customer, they screwed over their own employer.

Note: this is a copy of a Facebook blog entry originally posted in March 2010

While WYSIWYG editors are a great tool for novice web designers, they do have their limitations and drawbacks. Many of the simpler editors are very limited in the formatting options offered, causing the site to look very generic. Another severe drawback with WYSIWYG editors is that they usually do not handle change well. Even with the more advanced editors, the HTML code that is generated is severely bloated with lots of redundant and or unnecessary code. This is often due to changes to a font size or style are done by embedding the changes inside of the original formatting instead of actually changing the formatting. When I was tasked with fixing the problems with these sites, I was presented with hundreds of lines of code that turned out to be completely useless. This complicated finding the actual issues as I had to wade through all the meaningless code hunting for the offending tags.

I certainly understand the do it yourself mentality and like to save money as much as the next guy. Having said that, there are a few things you can do to keep yourself out of trouble when editing web pages with WYSIWYG editors.

1. Always check your page in at least 2 different browsers after creating or editing a page. Internet Explorer and Firefox are a good start.
2. Check your pages often during the editing process, it easier to find errors when you have only made a few changes that could have caused the problem.
2. When checking the page, try different window sizes to gauge the effect of narrow and wide window sizes.
3. When pasting copy into a page, paste only the text not the formatting as well.
4. Keep your page lengths reasonable. Longer pages have a greater likelihood of being impacted by formatting issues that may not even show up on a shorter page.
5. If you have issues that you can not figure out, call in a professional early rather than later. It is better to find out what you are doing wrong before you have done it to a dozen pages.

I first checked that there was a place to mount the second drive in the case and there was a clearly labeled mounting point for the 2nd hard drive as well as extra deive bay to install a 2nd optical drive. Both expansion areas had extra SATA power connectors nearby, so power was available. It looked like this upgrade was going to be easy sailing!

I then grabbed a SATA data cable and started the upgrade. Imagine my surprise when I encountered the issue illustrated in the image below:

Although the motherboard was clearly designed to support 4 SATA devices, for some reason two of the headers had not been populated with a connector for the additional drives. I can surmise that the maybe 50 cents saved by not putting the connectors in place was not why the connectors were missing. It would seem that Dell did not want people to have an upgrade path for the system. I guess that the idea is that if it is impossible to add a second hard drive or a second optical drive, Dell believes that the computers owner will elect to purchase a new system from them.

It certainly backfired in this case. This customer has been purchasing Dell systems 2 or 3 times a year for many years. She has vowed to never buy another Dell system after seeing this particular marketing strategy.

Traditionally when software was in beta mode it meant that the program was in the final testing stages, normally released to a select group of beta testers (often volunteers) to put the software through its paces and uncover any lurking bugs or other issues. The common understanding for beta testers was that the software might be unstable,  and using the software was solely at the risk of the tester. Eventually the software would be declared as being stable and would be released to general public as a working product.

The software developers deploying products via Facebook have embraced a different model for declaring a product as being in the Beta stage. The software (in this case a flash based game) is released to the entire Facebook community after some degree of internal testing, and is labeled as being beta. So essentially everyone using the application is now a beta tester.  Since it labeled as being beta the software is used at the users risk. Any problems that arise can be attributed to the application being in beta stage. The games are continually updated and upgraded and will often never achieve a release status throughout the entire life-cycle of the application. As most of us have seen, these perpetual beta status game applications become unstable, are unpredictable, and do fail (sometimes in a spectacular way).  Everyone takes these problems in stride; after all the games are free and clearly still in the beta stage.

Now come the questions of ethics. In the traditional model, the product was released to the public with the expectation that it worked. Most often consumers would purchase the final product upon its release, providing a profit for the developers. The income for developers using Facebook to deploy their products is from the selling of various game enhancements that allow the user to play the game longer, without mandatory waiting periods,  advance their game progress, or add capabilities and items not easily obtainable by simply playing the game for free. Do these users that are paying for a product (no matter how virtual) deserve a stable platform? At what point can developers no longer hide behind the beta label.

I play many of these free games, often encountering bugs and outages along the way. I often wonder how angry are the users who paid for the game enhancements that have lost lives, game progress, and virtual game items when the games roll over and die.  Is this just the risk you take when paying for virtual game enhancements?

When a customer comes to me and says that they need more memory, I immediately think they are asking to have a RAM upgrade.  This because the term computer memory most often is used to denote Random Access Memory or RAM which is used for very short term data storage. RAM is electronic storage so therefore is very quick although volatile.  Almost all the data used by a computer passes through RAM at some point so having enough RAM is critical to proper computer operation. Ram is somewhat expensive so budget computers often suffer from lack of enough RAM.

Long term storage needs are served by various mechanical devices such as magnetic hard disk drives, removable optical media hardware such as CD/DVD drives, and Flash memory. All these can also be termed computer memory when used in its most generic meaning. The real differential from RAM being that these devices are non-volatile memory, having the ability to store data long term with out the need to supply power continuously to the device. This type of memory is much slower than RAM, so it takes much longer to store or retrieve information. The advantage is that the data can be saved long term and is often portable depending on the media involved.

One of the reasons that people become so confused is that most computers use a technique called virtual memory where all memory is controlled by the operating system. When there is not enough RAM the operating system will instead use non-volatile memory devices (usually a hard drive, occasionally flash drives) to store data. Although this allows the computer to keep operating despite exhausting all available RAM, the computer will be much slower. Many customers come to me complaining that their system needs more memory due to warnings from the operating system that it is low on virtual memory. In actuality the issue is that the system has used up all the hard drive space allocated for use as virtual memory. Sometimes the hard drive is full so the operating system can not use it for virtual memory.

I hope this article might clear up some of the confusion about computer memory. While the term computer memory most often means RAM, other usage of the term can  denote any device capable of storing data. This is why I often ask exactly what the customer means when they talk about memory.

Many of the scammers who send out these emails are operating out of Nigeria. Section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code deals with obtaining money or other things of value by false presences, thus many refer to these scams as 419 scams. As the relationship matures with the scams perpetrator, they will invariably ask for funds  in order to secure the “great amount of money”, therefore the scams are also known as Advance Fee Fraud.  These scams date back to many years before the advent of personal computers and the internet, but with the advent of easy technology, the scamming criminals can now target millions of email users.

There are many clues that give away these criminals. First and foremost is “something for nothing”  come on which is the basis of all these scams. The email addresses used by the scamming criminals is always another big clue. Why would a lawyer or banker resort to using a free email account? Also many of these emails come from one address but solicit the reply to an entirely different email account. Although many of these emails purport to being sent by an educated lawyer, banker, or oil company executive, they often contain spelling and grammatical errors. Email users should always beware of any communication that urges confidentiality in the transactions as this is a big tell in identifying scam spam.

Many of these scamming thieves will spend hours scouring the internet in order to associate names and professions with email addresses so that they can personalize their message in order to bait you. One of the more common forms of the scam involves the supposed death of a rich person who has the same surname as you, allowing you to pose as a relative in order to acquire the wealth of the deceased. Generally these types of scams are a bit more sophisticated as they require some amount of research. Another common tactic is to send the same bait message to thousand of recipients. While these messages are by nature more generic, the shear volume often ensures some sort of response.

In the future I will post some of the more creative scams that I have run across in an effort to educate the unwary. In the meantime you should always get the opinion of others if you are tempted to respond to an unsolicited offer to make you wealthy.

As Ralph stood woodenly in the parking lot, he struggled to understand why this was happening.  “Hey, that’s my laptop!”, he exclaimed to a young FBI agent pushed a cart loaded with computers, including the sales staffs laptops. “We have tracked internet files and email from a major pornography ring to this location”, advised the senior agent. “We are confiscating the computers and all data media as evidence.”

The agent walked off to confer with his partner, who had emerged from the building with a grim look on his face. The agents conferred angrily, looking over at Ralph several times. Finally, both agents approached Ralph.  “Mr. Sanders, Are you operating an unsecured wireless network?” questioned the young FBI man. Oh yes! said Ralph momentarily distracted, “It was so easy to set up and so very convenient for our sales staff!  I just plugged it in and it works great!”

“Did you by chance think about who else could be using it?”,  snarled the frustrated senior agent. “And what they might be using it for!” blurted out the other agent. But if it was someone else, we are innocent! cried Ralph. “It’s just possible you are” admitted the fed.

“Can we get our workstations back then?”, asked Ralph?  “Sure you can,  just as soon as our labs are finished with them” answered the young agent as he climbed into the van. “Shouldn’t take more than a couple of months” called out the senior agent as their van pulled out of the driveway.

“Who knew” Ralph exclaimed, not knowing it would be for the last time, he locked the building.

First off, be assured that your computer is in trouble and is really infected. The problem is that the actual infection is the program reporting the problems. Most often the problems being reported are not actually infecting your computer, as they want you to waste your time targeting non-existent issues, hoping you will eventually  pay them off in frustration. Invariably, the rogue security program will also open up your system to be infected by other malicious programs that will further compromise your system. You certainly do need to clean up your system, but paying the scammers that infected your machine will not do the trick.

The first thing you should do if you see one of these fake programs pop up on your computer is to remove internet access from the computer to avoid further nasties from being put on your computer. If you are not comfortable trying to remove the infections yourself, you should turn off the computer right away and not use it until the problem is fixed.

Disinfecting your computer can be tedious as many of these malware based security programs will make changes to your computer that block access to legitimate web sites, interfere with antivirus and malware scanners, and they often replicate themselves as fast as you remove them. If you have all your data files backed up and a means of reinstalling all your programs, then running the factory recovery option that comes with most name brand computers is an effective but time consuming strategy to dealing with the issue. You will need to reinstall all the operating system updates, reload all your data files from your backups, and reinstall any programs that did not come with computer.

I of course recommend that your best strategy to deal with the issue is to have a professional disinfect the computer. Just watch out for those that profess to disinfect the system, but really just run a factory recovery or perform a clean operating system install. If you have important data files such as pictures, word processing documents, or even a large music library, then you may end up loosing these data files.