Even someone with basic computer know-how would be able to piggyback on an unsecured wireless signal to access the Internet, download anything including illegal material, and see what you do online. Someone with hacking skills could even get into your personal computer files! This isn’t only a problem when you’re at home. Many free wireless networks in places like hotels and cafes are not properly secured so your information could be in danger there too.

There are a few different methods used to access unsecured wireless networks. One of the easiest and least threatening is sniffing. This just means someone is looking for an open network whether it be in your home or from a business. Once they locate one, the sniffer can then access sensitive information including your online purchases (with credit cards). You may have heard the term wardriving. These are sniffers who just drive around looking for networks. As long as you have a password, you should be fine. If you are using a public access point and password protection isn’t something you can count on, make sure anything you type into your computer is something you wouldn’t mind a stranger getting.

Your computer can also be “spoofed.” Most computers are set up for convenience sake to automatically sign-in to the network. A hacker can set-up a false network with a stronger signal and it will confuse your machine into using their network. The best way to protect against this is to manually connect to your wireless.

Like any encrypted technology, someone could just hack into your system by cracking the password. There are numerous programs available to help a hacker do just that. The best protection against this is to avoid simple passwords. Though it can be a pain for you, its best to use alpha-numeric passwords with special characters when possible. This means using both numbers, letters (capital and lower case), and characters such as . ? ! if allowed. Try to always have a minimum of 7 characters, thought more is better. For example, if you want to use your favorite vacation spot as a password, instead of tybeeisland make it TyB331sL4nD. See how I used numbers in place of the vowels?

The best security you have against wireless intrusions is knowledge. Know the risks and how to prevent them. If you want to be sure you’re safe, give us a call. Justin has years of network and security experience he will put to use for you.

I’ve caught the green bug like most everyone else.  At home, we separate recyclables from garbage and compost organic material.  At the office, Justin uses paperless billing.  There are so many ways to be more eco-friendly and your computer is no exception.  Here are three easy tips to Green Computing.

1)  Refurbished/Recertified or Reusing Machines.

This way you use an existing product instead of creating demand for more resources.  These computers are just as good as brand new ones and cheaper, saving you money.  Our supplier sells these earth friendlier products and we can help order the perfect one for your needs.

When you’re ready to clear out the clutter and chuck your old electronics, be sure they are disposed of properly.  Check with local recycling and garbage collection sites.  If the pieces are still serviceable, consider donating them to a local non-profit, like the community thrift store or church yard sale.  Not only is it better for the environment, its tax deductible!

2)  Energy Efficient Computers.

The manufacturers realize that energy efficient machines reduce both the demand for resources and your power bill.  According to energystar.gov, if all computers in the U.S. were energy star compliant, we could save $1.5 billion in energy costs and greenhouse gas emission reduce by the equivalent to the emissions of 2 million vehicles.  Don’t want to buy a new computer just yet?  Ask us how to optimize your computer’s energy use settings.

3)  Go Paperless!

To save money and resources, try to practice conservative printing.  You can easily share files and give permissions to other group members to make changes to the content with Google Documents and Drop Box.  If you have a g-mail account, you can access Google Documents at the top left of your e-mail inbox page.  There are several formats to chose from, including writing documents, spread sheets, presentation, form, drawing, or you can choose to upload a file from your computer.

Drop Box is a software download that backs up your chosen file online, and then syncs it up with all of the computers you have given permission to.  Your files can be on all of your computers, mobile, and shared with family, friends, or co-workers.  Now there is no need to waste the trees or your money printing and reprinting to share an idea.

Businesses can utilize online billing.  There are many programs and websites that offer this service.  Find the right one for you and your customers.  These products offer security of information, the invoice can easily be resent if deleted by the client, notifications of receipt, and no paper or ink cartridges to deal with.

So, jump on the green computing band wagon with us.  If you have any questions about how you or your company can be more technologically eco-friendly, contact us anytime!

That is where open source programs can be a real life (and money) saver.  Open source simply means that the developers believe that anyone should be able to use their software and do not copyright or charge huge fees for it.

Open Office: The open source answer to Microsoft Office.

Everyone uses Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access and Publisher, but the Office Suite can be expensive if it does not come pre-installed on your computer.   Open Office offers all these programs and it’s completely free.  There are two drawbacks: It does not include an equivalent to Outlook.  Also, when saving a file, you must select the Microsoft extension (such as .doc for a Word document).   You can download Open Office at http://www.openoffice.org/

Drop Box: Back-up your files online and share them.

When your computer goes down, there’s a moment of panic when you wonder when the last back-up was made.  Or even how to get to your back-ups.  Maybe your data is scattered over multiple devices.   This program syncs it all up via the internet and Drop Box account.   When you save or make changes on one device, such as your laptop, it will be available on all your devices and the data is backed up online.   It even bridges PC and Mac.  You can also choose to share folders with other Drop Box users, making it easy to send mom that video of the kids playing at the lake.   To find out more, visit https://www.dropbox.com/

Microsoft Security Essentials: Free Virus Protection.

There are plenty of virus protection programs out there.   It’s hard to sift through them all to find one you can trust and afford.   We use Microsoft Security Essentials, especially for a home computer. It’s up-to-date, finds and removes most threats, and (best of all) free!  Be sure you do not have any other virus protection software loaded.  Remove current software by going to your Control Panel, then Add/Remove Programs.  You can find the link to download Security Essentials under “Helpful Software” on our homepage.

You can also find other free downloads on our helpful software page at http://pccopilots.com/helpful-software/ This software is there to make your life easier, but if you need more help, just let us know!

First, let’s look at a processor, also called the CPU. This component is basically the brains of the operation. The more gigahertz (GHZ) a processor has, the faster your computer will run and the more expensive it will be. Another thing to keep in mind is terms like duo and quad. This means that the CPU will run as if it were two or four processors. Intel makes processors like i3 and i7. Same principles apply here: the i3 is for slower, lower end machines and the i7 is a high end powerhouse. Standard computers will run perfectly well on a two-core processor. If you run more complicate software, you may need to spend a bit more to get the performance you’ll ultimately need.

RAM, or memory, is another key component in your purchasing decision. This is where the information is stored while you’re using your computer. I would suggest at least 2 GB (gigabytes), but more may be needed. Both the CPU and RAM should have matching front side bus (FSB). This is the speed they communicate with motherboard.

Third, hard-drives are where all your files are stored. A standard sized hard-drive is at least 250 GB, though you can get them as large as 2 TB (Terabyte). One Terabyte equals about a thousand gigabytes. Newer solid state hard-drives have no moving parts, last longer and are more reliable, but are more expensive and have less capacity.

Though there is much more to your computer, these are three of the most important. As always, we’re here to help you with any of your computer needs. If you would like our help purchasing a computer or have any other questions/suggestions, please contact us today.

This could be a podcast over a screencast, but I wanted to give you some examples throughout. I vastly went over my two minutes, but hopefully you’ll get a little better understanding of why you need to use secure passwords. I also advocate using LastPass as your password manager and talk about that some as well.

(For better quality, change to 480p and go Full Screen)

We tackled developing a site that is more user friendly, integrates a new blog, and has a robust calendar of events. Also, jump on board and like them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter.

What is a web browser?

Some people still don’t exactly know what a web browser is or what it means to them. Instead of explaining all of this out in technical details, I’m not going to reinvent the wheel. Google posted an awesome short video on YouTube with a quick overview of what a web browser is.

Now, an easy way to tell what web browser you’re using is to go to http://www.whatbrowser.org/en/. It has the same video above, but should automatically detect your browser version and its released date to the left.

How do I secure my web browsing experience?

Now that you know what a web browser is, you should know how to safely use it.

There are several key security aspects when it comes to browsing the Internet. The first is of course your virus and malware protection.

Virus & malware protection

Make sure to always use an up-to-date antivirus program and regularly scan your computer for malware. I personally think that Microsoft Security Essentials is the best free antivirus program available at the moment. Another good anti-malware scanner is Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware.

Your initial step in securing your browsing experience (as well as your computer in general) is to download an antivirus program and an anti-malware scanner, update their definitions daily, and run a scan of your computer at least weekly. You can find the links to download these applications on our helpful software page.

Use the right browser and secure it!

Most people still use Windows and most still browse the web with Internet Explorer. Virus creators and scammers want to affect as many people possible so they usually target the security flaws in the most popular operating system and Internet browser. Aside from that, Internet Explorer is inherently very insecure. Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and even Safari are more secure than Internet Explorer when it comes to your browser’s default settings.

For 99% of users out there, Mozilla Firefox would be the best choice as a more secure browser to switch to. I tend to prefer Google Chrome to Firefox for speed and other functionality, so we’ll cover the steps for securing either browser for your computer.

Mozilla Firefox

Google Chrome

One last step to beef up the security of your web browser is to run it in Sandboxie.

Sandboxie is a fantastic little program that you can use to open your web browser in a “sandboxed” mode. While running your browser in a sandbox, Sandboxie won’t allow the web browser to write data to your system. Instead, it uses a separate area that Sandboxie creates to protect your system, program, and user files.

Click here to download and install Sandboxie.

Sandboxie should have automatically opened after installation. You shouldn’t need to edit any settings within the program, but when you close the Sandboxie window, it will give you a message that the program will continue to run in the taskbar, which is fine for it to do. The taskbar icon for Sandboxie should look like the image to the right.

After installation of Sandboxie, you should also notice a new icon on your desktop that looks like the image to the right. Whichever program you have set as your default browser should open up in “sandboxed” mode by double-clicking on this icon.

If your browser doesn’t open for some reason by default, you can edit the desktop shortcut to specify Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. To do this, right-click on the desktop shortcut and choose “Properties”. In the properties box, edit the text in the “Target” field from “default_browser” to “firefox” or “chrome” as shown in these two images.
Change the above text to the text below:
Click the “Apply” button and then the “OK” button at the bottom of the properties box and the shortcut should open up your browser correctly now.

To verify that your browser is running in “sandboxed” mode, check for hash tags (#) around the title in the top bar of your web browser as shown below.

By performing these steps and installing these programs and add-ons, your browsing experience should be drastically more secure. The add-ons that we installed for Firefox or Chrome will either inform you of shady links and websites or block ads, flash, and other scripts from running in your browser. Each add-on easily allows you to add certain websites to the “allowed sites” or “whitelist” which will disable the add-on for that site. They also easily have an option to disable the add-on entirely, which I wouldn’t recommend.

Create long, secure passwords or passphrases for your online accounts

This is usually the most difficult step for most people. A good password is key to protecting your online accounts from brute force attacks or easily guessed account access. Unfortunately, no matter how secure your password is, a keylogger can send your password directly to a malicious source. This is why a good antivirus and antimalware program is the first recommendation!

As I mentioned above, we don’t recommend that you save your passwords in your web browser because some spyware can actually retrieve those from your browser’s settings without even needing a keylogger. This is how a lot of accounts become hacked (along with web and email phishing).

There are a couple of ways to go about creating a secure password.

Some sites won’t allow passwords above a certain length, so in those cases, I would use a randomly generated password. For better security though, try using a long passphrase wherever possible. I will be going over passwords in the next 2 Minute QuickTips screencast, which should be uploaded this weekend!

I know this blog post has been a long read, but I really wanted to give as much detail and instruction as possible to help secure your online browsing experience. As always, if you ever need help with anything we cover in our posts, or if you have other questions, contact us today!

You can either attempt to recover your lost data or you can start building it at a fast pace from the ground up. Going through massive amounts of information as fast as possible to reconstruct it all.

Neither of those options sound fantastic to me. In fact both are going to cause long-term impacts on your business. Your systems are down, you have to hire someone to fix it all back, you have to work your employees overtime to fill in all the missing information, you might have lost client information, and many more long drawn out problems.

“Oh sure, but this can’t happen to my business!”

I have backups in place and I check them everyday. You do right?

I have this external hard drive that keeps all my information. Is it really keeping all your information? Do you check it?

I have a brand new computer and I am not worried about losing information. We fix brand new computers all the time! They break, fall over, get zapped by power, and much worse.

If we told you how many calls we get every week about data loss:

You would think we were just trying to drum up sales, and in fact we are!

But not because we make a lot of money off selling you data backup plans. We make way more money helping you recover your data or setting up your new system. We want to save you money! Seriously, if we can’t recover your data the only other option you have is to send it to Ontrack.

While Ontrack provides an excellent service and we highly recommend them. They are pricey, but they have you when you most need them. They know you want your data and you can’t get it without them. That’s a pretty good business model.

So seriously stop gambling with your business data. I know this blog post is very marketing oriented, but I don’t want you, as a reader of our blog to have to experience the drama and complete craziness of loosing your data when its so affordable to call us and setup a backup plan.

Think about what you would do at this very moment if you couldn’t turn on your computer because your hard drive just failed. Now what?

The reason is simple.

Do you have one?

Without a call to action no one knows what to click on.

Your website needs to have a huge sign saying,

Our call to action is the big blue banner on our homepage. We instantly tell customers of our 100% guarantee. We also try to sell remote support and data backup, which helps both residential and business customers at the same time.

Other great websites that have a fantastic call to action are:

Mail Chimp – http://www.mailchimp.com

Camp Fire – http://www.campfirenow.com

Notice the websites fades away in your eyes. The only thing you want to click is that big ol button that they of course want you to click. This must drastically increase their profit.

Want to have a little fun?

Show your website to a friend or family member who has never seen it before, and tell them to just explore and try to find out what the website is all about. Don’t direct them or help them in any way, just sit there and watch what they do. I bet you will be very surprised! Unless of course you have a great call to action!

Tell us about your website in the comments and we will take a look and reply!