ourpcnerd.com

Yep its been a long time between drinks here at ourpcnerd, but recently I have had to move my business from an office I had in my local town to back home. While that sounds omonious its been a good decision as I got to build myself a nice office in my backyard. Or as I call it my Nerd Cave :), so that would be why I haven’t posted at all. So now I am all settled in I hope to get back on track to posting some useful stuff.

Oh and I just got myself a Mac, an old iBook but since I am a PC guy its a big step so I hope to post a bit about that too.

Take care and cheers for now

Today Google offically released Google Sync for mobile phones including …

• iPhone
• BlackBerry
• Nokia S60
• Nokia standard
• Sony Ericsson
• Windows Mobile

Synchronize the built-in calendar and contacts on your iPhone with your Google account.

• Get Google Calendar events on your device
• View multiple Calendars in different colors
• Synchronize your Contacts with Google
• Have changes pushed directly to your phone

While i have been using NuevaSync and have found it a great option it still lacks a little polish and can be a little flaky.

So I have today switched to Google’s offering. It was simple to setup by following the instructions here

I did have some issues with it not syncing all my calendars or the colours associated with it.

After some digging around I discovered this about setting up the calendars you want to sync…

Sync: Choose Which Calendars to Sync
Print
Google Sync allows you to choose up to five calendars to synchronize with the Calendar app on your iPhone.

To select which calendars to sync to your iPhone, follow the steps below:

1. Open the Safari browser on your phone and go to http://m.google.com/sync.
2. Sign in with your account and select your phone from the list of devices you’ve set up for Google Sync.
3. Bookmark this page so you can return to it easily.

This got it all going in a flash as well as colours

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/topic.py?topic=13587

As a full time techie you tend to come across a lot of bad software in your travels. Most of the time I have to remove for people .
But in saying that every now and then you come across a few gems. One i will mention today is a little program called Startup Control Panel .

Startup Control Panel is a nifty control panel applet that allows you to easily configure which programs run when your computer starts. It’s simple to use and, like all my programs, it’s very small and won’t burden your system. A valuable tool for system administrators!

This little program has been around for quite a while and I have used it extensively over the years. It can be installed on a system running anything from Windows 98 to Vista with no problems. It creates an icon in the Control Panel and from here you can enable, disable or delete any item in the startup area.

But I hear you say why not just use “msconfig” from the Run dialogue box. Well yes I use that too but find it limited especially if you want to totally remove an item (this can be vital when dealing with Viruses or Spyware).

Take it from me and give it a try, I think you will find that it will become a valuable toll for anyone dealing with PC’s and PC related problems, from novice to expert.

Wow what a problem I had today. One of my clients has decided to migrate to Apple Mac’s. So he gets me out to move his historical email from a Windows laptop and desktop to Entourage. Sounds simple enough right??? Right???

Wrong and I must say I was surprised. I tried a few methods.

Saving individual mails to a USB drive and attempting to copy them directly into the program.

Importing the PST file using pstimport from Microsoft.

Last I tried was to convert them all to Thunderbird and the importing the resulting files that way.

Unfortunately none of these methods worked or even looked like working.

I am not saying that just don’t work, its probably a case of me not having done it before and doing a lot of trial and error. Either way I sure would love to know of a good reliable way to move mail from Windows format to a Mac format.

The Windows Blue Screen of Death or BSOD as we techies call it can be the bane of our existance.  I have spent long and frustrating hours trying to troubleshoot these messages. Initally i was like many who just shrugged their shoulders and put it down to faulty hardware or Windows biting the bullet. While this can be the case these messages are actually helpful in diagnosing the root of the problem.

The trick is knowing how to decipher the obsure combinations of numbers and letters that appear on the blue screen…see below

You will note that there are 2 “errors” here and they will help us to work out what the problem is. Now here is my secret weapon a website that has an excellent repository of information on these TROUBLESHOOTING
WINDOWS STOP MESSAGES

If you head on over to the site you will see a good explanation of what the messages mean as well as a huge list of them with explanations and hints.Using the search feature there I entered the fault PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA.

The search turned up….

0×00000050: PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
(Click to consult the online MSDN article.)
Requested data was not in memory. An invalid system memory address was referenced. Defective memory (including main memory, L2 RAM cache, video RAM) or incompatible software (including remote control and antivirus software) might cause this Stop message, as may other hardware problems (e.g., incorrect SCSI termination or a flawed PCI card). Use the General Troubleshooting of STOP Messages checklist above.

• You receive a Stop 0×00000050 error on a Blue Screen {KB 894278} Win 2000, Win XP, Server 2003 (with concurrent 1003/System entry in Event Viewer: possible Rootkit spyware infestation)
• Possible Resolutions to STOP 0×0A, 0×01E, and 0×50 Errors {KB 183169} Win NT, Win 2000, Win XP
• During setup {KB 171003} Win NT, Win 2000, Win XP
• Easy CD Creator 5.0 Does Not Function In Windows XP {KB 310628} Win XP
• How to Use Driver Verifier to Troubleshoot Windows Drivers {KB 244617} Win 2000, Win XP, Server 2003
• STOP Error When You Start Windows After You Connect a Scanner {KB 310869} Win XP
• Stop 0×1E in PROTCLS.SYS When You Undock a Toshiba Tecra 8100 {KB 284154} Win XP
• STOP 0×4E, STOP 0×1A, STOP 0×50, and STOP 0xA Errors Occur When You Try to Start the Computer {KB 271955} Win NT 4.0 (corrupt physical RAM)
• “STOP 0×00000050” Error Message in Stac97.sys After You Upgrade Your Panasonic Toughbook to Win XP Service Pack 1 {KB 329832} Win XP SP1

The above is the information we need to help us start to troubleshoot this error. While this is a lot of information with some time and a little patience and experience it is possible that this BSOD can be resolved without drastic measures.

Unfortunatley its not always possible to fix these and in the end a reformat and or hardware upgrade are the only options left, but should be considered a last resort. Of course your friendly PC tech will be glad to help if you get in over your head. But it is always nice to know what you are dealing with even if you cant reslove it yourself.

While I am not a big fan of musical ring tones plenty of people are. So its always nice to find a good resource to help make them rather than get ripped off buying them online or via SMS. There are a few PC based programs that will help you do it but they can be tricky and also a bit daunting to some.

Well along comes audiko . Audiko allows you to upload your favorite song to their site and then select the portion of it you would like to make into a ring tone. This is a very easy process, upload, edit then download. It does all the hard work and you can download the finished product  in different formats, upload to your phone and your good to go.

I stumbled upon this while looking for a network storage solution for myself. Kinda silly since I already have a 1TB USB drive but i like the ease and convenience of sharing whats on it across my network. Yes i could always share the drive but that involves keeping my PC on all the time or I could just get a Drobo. Unfortunatley they are kinda pricey and im yet to find an Australian distributor.

Well along came Addonics NAS Adapter.

NAS Adapter

While I have not used one as yet I sure am tempted to grab one…its about $50 USD so approx $100 AUD. While its still a lot of money its the perfect solution to anyone that has an exsiting USB hard drive and wants to share it on a network.

This litte device looks awesome and as quoted on their site it has a range of functions.

The Addonics NAS Adapter is a convenient and economical solution for adding any USB storage devices onto your LAN (Local Area Network). Once on the network, the USB storage can be shared by any network user, just like an ordinary NAS device. When use in conjunction with Addonics Storage Towers or Storage Racks, a Multi-Tera bytes storage with various RAID capabilities can be instantly added to the LAN. With the NAS adapter, you can custom build you own NAS appliance with RAID capability and plenty of storage expansion using Addonics family of Drive Enclosures, Port Multipliers, and IO converters.

Come built-in with a USB 2.0/1.1 connection and a fast Ethernet 10/100Mbps connection, the NAS adapter supports both SMB (Server Message Block) and the open source Samba network protocols, allowing for cross-platform access of all shared data for most versions of Windows, Mac OS X, and various Linux distributions. For remote users who are not connected over the LAN, the NAS Adapter provides FTP access for up to 8 simultaneous users anywhere in the world with an internet connection. In addition, the NAS adapter can also be used as a print server or as a Bit-Torrent downloading appliance.

Well if anyone actually reads this they will know ive been absent for a while…firstly my apologies..with work and family stuff its been low on my list ti update a blog. But now things are settling down and I’m going to spend some more time here and hopefully get a few new readers

Also Word press 2.7 is out and ive just installed it. Oh my what an improvement, you may not see much in reading this but the back end and interface for managing and posting is excellent and a huge improvement, so if you use Word press and haven’t yet updated I highly recommend you do. It gives me even more motivation to keep the blog up to date.

Well OMG after over a week of dealing with this I can conclude this is one of the worst infection I have dealt with in a long time. Infact from a couple of different points, it looks legit I mean the whole thing to the untrained eye makes you think its a valid product that will fix problems on your PC.

The inner workingins are horrible…it installs fake Blue Screens of Death, fake security warnings and actual Viruses.

Getting rid of it is a pain…you need to run Spybot, Adaware, Malwarebytes and AVG. Also if you have mutiple logins you need to perform the process on all logins as it infects them all seperatley.

Bottom line here people is if it pops up its BAD.

Practice safe computing and be careful what you click.

Thought I would write a little on this horrible fake and deciving software. Reason being is the 11 seperate clients in the past 2 weeks that have been infected by it. Probably not a lot in the grand scheme of things but I live in a town with a population of 3000 so 11 is a lot and they are just the ones i know about.

Antivirus 2009 is a clone of the infamous Antivirus 2008. Antivirus 2009 usually come up after you installed a video codec that come with Trojan, malware and virus. Antivirus 2009 normally generates fake and misleading system popup error messages so end-users will be tricked into purchase Antivirus 2009.

It is very important to remove all the components of of the Antivirus 2009 and all the malware and trojans that it might have come bundle with (such as zlob.trojan, trojan.vundo and Trojan.Downloader).

Yep this is a nasty one. Of course no one actually knows how it got on their PC but a simple read from the countless references I googled explains that it comes from sites of dubious nature, be it porn sites, warez sites or free music sites. In my experience its usually a teen or child in the family that has inadvertently downloaded it…but whos going to admit it

Once infecyed you get a myriad of pop ups, scan windows, hijacked web pages and even fake Blue Screens of Death. All trying to make you shell out $50.00us to fix these problems….its a SCAM none of it is real but its slick and persistant.

Now the clincher here is getting rid of it…it gets itself deep into your system and can be a bugger to shift. Generally I find a combination of Addaware, Spybot and AVG to be fairy successful in cleaning an infected system, run one after the other.  This takes time, patience a little know how too…but is preferable to giving the scumbags that make this your cash.

As at writing this I am trialing a program called Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware, which says it will get rid off it completley…I will know the results soon.

Moral here is just because it says its the be all and end all of your PC problems doesnt mean its actually true.