It's October 2009 and I have not posted here since last November LAST year. It's not that I have any more time today just that I feel guilty for not at least posting something. The summer went far too fast and the new school year is well under way.
Fix My PC 2 is keeping me very busy with new viruses and Trojans infecting machines every week. One of the most frequent questions I get from my customers is "I have an Antivirus so how come I still get these infections". My reply is simple, you have seat belts in your car, you have anti lock brakes and airbags but if you insist on driving off a cliff you will probably die. In the case of your computer if you allow your antivirus to do it's job, stay up to date with the latest virus definitions and respond appropriately when it pops up and tells you to act on a found infection you will keep your computer clean of these annoying, time consuming and ultimately expensive infections. I am still advocating the use of AVG Anti virus for my clients, and many times after removing Norton or McAfee not only will the PC run better but subsequent installation of AVG will find a Trojan or a Virus. This year I also had my first incident of a Mac virus and expect to see more as this platform becomes more popular. currently Symantec (Norton) is the only anti virus option I have found effective for Mac's
On October 22, 2009 Microsoft is releasing their new operating system, Windows 7. I have installed a trial copy and it is definitely an improvement over Windows Vista. They appear to have overcome the poor performance of the Vista systems and reduced a lot of those annoying warnings. Home networking is even simpler than Windows XP. However, I did not find the differences enough to justify changing from Windows XP but if you are currently running Windows Vista it is worth upgrading. Two caveats, one the cost of the upgrade is about $100 ($149 for a 3 PC family pack) and I mention this because Vista was SO bad I think Microsoft should be giving this away for FREE. Two, upgrades to operating systems NEVER work as well as a "clean install". This means backing up all your data, music, pictures and documents, wiping your hard drive clean, installing a fresh copy of Windows 7 only (rather than upgrading an exiting XP or Vista install) then reinstalling your programs (do you still have all those disks and or download install keys) and then finally copying your backed up files back to the PC. This is a lot of work.
Finally, I continue to see PC's (and Macs) that are not backed up! Today there is no excuse, local, remote or both it is so easy. For local backups on the Mac use the built-in Time Machine on systems 10.5 and above. For PC's checkout a similar product from Geniesoft called Timeline (genie-soft.com/Products/genie_timeline/default.html $35). Remote solutions are also very affordable, checkout Mozy (mozy.com) Dell Datasafe (dell.com/datasafe) and Carbonite (carbonite.com).
I will not leave it another year before I write again and until then.
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