Part one of a two part series is now available on the Petri website here

The Ambulance Virus

Infections to laugh about

This is the third post on the malware topic we covered in the last few weeks. This time we have decided to share with you something of a light-hearted nature. However, it’s good to remember that even though some of the viruses listed below might seem silly and funny, they remain computer viruses. 

All the viruses listed here are non-destructive, although they might not harm your computer they can be a real pain, especially if you’re sensitive to sudden and unexpected images and sounds. 

In our previous post we discussed the difference between malware and viruses and gave you a few tips on how to recognise if your computer was infected with malicious software. This time we want to bring to your attention something equally important – protecting yourself from fake antiviruses.

This post is the first out of three articles focusing on malicious software. Here, we will explain the difference between malware and viruses and point out some of the symptoms of an infected PC.

Computer infections are not new. They have probably existed as long as there has been software; in fact the first known computer virus - the ‘Creeper virus’ - was written in the beginning of 1970’s. Such infections spread very easily and probably every computer owner has come across some form of malware at some point in their life. Many of them might have not even been aware of the infection at all.

An infected PC might not seem a serious problem to an individual person whose computer usage is limited to checking their personal e-mail. If, on the other hand, you use your computer to do online banking, shopping or anything involving private data you might want to make sure that your computer is safe. Not knowing that you have a malware in your system might cost you (and your business) not only your precious data but also: credit cards being used, banking accounts being cleared. I don’t think I have to explain in more detail what damage it cause.

Of course there are different solutions to protect personal and business PCs, but with hackers and programmers being craftier than ever it is becoming more and more difficult to defend the data stored on your computer. Therefore it is important to understand what malware is and how they work.

Prolong battery life on your Laptops / Mobile Devices

Although mobile devices continue to become more and more powerful, battery technology hasn’t kept up at the same rate so the chances are you’ve found yourself lacking power at a critical moment at some point. For the frequent traveller a second battery is usually the best option (and help4IT can supply them for most devices), but there are things you can do to make the most of your existing battery:

• Disable WIFI and Bluetooth  -  when you don’t need them.  These services often have LED’s hard wired into devices and draw power even when you are not using them.

I decided to install Ubuntu on my existing Windows PC with a dual boot option which would allow me the option to access my Windows 7 operating system.

Ubuntu is a super-fast, reliable and virtually crash free operating system that isn’t susceptible to viruses and malware.  Installation is quite straightforward it just involves downloading the latest version from the Ubuntu website and burning a copy onto a bootable disk, installation only takes half an hour and some very concise instructions are available from the Ubuntu website - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GraphicalInstall.

The iLife Suite of applications provided with a new Mac (iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb and Garage Band) are easy-to-use, well-designed solutions for performing their respective functions. Even novice users can get up and running quickly with these applications so they can spend their time 'doing' rather than worrying 'how to get it done.

'iPhoto has a number of extra features such as 'Faces' which, once configured, automatically identifies the people in your photos. Also, iPhoto supports reading GPS tags so can display on a map where in the world your photos were taken. Garage Band, which has no built-in Windows equivalent, allows you to put together unique new music tracks using a myraid of provided audio samples'.

We would like to take this chance to wish everyone a very Happy Christmas from help4IT!

Office for Mac 2011 is due for release at the end of October 2010 and reviews from the Beta testers have generally been very positive. A "new" edition to the suite is Outlook 2011, previous versions of Office for Mac had Entourage, which was an Exchange compatible mail/PIM client but even Microsoft didn't feel it was worthy of the name Outlook. Entourage users often felt hard done by compared to their Windows friends, a rare experience for most Mac users by the sound of it, as a number of features were missing or didnt work properly.

By all accounts Outlook 2011 addresses virtually all these problems and delivers a very similar experience to Outlook 2010 for Windows, however there is one drawback. To achieve this feature set Microsoft have dropped support for Exchange 2003, you have to have Exchange 2007 or later. Apparently users of the Zimbra hosted service will encounter the same problem, although hopefully Zimbra should provide an update to fix this sooner rather than later.

So how to access an Exchange 2003 mailbox with Outlook 2011 then? The only solution (and the same applies with Zimbra and any other hosted services which might not work) is to switch to IMAP synchronisation. This will only give you basic email sync and not much else, but its a lot better than nothing! To see how to enable IMAP access to mailboxes on Exchange 2003 take a look at this article I wrote for the Petri website.