CrexTechs Blog

Like cyber-space and the virtual-world , the "cloud" is a metaphor. The "cloud" refers to an amorphous place where operations can be performed and data can be stored and accessed via the internet. We are encouraged to think of a vaporous place where data goes and we can get it when we need it. Like the sky and the clouds, the sun, the moon and the stars, we don't need to think about it,  it just there.

These metaphors are used to help people understand highly technical concepts but for a lot of us, they make these already mind-bending concepts unnecessarily confusing.

We know that when we create documents or upload pictures we use programs that came with our computer or that we installed on our computer.  We also know that when we save stuff (documents, pictures, music) on our computers, it is all stored on our hard drive. If something goes wrong we have disks to reinstall our programs.  We also have copies of our data (documents, pictures, music) on CDs, DVDs, thumb drives or other backup media so we don't loose everything.

Some of us upload our photos to a website like Flickr where we can access them and also share them.  When we use a website like Flickr, we are saving our data (our photos) on some server somewhere in the world. Like the sky and the clouds, we don't have to think about where, we just know that Flickr is taking good care of our picture files and when we need them we can access them.

Yahoo and Gmail are companies that also let us store our data online and use their program to access the data. If we use them for our mail server, they store our email for us and give us a nice interface so that when we want to check our email we can. Yahoo and Gmail take very good care of our email and they back it up all the time so if something goes wrong with one of their servers they can just switch over to another one or another one.

For businesses with lots of data and lots of transactions to make, it is becoming more and more attractive to store this data and perform these transactions on the internet rather than having to keep their own servers and drive and backups.  The overall cost of using another company to perform these functions can be big but is often cheaper than doing it themselves on site.

I once worked for a company where an extra backup tape that was made every evening was taken home by one of the administrators so that if something happened at the building, the data would be safe. We didn't, however, have a backup system of servers at another location. That would have been prohibitively costly. We had a narrow escape one summer when a huge storm passed by while the roof was being redone. The tarps that were to keep out the rain were not sufficient. We arrived at work the next day to find the place flooded. Luckily, the room where the servers were kept was not affected. Phew!

Even with a good backup, if the system of servers itself goes down, you're sunk if you haven't got another system.  This is not so crucial for individual users. It is relatively easy to buy a new computer, hook it up, reinstall the software programs and move the data file off the backup media and onto the new computer.  No so for a business. Getting a system back up and running can take days and can cost a business lost accounts or missed opportunities.

"Cloud" computing is designed to take away a lot of the headaches of running businesses and storing data. New "cloud" companies are offering businesses the ability to run their business and store their data "in the cloud", that is on "cloud" servers. The cloud companies take care of the system, the data backups and security at least to a point.  It will still be necessary to have security in place on-site just as Flickr users still need to concern themselves with the security of the own computer (or smartphone).

According to Microsoft and the gurus out in the cyber world, the Cloud is the future.

There are all kinds of issues around "Cloud" computing. Making sure your cloud company is reliable and that your data is really secure is an issue. Do quick Google search of  "Cloud issues" and you will come up with lots of information to learn more about the future.

The following is from a Vipre newsletter article warning Vipre users to be aware that there are scammers out there impersonating Vipre Support.

We’ve received a few reports of customers searching the web for technical support for VIPRE and unwittingly going to websites and calling entities purporting to offer “VIPRE technical support.” In fact, you can run a search engine query for just about any antivirus company, and you will see search results and misleading advertisements trying to drive you to third parties who will pretend to represent the company you’re trying to reach.

Here’s how the scam has been working:

• A customer searching for sales or technical assistance visits a search engine like Google and searches for technical support for their software.
• The customer unknowingly clicks on a third-party website claiming to offer the support services they need.
• The customer contacts the website by phone or email, and all sorts of scare tactics ensue, including instructions to download software and dire reports of malware infection and of how inefficient their PC is running.
• Customers are then told they need to purchase an annual protection plan for as much as $169 to solve their issues.

Always be skeptical of such claims.

If you purchased your Vipre subscription from CrexTechs, we should always be your first call (715)463-2365 when you are in need of support.

Here is some important contact info from Vipre:

• USA, CANADA AND CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA
• 33 North Garden Avenue, Suite 1200 Clearwater, FL 33755, USA
• Sales and Registrations: 1-800-336-3166
• Fax: +1 (919) 379-3402
• Technical Support: www.vipreantivirus.com/support

This is a long video (10 minutes +) that our tech guru, Vaughn, wanted to post as he is certain this knowledge has the potential to improve anyone's life.  A little too techie for me.

However...

For those women out there who are not tech savvey and couldn't care less about how to make a mother board, I suggest watching anyway. The narrator is a young Frenchman and his accent will make you happy to be alive!!

Enjoy!!

When you buy a new computer from CrexTechs or have your existing computer  worked on by us, we install a bundle of twelve programs selected specifically to help you save money and make computing more enjoyable and safe.  Here are a few of the programs we install.

• CrexTechs' remote support utility
• Malwarebytes
• CCleaner
• Defraggler
• Libre Office
• Cute PDF
• 7Zip
• ImgBurn
• Two browsers, Crome and Firefox
• And a couple of other things

To learn more about the Utility Bundle programs check out the right column under Helpful Links.  You will find CrexTechs Utility Bundle Information Sheet.

We have a mixed household at my house. At one end of the house is a Mac and at the other is a PC.  We are connected by a shared printer yet the battle lines are drawn, well at least until things start to go wrong, then my Mac user comes around asking for help.

At CrexTechs we also run both Macs and PCs, though we are heavier on the PC side. There seems to be a preference in the shop for PCs if only because Apple seems to have purposely make Macs harder to repair.

Mac users have been thumbing their noses at PCers for years gloating that they don't have all the worry about viruses and other malware while we spend half our time updating and running anti-virus software. Well, welcome to the club Mac users! The first major MAC ATTACK happened in the last few weeks in the form of the Flashback Trojan that took advantage of a JAVA weak spot and infected over 600,000 Macs.  The next round is coming and it's called the Sabpab Trojan.

At CrexTechs we have been using MacKeeper for some time now, aware that Macs are vulnerable even while the die hard users would have us believe otherwise.  There are other products on the market that may be equally as good. Mac users should be able to protect their machines for around $40.00 per year or less.  Sophos offers free ware for Mac anti-virus protection.

For more information on this latest news check out:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/16/sabpab-trojan-mac_n_1428156.html?1334591956

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/04/13/sabpab-new-mac-os-x-backdoor-trojan-horse-discovered/

When I was 20 and my grandmother had just passed away, I received her suitcase full a family photos and genealogical research. I put the suitcase away and didn't look at it again for 20 years. My second cousin who was in a generation between that of my parents and that of my grandmother called to find out where his own father (my grandmother’s brother) was born.  His grandchild was doing a genealogy unit in school and needed the information.

I had recently pulled out that old suitcase and started going through the contents after a trip to the genealogy library at the then new Minnesota History Center in St. Paul.  I'd been asked to do some research by an out-of- state friend. I'd just gotten curious about my own family history when my cousin called.  I was able to answer my cousin’s question about his father's birthplace but in doing so I found I had a lot of questions of my own.

One of the things I wanted to know was who were all these people pictured in all the old tin types, cabinet photos and carte-de-visite as well as the later snap shots and studio portraits. While some were labeled, I had no idea who many of these people were and where they fit in the family. I set about organizing my grandmother’s genealogical research creating as complete a tree as I could  then organizing the labeled photos according to lineages. The photos that were not labeled were another matter and there were a lot of those going all the way back to the mid 1800s and up to the 1940s and 50s.

I supposed that most of the unlabeled photos fit somewhere in the family. Photos were expensive in the early days of photography so most exchange of photos was between family. Later on however, more and more photos of family friends enter the collection complicating my task.

Based on the age of the photo (determined by type of photo and dress), where it was taken (if that information appeared on the photo or frame) and family resemblances, I was able to piece together the family photo tree with what I suppose to be about 95% accuracy. There  may be a few photos that I miss attributed.

I was able to determine the probable decade the photo was taken by looking into the history of photography and the history of clothing. The internet helped greatly with that task. But that wasn't enough to figure out who these people were. I had to resort to comparing photos I could identify with photos I could not.  I used a number of elements in my comparisons: the shape of the face , the jaw, the brow and eyebrows, the hairline, the shapes of the ears (the top edge and the earlobe) , the shape of the chin, the shape of the lips, the distinctiveness of that little area between the lips and the nose (called the philtrum, I guess), and the shape and size of the nose. Once I identified the correct family, the age of the individual and the spot in the family tree where he or she would fit gave me the identity in most cases.

I had pictures propped up all over the house trying to compare this one with that one. I ended up with only about 5% of pictures that I simply could not attribute.  Though recently (and this is about 15 years later) I was able to attribute one of these from about 1910.

After I got all that done, I realized I wanted to protect these images for subsequent generations and I wanted to be able to share them easily with family near and far. Digitizing the whole mess was the only way to do this. So I got myself a scanner and set to work digitizing these photos one at a time.  It takes a lot of computer storage since it is important to get a decent resolution image for printing later. Luckily,  most computers now days come with far more storage than the average user would ever fill up.

Hours of time went into digitizing all these photos and it wasn’t just my father’s side but over time I managed to accumulate all the photos from my mother’s side as well.  That both my mother and her mother were alive made identification of her side much easier.

Getting this done was a big load off my mind.  I burned a number of CDs to send off to my family and to store away. I have also done backups on thumb drives. I was able to use these pictures to create Power Point Presentations of my Dad in WWII, my grandmother’s life and my Dad’s father’s family who came over from Wales. It is really fun to have these pictures in a format that allows me to share them with distant family and in doing so they have shared their photos with me. The next thing I need to think about is putting it all together into a book but there is still time for that.

If you don't want to do all the scanning yourself, or if you have slides that you want to digitize, CrexTechs does offer this service. Check out our pricing on the pdf posted to this blog. Scroll down on the right column and look for Preserve your family photos.

It's been my personal policy for a long time that I don't do surveys whether solicited on the phone, in person or online. They are time consuming and every time I acquiesce with the promise that the survey is short I am sorry. CrexTechs doesn't do surveys either nor did my last employer. For a while there we were getting weekly requests by phone to do surveys for our purveyors but we always state our policy that we don't do surveys.

It seems sometimes that every company is doing surveys. Even the paint sales person at Sears asked me to go online and take a survey. Some employees insinuated that without enough positive surveys, they would not get their raise or a bonus. While I felt sorry for these folks, logging on to take a survey seemed to me a real imposition. As a customer, I do not like being made to feel guilty for not taking a survey.

Then there's the promise that you can make money doing surveys online.

Pop ups abound asking me to fill out a quick survey when leaving a site (never quick). Progress meters help but still, I think it is a bit much to ask customers to fill out these surveys. The sampling can't be scientific in any way if people are being guilted or paid off to take surveys.

More and more of these survey requests are proving to be bogus. Some solicit you on the phone, some on the smart phone, some online. I suppose some requests come through the mail as well. Not doing surveys has become a good policy of late as more and more fake surveys are being offered promising prizes, payment and merchandise. There has been a fake Walmart survey going around for some years now promising all kinds of incentives. Don't be fooled. This is a fake survey and you will be "phished" for all the information they can get out of you.

A good rule of thumb is, don't do surveys. If you are tempted to do a survey, only do those that are accessible on the company's website. Or get the name of the survey company and check them out. And don't ever, ever, ever give out any personally identifying information such as name, address, phone, cell phone, credit or bank accounts or even where you have credit or bank accounts, birthdays, social security numbers, names of family members. There is enough information out on the internet about each of us that can compromise our security that it is important to start protecting what we can of our privacy.

And always look for the security lock on the address line of any website you are on giving any survey information.

Here is a link to Walmarts online security page giving advise on protecting yourself from fakes that claim to represent Walmart.

One of Dennis' missions at CrexTechs is to educate all our customers to the perils of malware and to give you tools to protect yourself. Vipre Anti-Virus, Vipre Internet Security and Malwarebytes are the tools we recommend for the average user. Still, infections happen. Most users do not want to deal with their machine once it has been compromised so they bring it to us.  That is what we are here for.

But if you have the time and are someone who would like to try to clean up your own machine, here is a great step-by-step article to help you.  Plan on spending the better part of your day working on this especially if you don't have a backup of your important files or you are learning most of this as you go. You will need access to high speed internet and some kind of backup media (do back up your important files, if possible, before you start your clean up effort but don't back up to the same media that has other backups on it as you could infect a good but older backup that you may need).  And remember, if worse comes to worse, CrexTechs is here for you.

Note: This article recommends some free anti-virus programs. We stand behind Vipre. Some of these other programs could complicate your life as they don't always work well with each other or other programs you are running. So be careful what you download and install.

Disclaimer: CrexTechs does not advocate attempting to clean your own machine--things can go wrong so be warned. If nothing else, this article will help you understand some of what we do to clean your machine while, hopefully, preserving your important data.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/upgrade-your-life/computer-virus-remove-195435755.html 

If, after you have read through the article and watched the video, you are hesitant to go it alone, bring your machine in. This is what we do and we do it well!

With all the free blogging and great social media sites out there, there is no excuse for a business or an individual not to have a web presence. There is, however, one caveat: You have to be somewhat computer savvy and be willing to learn how to do a few things--I guess that's two caveats. There are a lot of possibilities out there for small businesses to have a web presence without spending a lot of money.

Check out this website for Log Cabin Soaps. Our friend Mary started Log Cabin Soaps a few years ago and realized right away that she needed to be on the internet, she needed a web presence for her business to be taken seriously. She asked a few friends with the know how to help her get started on Blogger where she created a site and over time has tweaked it. She is now learning Weebly, another free blogging site, so she can change up her site in more ways than Blogger offers. She uses PayPal buttons on her site so that customers can buy on line. It has taken her a lot of hours of learning and creating her site but she is very happy with the results.

Okay, so you aren't computer savvy and/or you don't want to learn how to do this stuff on your own or you don't have the time to spend putting it all together. Time is a big factor. Small business owners work long hard hours as it is and often the last thing they want to do is sit down at a computer to puzzle out a new program.

So what does one have to expect to pay to have someone else set up a website for them? It all depends on what you need from your website. Some sites only give basic information about their business: what they do, who they are and how long they have been in business, where they are located, how to contact them, maybe a few pictures--pictures are always good. Maps are good too so people can find you.

If you want to put in information that exceeds one page that will display on an average monitor, you may want to break it up into two or more pages. This adds a little cost but will keep the main page from getting too cluttered. An easy to use navigation system to let the view get to the other pages is essential. Fancy is nice but most potential customers want easy. They don't want to have to hunt for the information so an easy to read menu is good and will be the most economical.

What else might you want on a website. Not knowing what you want on your site can be a big impediment to going forward. The best way to decide what you need is to look at the websites of your competitors.  If your closest competitors are big box stores, look for a business the same size as yours even if it is in a different part of the state or country. This will give you a good idea of what you might want to have on your site. But remember, a lot of small businesses have websites that are far more splashy than they need or their customers want. Flashy sites can be intimidating to potential customers. Web site developers get excited about dramatic colors, exotic fonts, whirling and twirling objects and other gimmicky stuff that they then push on their clients. These things usually cost extra and are distracting to the customer who may have a hard time reading text or navigating the site because there is too much going on. Go for the basics and you will save a lot of money.

A basic website with up to 5 pages shouldn't cost more than $500.00 (about the cost of a car payment now days!). You may have to pay extra for a domain name if you don't already have one (there is a yearly fee to keep the name), a web hosting fee (the yearly fee to host your site on a web server) and a launch fee to get your site up and running on the web hosting server. This shouldn't be more than $100.00.

Once you start adding features to your site, the price will go up. Do you want to linkup your site with a blog or with Facebook or other social media? Do you need an events calendar?  Do you want to be able to update information on the site yourself (you will need the feature added to the site as well as training)? Do you want a slide show or a photo album?  Do you need to sell products from the site?  (Setting up a e-store with shopping carts and payment options can be pricey so you may want to add that feature sometime down the road. But you will want to let your developer know you will want the option to add an e-store in the future.) All of these things cost money and can be added later as your ideas about your site grow. But don't forget to negotiate.  If you don't need all the features offered in a basic package, you may be able to get the price down.

Start as small as you need to create a web presence for your business but get started. If you are on Facebook as an individual, set up a Facebook page for your business. Check out your on-line Yellow pages listing as well as other listings sites to see if there is a place you can add some information about your business. Google search your business and yourself to see what might be out there about your business already that you can add to. Join your local Chamber of Commerce and get your business listed in their directory. Invite your local newspaper to do an article about your business. There are lots of things you can do to promote you business while you decide what kind of website you need.

One last thing: The initial consultation where you talk about what you want should be free. Plan on spending at least an hour discussing what you want from a website.  And don't be afraid to tell your developer you don't understand something. Tell them to slow down if they are cover something to fast for you to get it.   And get it in writing!! Never let them start working on your site until you get it in writing what they will do and how much it will cost.

Social Media websites

Free Blog sites

CrexTechs Web development service.

Grantsburg Chamber of Commerce

Just got back from a much needed week away. Found out that March in western Wisconsin can be nicer than in Southern California on occasion! Drove through snow/sleet in I-10 just west of Palm Springs while Grantsburg was enjoying sun and nearly 80 degree temps.  Oh well, it was good to get away.

While gone I checked my CrexTechs email a few times just to be sure Dennis didn't need something that only I could provide. Luckily I was not needed since as the week progressed I checked email less frequently and stopped altogether by day 3!!

It is a bit disconcerting to return to a whole slew of new emails. Fortunately most could be discarded without a glance. Some incoming mail is dated and no longer relevant after a day or two.  Some just needs to be filed away in one of my many  subject files for future reference.

I do enjoy reading through my Vipre newsletters though as there is always relevant information even if I get to it a little late.  If you don't get the newsletter, you can always check out the current and back issues by going to http://vipresecuritynews.com/.

The latest issues of the newsletter include easy to use print-screens to help users get the most out of Vipre.  I love print-screens: they let me see just what I will be seeing when I am navigating through a new program.

Anti-virus software is an expense that if you are not running your scans correctly, is money down the drain. It is easy to forget that if your scans are scheduled for 1 am, and you shut your computer down at midnight before heading to bed, you are not getting a scan.  For a lot of people, scheduled scans are not convenient especially if they start up in the middle of a project and take 45 minutes to an hour and a half to run.

Learn how to manually run scans when the days computing is done then let Vipre shut the machine down when the scan is done.  It is easier than you think--the Vipre newsletter will show you how with easy to follow print screens you can print off  if you need to.

Have a look at the newsletter for step by step instructions on how to use Vipre to suit the way you live.

Also, if you are computer savvy and want to know what's new, the newsletter is a great way to get that info without having to visit the really geeky sites!!