External Hard Drive

More and more of our customers are getting external hard drives for backing up their data. With the ongoing fall in hard disc prices, an external hard drive is now the best way to ensure that all those precious family pictures are safe for years to come.

We have quite a few external hard disc drives here at PC Medic but the model we currently feel is one of the best comes from hard disc manufacturer Seagate. Available in capacities of 80, 120, 160, 250 and 320GB, what we particularly like about this USB 2.0 external hard drive is the broad base which prevents the unit from toppling over, the quiet operation and the passive ventilation which ensures that the drives run particularly cool. With Windows XP these units are plug and play - no installation or drivers required. We have the 250GB model in stock at €155, but can supply all sizes at competitive prices. Don't wait for your hard drive to crash before you get your back ups organized. Contact details at www.pcmedic.ie.

A Little Knowledge ...

...Can be a Dangerous Thing, as one of our customers found out recently. The customer in question had a 14-month old Compaq PC that they bought as a display model and, unfortunately, it was not supplied to the customer with a Recovery CD/DVD, as it should have been. When the PC became infected with viruses recently she took up the offer of her sister's boyfriend, who was known as pretty handy around computers, to fix it.

What the boyfriend did was to take a Windows XP OS disc he had lying about and reformat the harddrive and reinstall Windows. Talk about using a sledgehammer to crack an egg? The customer's daughter was upset to find out that she had lost all her digital photos which were stored only on the PC and had not been backed up before the re-install. The computer was returned to the customer who paid the sister's boyfriend "€30 and a couple of packs of smokes for his trouble".

A few days later we received a call from the customer complaining that they weren't able to connect to the internet since they got their "repaired" PC back. I called around and it didn't take long to see what she got for her €30. The reason she wasn't able to connect to the internet was that there were no drivers installed for the modem. Neither were there any drivers installed for the video card, sound card or network card - practically all the hardware on the PC was non-functional. As there was no way to download the drivers from the customer's house, we had to bring the system box in to the workshop, install a wireless USB network card and download the drivers from the HP site. It was while doing this that the Windows XP Activation reminder popped up informing me that the OS could be used for just 27 more days before it would self-destruct. At this point I got the feeling that things were worse than I initially thought. We brought Windows XP through the activation process, entering the OEM licence key on the side of the system box and, as I suspected, it wouldn't activate.

Compaqs are not designed to have their Windows OS reinstalled from a generic OS disc - they must be reinstalled either from the supplied recovery disc (missing in this case) or from the Recovery Partition that is found on the hard drive. To bring a Compaq PC back to its original factory settings, it is simply a matter of pressing the F10 key during startup and this will bring up the Recovery Options. From there, it's just a matter of selecting the required options and you have a factory-fresh PC in about 30-60 minutes. Unfortunately, when F10 was pressed on the customer's PC, nothing happened. This is most likely due to the reinstallation of Windows, using the generic OS disc, overwriting the Master Boot Record on the hard disc, thus making the Recovery Partition inaccessible. Solution? The customer had to order a set of Recovery Discs from HP at a cost of €38.50 and, when these arrive, she has booked us to perform the system recovery. I have suggested that she passes on our bill to her sister's boyfriend. She agrees.

Winfixer Woes

We've had two customers in the last couple of weeks who have fallen prey to a particularly aggressive piece of bogus software known as Winfixer. WinFixer - is a bogus antispyware and spam blocking application that attempts to market itself by surreptitiously installing adware on the user's PC. This adware aggressively and incessantly displays popup notifications in an attempt to convince the user that something (other than its own existence) may be amiss with the computer. The problem is typically initiated via a popup ad displayed during a visit to a distributing web site. Reports suggest that this initial popup is constructed such that any attempt to dismiss it (including clicking the 'X' in the upper right-hand corner) actually causes the adware to be installed on the workstation. From this point on, WinFixer popups are launched from the PC itself. Because of the intricate way in which the adware insinuates itself into its host (including making dozens of registry edits), successful removal is a tedious, manual process. When running, it can be found in Windows Task Manager and stopped, but before long it will start up again.

Ultimately what this piece of malware is trying to do is to tempt you into registering the software for $49.99 in order to "fix" the problems your PC is experiencing (which are caused by Winfixer). Needless to say, after registering the product, nothing much changes - you've just been conned out of $49.99. Indeed it may not end there. There are unconfirmed reports that the credit card that you used to purchase the subscription may be compromised and may be subject to unauthorized use and that the operation works out of the Ukraine, though neither of my customers reported this happening to them.

If you come across Winfixer on your PC, DO NOT buy the subscription - get a reputable anti-spyware program and let it try to deal with it, but be warned that many anti-spyware programs have difficulty completely removing it and pop-ups may still occur. If in doubt, contact us here at PC Medic.