Once upon a time someone buys a house valued at $190,000.  They put 10% down ($19,000) and finance the remaining $171,000 at 7%.

A few short years later the economic system stumbles… unemployment is over 9%, raises are not given, bonuses fade away.

Now $168,000 is owed on the house now and it’s only worth $150,000… it’s upside down.

Things are tight and rates are now under 4%.  Moving the rate from 7 to 4% would save over $350 a month… this would help.

When refinancing is discussed the bank states that the house is only worth $150,000 and, if you qualify, they’ll refinance up to 90% ($135,000).

You explain that you don’t have the $33,000 ($168,000 owed less $135,000 proposed) to put in to cover what the loan won’t cover… not to mention the $3,300 the bank wants in fees.

You state that you can no longer afford the house and that you’ll be forced to walk away…

Solutions:

A)  The banker holds the door open so that it doesn’t hit the borrower on the way out…

B)  The bank refinances the $168,000 balance at the sub 4% rate.  To do this they’d have to overstate the value of the house at $168,000.

Reality:

The person is moving out in two weeks.

We learned, once upon a time, that the smallest element anything consisted of was an atom.  Dogs made be made of 20 bazillion atoms while humans are made up of 2,000 bazillion trillion atoms… or something like that.

In the computer world the smallest piece of data is a bit.  For the sake of this conversation all data is made up of 8 bits… so, the “character” A is made up of 8 bits.  The word “apple” is made up 5 characters each made up of 8 bits.  Characters consist of letters, numbers and special items such as commas, spaces, !, @, etc.

Years ago we’d connect online using a modem and would “dial up” to the Internet.  These modem speeds started around 300 bps… bits per second.  Thus, at 300 bps, the communication speed was around 37 characters per second… about 6 or 7 typical words.

Pictures sizes are measurable in bits as well… thus a picture of 3,000 or 4,000 bits could take several seconds to download.  It was very common to wait a minute or two (if not longer) for each and every web page to load when one was surfing the Internet.

Over time upload and download speeds have increased dramatically.  In fact we changed the wording from dial up to “broadband” or “high speed” to denote an entirely different speed concept altogether as dial up moved from 300 bps to 1,200 then 2,400 and higher.  We now discuss data speed in terms of mega (millions) and giga (billions) of bits per second. 

We began our “G” (G = generation) series with 2G.  2G was the beginning of digital transmissions… thus everything prior to digital is referred to as 1G (analog)  The G series often times implies faster speeds but also includes other benefits… such as encryption.  Thus a 2G phone, for example, could not be “listened” to by normal eavesdropping methods.  2.5G could provide data rates of 56kbps (k = thousand) or 56,000 bits per second to 115 kbps.  2.75G is referred to as the Edge network offering speeds up to 236.8 kbps.

3G is a standard that can offer rates up 384 kpbs or 384,000 bits per second.  3G offers greater security over 2G as well as Mobile TV, Video on demand and Video conferencing capabilities.

This is a 650 word, 3 or 4 minute must read that explains “need to know” computer info.

Many people think of a computer as they would a solidly built piece of furniture.  They think that with little or no maintenance they’ll be able to use it for ever and ever.  A computer is actually like a finely built automobile… we still need to give it some TLC (tender loving care) and sometimes it can leave you stranded on the side of the road anyway.

A computer is made up of a few components… one of them being a hard drive.  A hard drive can physically vary in size from that of half the size of a deck of cards to two or three times the size of a deck of cards.  The important thing to note is that, for all general purposes, the hard drive IS the computer.  It contains all of your programs and data.  Your valued documents, pictures and music are on the hard drive.

A hard drive is similar to a CD player… except that the CD (platter) is sealed inside the CD player… you cannot change it.  When the computer is active the platter is spinning inside its housing at a rate of at least 5,400 revolutions per minute!  Many drives spin at 7,200 or 10,000 or even 15,000 revolutions per minute!  The “needle” that is reading and writing your stuff to the platter is sitting only a hair or two above the surface… and, on top of it all, the needle is actually reading and writing tiny electrical impulses that are magnetically held to the platter.  All of this leads to a very complex fragile mechanism.

A computer crash is something bad happening to the hard drive… a power fluctuation can disturb the electrical impulses sitting on the platter, the platter can become “scratched”, the motor in the drive can go bad or the a piece of equipment (the needle, the needle arm, the thing spinning the platter, etc) could die.

There have been many times when I’ve had to go out to a crashed customer and had them ask “Do these things normally happen?”  Absolutely.  Think of a hard drive as a tire on your car… it is only a matter of time that tire is going to give out.  Sometimes you can patch the tire and you’re good to go… other times you have a blow out and need to get a new tire.  When your hard drive “blows out” it is dead and all data is lost… period.

You cannot prevent a drive from crashing anymore than you can prevent a tire from blowing out… but you can be ready for it.  Just as you should carry a spare tire in the trunk of your car you should have a backup of your hard drive.  When your hard drive crashes you can pull your data from a backup and put it back onto a new hard drive (or new computer).

I’ve had some customers that get an external drive and MOVE all their data to it thinking that they are good to go.  The external drive is simply another hard drive… it can crash at any time.   The key is to keep the data on your computer and a COPY on the external drive… this way you always have two copies.  Even better is to have a third copy stored off-site… thus if the worse happens (the house burns to the ground destroying your computer and external drive) you can pull your data down from the Internet.  Carbonite is a popular off-site backup service that currently runs $55 a year.

I hope this helps to clarify the importance of the hard drive and to explain how vulnerable your data is.  I hate going to a customer and NOT being able to pull their precious pictures from a dead drive when they don’t have a backup.

Windows 7 libraries are a cool addition to the operating system and best shown by example.  A library is simply a collection of shortcuts to folders located on the computer.

Right click the Orb in the lower right hand corner of the desktop… this used to be the Start button… and click Open Windows Explorer.  You can actually open Explorer any way you wish.

Once it is open you’ll notice on the left hand side a Libraries icon/folder.  This Library folder is probably already open to reveal the four default folders inside of it (Documents, Music, Pictures and Videos).

I am a programmer and am going to create a new library for my programming jobs. 

So, I right-click “Libraries” and select New (at the bottom) and then Library.  I’m calling my new library Program Jobs.  Clicking this newly created library shows nothing inside of it except for an “Include a folder” button.   Clicking this button will allow me to navigate to a folder to add to this Program Jobs folder (or group).  I navigate to my desktop and select the “Test Program” folder that I made some time ago and click the Include folder button.

My new library now includes one folder that is actually located on my desktop.  All I actually did was create a shortcut to the Test Program folder.  Now I’ll add another.

Clicking the Program Jobs folder again shows its contents.  I now notice that I have the one Test Program folder in it and above that Test Program is a link that reads “Includes: 1 location”.  This means that my Program Jobs folder includes 1 shortcut… the shortcut to Test Program.  If I click the “1 location” link, I can add another folder.  I click the Add button that appears on the “Program jobs library Locations” dialog box that popped up when I clicked the Add button.  I then navigate to another folder… this one is located in my Documents folder.  It is called “Web App Job”.  I select the Web App Job folder and click the Include folder button.

Now my new library, Program Jobs, has two folders in it… Test Program and Web App Job.

Now, whenever I wish to view the contents of these folders, I can simply open Explorer, select my Program Jobs library and view away…   You can add folder shortcuts to the default libraries as well.  The caveat?  The shortcut cannot point to “removable media” such as a DVD or some USB flash drives.

We should begin this post by describing “Social Engineering”.  Social engineering, as it relates to this discussion, is the process of the bad guys fooling good guys into doing something unwittingly.

A popular example of this is when you supposedly receive an email from PayPal that wants you to click a link to fix some problem with your account.  The link will lead you to a fake PayPal page in the hopes that you will enter your user name and password that the bad guy can then use for their own purposes (since you entered that information on their fake site).  The social engineering aspect is that the bad guy fooled you into entering this information instead of using some kind of technology to capture your keystrokes or hacking the PayPal account by guessing a username and password.  This type of attack is categorized as phishing… the bad guys will email thousands of people hoping that a few will take the bait.

See my fake PayPal page here:

http://www.vslcomputers.com/fakepaypal/fake.html

It seems that a new method of trying to dupe people now is for the bad guy to obtain access to the good guys email, read the email and then generate a message based on what they’ve learned about their victim.

Someone could gain access to your account and send the following:

Hey Sheldon… this is Uncle Louie.  As you know I’m vacationing in Germany this week and I’ve lost my wallet!  Can you loan me a couple of thousand dollars to hold me over until I get back?  If you can, just send the money by following the instructions below… I understand you if don’t wish to do this… in fact I hate to ask but I’m desperate.  Anyway Gertrude and I are doing fine otherwise… We are checking our email sporadically via the library…  Thanks!

They finish the email with official looking instructions on how to send them money.

Who would fall for this?  How about the people who think the King of Nigeria is about to flee his country and wants to send YOU his $300,000,000 for safe keeping until he arrives in the states.  Or the people who have $2,000,000 waiting for them because they were left in a will?  Or the people that go ahead and pay the $59.99 to have their computer cleaned because a pop-up stated that they have a 172 infections and need to be cleaned?

We weary… be leery…

Defragging a hard drive takes fragmented files, files that are split into more than one piece, and puts them together so that the files are in one contiguous piece or chain.

Imagine taking your favorite 300 page book and throwing it up in the air and having all the pages fly all over the place in a shuffled mess.  You could still read the book… it would just take much longer.  When you were done with page 3, you’d have to find page 4 before you could read it.  If we defragged the book, we would be picking up all the pages and putting them back in order.

Files are saved in pieces, or units, onto a hard drive.  The larger the file the more units it has.  Over time, as files are deleted and added to a hard drive, they get split up so as not to waste space… read on.

Image that the first file you ever saved, file1, was 10 units big.  The next file, File2, is 15 units.  File3 is 12 units.

Your drive looks like this:

1111111111222222222222222333333333333

Now you delete file2 from your drive… you are left with file1, 15 units of empty space and file3.

1111111111               333333333333

Now you want to save file4 which is 20 units.  The computer will utilize the 15 units of empty space with part of file4 and put the remaining 5 units after file3.

1111111111444444444444444433333333333344444

File4 is “fragmented”.  After “defragmenting” the drive it would look like this:

1111111111444444444444444444444333333333333

Or

1111111111333333333333444444444444444444444

Either way file4’s units are all put together in one contiguous chain.

A badly fragmented drive can slow a computer down as it would need to read part of a file, lift the read head, find the next piece, read it, find the next piece, read it, etc.  The more it has to do this, the worse your performance will be.

This needs to be kept in perspective though… defragging a drive is a burdensome process.  You don’t want to defrag every time you delete a file or you’ll wear your drive out. 

In Windows XP you can analyze a drive and you’ll be told whether to defrag or not.  Vista and Windows 7 handles this automatically.

I have come across users that have switched to Firefox or Chrome or some other browser to try to avoid the exploits in Internet Explorer (IE) in an attempt to make their system more secure.

If you have decided not to use IE there are a couple of settings that you should make to the browser as Internet Explorer’s engine is used by other programs and processes such as Outlook and Microsoft Updates.

You’ll want to open IE and go to Tools | Options and select the Security tab.

Once on the Security tab set both the Internet zone and the Local intranet zone to the highest level (almost blocking everything).

Now select the Trusted sites icon and click the Sites button.  Add *.microsoft.com and *.windowsupdate.com and uncheck the “Require server verification” checkbox.

Click Close and then OK to complete the task.

You now have locked IE down to just allowing it to go to Microsoft’s and using Window’s updates.

I’d like to spend today’s blog clarifying the association between Microsoft’s Office suite and the operating systems that are running a computer.

Well… it happened again.  A client’s computer died (hard drive crashed) and they wanted me to reinstall Windows XP.  Upon completion the user was curious as to where her Excel program was.

Microsoft’s Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc is part of Microsoft’s Office suite.  In fact there are several flavors of the Office suite.  You have the varying versions (Office 2000, Office 2003, Office XP, Office 2007 and now the emerging Office 2010) that each contain the various programs (Word, Excel, etc) as well as the different versions of these versions…

Office Home and Student, for example, contains Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.  Office Professional has Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher and Outlook with a contact manager.  Office Small Business is Office Professional without Access.   You also have Office Standard and Ultimate.  The link that shows these differences is here (for now).

For the sake of this blog, Microsoft Office can be compared to any other program that you install after you purchase a computer… a game program for example.  If you likened the operating system (Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista or Windows 7) to an automobile you could say that Microsoft Office is a GPS device.  You can buy the car and then run up to the store and buy a GPS system.  Some manufacturers’, like Dell, will let you optionally purchase Office with your computer but this is simply to save you the leg work of obtaining the Office program yourself.

Often times the computer comes with an operating system restore CD… these CD’s do not contain the Office program… they contain the operating system (XP, Vista, etc) only.

I hope this helps to clarify any misunderstandings.

I love the backup solution provided by Acronis (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/).

Many backup solutions, especially older ones, provide a method of backing up your data… but not your programs.  Backup solutions like these make computer crashes very painful… but not fatal.

Acronis is an imaging backup solution in which the computer is backed up bit for bit… programs, operating system, data and all!  In the event of a hard drive crash you simply replace the drive ($100?) and restore the image… you are exactly back to where you were the last time you made a backup!  No programs to reload, etc.  You can schedule backups as well.

Acronis currently runs $49.99 a computer although I see that they have a “Buy Two for $79.99″ deal going on.

This is a 30,000 foot overview of the Windows 7 “upgrade” process.

Before we discuss Windows 7 “upgrading” let’s go back in time.

Pretend you had a machine that had Windows 95 on it.  You went out and purchased a Windows 98 CD, started the Windows 95 machine and then inserted the 98 CD and proceeded with an install.  Some time later you reboot your machine and it has Windows 98 and, for all general purposes, all the programs work and your data is in tact.  You have just migrated from Windows 95 to Windows 98.

Now let’s fast forward to Windows 7.

You can go out and choose to purchase one of many different flavors of Windows 7 (basic, professional, premium, etc).  You can purchase a full version or an upgrade version.  The upgrade version gives you a cost break in consideration that you already had a “qualifying” operating system already.

Here is the clarification:  Because Vista had such bad press, Microsoft is allowing people with XP (who shied away from Vista) to purchase an upgrade version of Windows 7 (cheaper).  The upgrade will NOT migrate from XP though.  You will have to perform a clean install and restore your data and reinstall your software.  If you have a Vista machine you CAN migrate to Windows 7 (as well as purchase an upgrade version).

So…  “upgrade” in this context means to be given a price break for a product and migrate means to move to Windows 7 and have all of your programs in tact and your data available.

You can but an upgrade version of Windows 7 if you have XP or Vista… but you can only migrate from Vista.  If you have Windows 98, for example, you have to purchase the full version of Windows 7.