Scammed? SCAMMED!

Posted on by Jim Teague

Are you worried about being scammed? Or do you think it might have already happened? In July 2021 alone I have worked with three local people who have been victims of scammers, and I’m sure there are more of you, and I’m happy to help.

There’s no shame: scams are a huge problem, and the scammers are getting really good at it. I’ll share a few things below that should be universal Red Flags, and what to do about them. However, first let me emphasize that, above all, they need YOUR cooperation. You are almost certainly NOT scammed or infected with a virus unless you engage with them by either speaking with them on the phone or clicking a provided link. Here are the Red Flags:

  • A “cold call” from someone who says they are from Microsoft/Google/Amazon, or even from the IRS, Social Security, etc. What to do: hang up immediately. You can block the number, but they often use rotating phone numbers. Regardless, never engage them.
  • Suspicious emails
    • An email that appears to be from a friend, asking for something unusual, such as Google Play gift cards. What to do: delete the email – simply call your friend to ask if they sent such an email. Scammers can “fake” email addresses.
    • An email that appears to be from Apple or Amazon (or even the IRS or Social Security) that says there has been suspicious activity or charges on your account and provides a link to “validate your account information”. What to do: NEVER EVER click on the provided link. Delete the email immediately. If it is from Amazon or Apple, go to your account and see for yourself it there has been any unusual activity.
  • A pop-up screen on your computer that says you have a virus and should call “Microsoft” at the displayed phone number. What to do: ignore it and dismiss the web page – if you can. Sometimes your screen is stuck on that page, and you can’t change it. A computer service can help you get un-stuck. I can help, and there are many others as well.

Stay safe out there, and if you have any doubts, feel free to contact me.

What is a Solid State Drive (SSD) and why should I care?

Posted on by Jim Teague

Everyone knows what a hard disk drive (HDD) is, right? And a fair percentage know what a solid state drive (SSD) is, too. But the “why do I care?” part is where many people’s confidence in the subject matter starts to diminish, so let’s go into this from the beginning.

Let’s start at the very beginning. Remember those round paper-thin disks enclosed in a square envelope, called a floppy disk drive, or a “floppy”? You slid them into your PC or Mac to boot the OS, or to load a program. These were sorely limited in space and speed, but I’m sure you’ve forgotten all about that, even if you’re old enough to know what I’m talking about.

The next major innovation was the HDD. Because it was sealed inside an enclosure and manufactured to precision tolerances, this miraculous invention was able to store more information, and access it faster. Further technological advances brought faster speeds, larger capacities, and the resulting drop in price per megabyte of data. The HDD was permanently installed inside the computer, and was able to store multiple programs, reducing the need to do the “floppy shuffle”.

As computers themselves got faster, the limitations of HDD performance became much more of an issue. An HDD is somewhat analogous to a vinyl phonograph record (I hope you all remember what that was?), with the data being recorded on one or more rotating platters in multiple tracks. The difference of course is that the HDD rotates much faster, and data is accessible at random locations, not just in a single track that spirals sequentially from one beginning to one end. Multiple methods were invented to mitigate the reduced performance that resulted when trying to read or write data from/to scattered locations on the HDD, but only so much improvement was possible.

Enter the solid state drive (SSD) concept. Computer random access memory (RAM), or chip memory, provides extremely fast access to data. What if RAM data were stored behind a “disguise” that looked to the OS (Windows or MacOS) just like an HDD? No changes were necessary in the OS because it thinks it’s talking to an HDD…the only difference is that the data is available much, much faster. These SSDs were originally available in an HDD form factor, so that you could simply plug them into a computer to replace an existing HDD. Later, as they became more widely used in production computers, they started to adopt their own custom form factors because they didn’t need to be as large as an HDD to store the same amount of data.

At this point you may be wondering exactly how fast these SSDs are. Of course, as always, it depends on the application. I throw out 10x faster, but mainly to emphasize the huge difference in performance. Any detailed analysis would show that number as being too high or too low but let me provide a case in point. I had one client whose PC took 1 minute and 50 seconds to boot. After I swapped out the HDD with an SSD, it took only 20 seconds to boot. That’s not 10x, but it’s enough to blow your mind when you’ve been used to getting a cup of coffee while your PC boots.

What about reliability factors of HDDs vs. SSDs? It really depends on how you look at this (do I ever begin my answers to anything without starting with “It depends…”?) but SSDs are a little more reliable. HDDs are old technology and have been around for a long time, with ever-improving technology and manufacturing techniques, but as long as you stick to the more reliable brands, their failure rate is pretty infinitesimal. I won’t say which brands here online, but I’m happy to share my experience if you want to email me.

Finally, I’ll leave you with a few statistics on SSDs vs. HDDs.

Scam Alerts – Fake Customer Service Phone Numbers

Posted on by Jim Teague

I think the message has gotten across to most people by now that a company like Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon will never call you with a problem. These are always scams, calling you to alert you to some problem, whether it is a virus or an expiring account, or whatever. After convincing you that there is a problem, they will ask for money to fix it. This is usually the risk – getting your money – rather than actually infecting your computer, but sometimes it’s both. Bottom line: hang up on them.

I was recently alerted to a new scam, which is actually the above in reverse. One of my clients needed some help from Amazon customer service, and they googled for that online and called the resulting number. The “Amazon employee” proceeded to throw lots of alarming information at my client, offering to hook them up with companies that could fix the problem, for somewhere between $300 and $500. Of course, the client was told that they weren’t supposed to contact those companies directly – they would be connected by the rep because they had a special relationship with these companies. This should, and did, raise eyebrows. The fake rep offered a name and an employee number which was later confirmed to be as fake as he was. Luckily my client hung up and called me first.

So what went wrong here? Always start with the official, home website (in this case www.amazon.com) when looking for contact info for any major tech company. What scammers are doing are posting their own phone numbers on the web with the search parameters that will match “Amazon Customer Service”, so a google search will bring up these fake numbers.

Password Management

Posted on by Jim Teague

What is the number one issue I run into when doing work for a client? Hint: it’s not technical.

Most of the things I do for folks requires at least one password, whether it is hooking up to your WiFi, logging in to your PC/Mac, accessing your Gmail/Hotmail/Msn/Outlook/Quicken account, etc. And the number one obstacle I run into, by far, is that people don’t know their passwords. On occasion, this has turned something that should have taken less than an hour into a 4-hour job. More than once, it has prevented me from doing anything whatsoever.

I know, I know…so many passwords, so many accounts. While having the same password for everything simplifies matters, it is extremely risky, but today I’m not even going to go there. For now, suffice to say that being on top of your passwords will make both of our lives easier.

The typical root of the forgotten password problem is that when logging in to any account, Chrome or Edge or Firefox will ask you “can I save your password to this account for you?”, and of course most people say “yes”. But if you go to another computer (or, as many of you have done, buy a new one) that saved password info will be gone. Because that password was saved for you, you might not have had to type it for months, or even years. Now we get into the “Forgot Password” process, which is frustrating at best. It may ask you for a code that gets sent to one of your “devices” or another email account, and that doesn’t always make it across the wire.

Because people sometimes ask me “can’t you just look up my password somewhere?” it’s important to know that there is no way to find or recover a current password. Take my word for it, this is a good thing, and standard security practice – if there were an easy way to find your password for your Hotmail account, for example, then someone else could, too. Passwords are processed with what we nerds refer to as a “one-way encryption”. What this means is that the password you type is encoded in such a way that you can’t get back to the original (can’t be decoded), but it always yields the same encoded result, and the encoded result is what is stored. When you type the original each time you log in, it gets encoded and compared to what is stored: if it matches, you’re “authenticated”, which means you have satisfactorily proven that you are the person who can be granted access.

So, you ask, “what should I do?”. First of all, always keep track of your password yourself, even if you let your browser (Chrome/Edge/Firefox) keep track of your password. The best solution is to use a password management app, such as “1Password”, which keeps your passwords for all accounts, protecting it via encryption and a single master password (this is what I use, and if you’re interested, check it out here). But some of you may want a more straightforward, less technical solution. Writing it down isn’t the best option, because 1) it can be read by anyone else, and 2) you need to update it religiously when it’s changed (or if you create a new one). That aside, if it works for you, far be it from me to discourage it. And force yourself to use it occasionally: that will help verify if the one you have written down is current – maybe you forgot to update it in your password book last time.

I am investigating having password booklets printed for my clients. Though I recommend using a Password Management application like “1Password”, a password booklet is better than paging through a stack of papers or rummaging your desktop.

1990’s PC Practices That You Need to Stop

Posted on by Jim Teague

I’ve run across several people now who are still treating their PC or laptop as if it were 1995. They shut it down every time they are finished with it. Don’t do it! There are several reasons not to do this.

  1. It’s more harmful to your electronics, than just letting it run, or sleep, or hibernate. I’ll explain these later.
  2. Your PC often installs upgrades and updates in the background. Shutting the PC down in the midst of this process wreaks havoc on your operating system, trying to figure out where it was last time it was running. If you shut it down again while it’s trying to get its bearings, things can get worse.
  3. It takes longer to shut down, and much longer to boot up afterwards…even if it wasn’t in the middle of an update or upgrade.

Let me explain the sleep and hibernate states – I assume that the running state is obvious! The sleep and hibernate states make some sense compared to your non-computer concept of the two.

  • Sleep is a state where your computer isn’t running, but it is ready to wake up and resume in just a few seconds (usually 3 or 5 at most). The processor is at a low-power state, with RAM memory fully loaded, which is why it can resume very quickly.
  • Hibernate is a state where it is assumed that the computer will not be running for a longer period of time. The contents of RAM are written to the HDD so that it can be quickly reloaded when the computer resumes. This will take longer: it depends on how much RAM needs to be reloaded, but this typically shouldn’t be more than 10 to 15 seconds.

You can see how this relates to the non-computer definitions: sleep is something I wake up from pretty quickly, but if you’ve ever seen a bear, or a tortoise, or something else come out of hibernation, it’s obvious that it takes a bit to shake it off! However, if the computer is turned off, then it is essentially a newborn babe – the entire booting process is run from a “cold start”: loading BIOS, and then the operating system, which then figures out in what order to start up all of the myriad of programs, essentially from scratch. You can see why this takes much longer. If the computer was in the middle of an update and was “rudely” shut down, this will take even longer while the operating system tries to figure out where it left off, and where it can resume…or worse, start the entire process from the beginning.

A computer that is plugged in all the time, desktop or laptop, can be configured to sleep or hibernate under the “Power” options. A laptop with a battery should be configured to sleep: this uses a tiny trickle of battery, but it will switch to hibernate if the battery gets low enough. And a desktop can quickly wake up with a shake of the mouse or a tap on the keyboard.

Bottom line, there’s rarely ever a need to shut a computer completely down – this is probably why most people complain that it takes so long to boot…they are waiting on a complete cold start every time.

There you go…happy sleeping!

 

Meltdown and Spectre

Posted on by Jim Teague

There’s quite a bit of internet hysteria on these two recently discovered flaws in computer chip design. I wanted to pass on a little “common sense” information and advice, since these are pretty complicated.

First of all, most potential computer security weaknesses (referred to as “exploits”) are revealed after computers are hacked – i.e., someone exploits these flaws and causes some damage, and then software or hardware makers scramble to fix them after the damage has been done.

Spectre and Meltdown are not like that. Noone has yet exploited these flaws (that we know of). For this reason I call them “theoretical” exploits. Not that there isn’t a threat — but it is very difficult to exploit either of these, and they were discovered by people looking closely (um, maybe more closely) at computer CPU core design.

Essentially, every modern CPU has these flaws, but everyone is working on a fix for them. In fact, your computer may already be fixed. Just make sure you are current with your updates and OS versions – which is always good advice.

Want to save $10 every month?

Posted on by Jim Teague

Odds are, if you live in a single-family home, that you have a WiFi router/modem combo from either Comcast/Xfinity or Frontier, that they provide “free”. Well, check the fine print of your bill — it isn’t free. You’re paying, on average, about $10 per month, or $120 per year for this equipment. Worse, it’s not very good equipment — your cable provider buys them by the thousands because…well, they’re cheap. And to be fair, because every customer now has something they know works with their service.

But you can use your own equipment, and I can replace the cable company’s router with something better that will cost between $70 and $80 (equipment cost), so you’ve paid for it in way less than a year. I’ve done this multiple times, and it’s very easy.

NOTE: Whether I do this, or someone else does it, keep in mind two things:

  1. You will need to call your cable provider to make sure they stop billing you monthly for their equipment — it doesn’t happen automatically.
  2. Very important…either keep the cable company’s equipment, or return it to them and get a receipt! If you move, or otherwise cancel your service, they will charge you for their equipment they assume you still have. So, either show them the receipt, or hand them over their equipment.

That’s it for now…

 

How (and where) do I get rid of old equipment?

Posted on by Jim Teague

For my first blog, I thought it would be useful to write about something that anyone can do – responsibly dispose of old equipment. First, don’t just throw it in the trash!

I charge a small fee to do this for you, but anyone who can find their way to PC Recycle can do the same thing for the price of the gas to drive there and back.

PC Recycle (I go to the one in Bellevue most often) will take old PCs, laptops, keyboards, etc. for free, as long as you’re not a business dropping hundreds of them off at the same time. Make sure you erase, or remove, the hard drive first.

They are at 13107 NE 20th Street, and you can call them at 425.881.4444.