Technical Tidbits

Thank you to the wonderful film crew and journalists of ABC World News tonight for the interview opportunity. ABC World News Tonight due to air 5:30 PM (Central Time) with Charles Gibson (barring any major world crisis) will air an interview with me tonight.

This is the first time I’ve ever had an opportunity like this and the film crew was so great! They made me feel as calm as could be expected given the circumstances. And the staff and journalists connected with ABC World News are very professional and friendly. It was one of the most positive experiences of my life to date.

So again, thank you ABC World News for the awesome opportunity and thank you again to the film crew for making it such a pleasant experience!

And if you get a chance to watch (and you’re one of our repair customers),  the entire World will know I’m leaving repairs and teaching here full time! Not many people get to retire on world news! ::WINKIE::

Debbie

written by Admin \\ tags: ABC, ABC World News, Charles Gibson, gas, gas prices, high gas prices, World News

Debbie says: I’m giving back! For a chance to win, donate now or add this application and help raise funds for IDOL GIVES BACK. Visit the application on my profile now!

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MICE Training & Technology is announcing formally our decision to remove ourselves from Partnership with Trend Micro and Symantec products. Although we’ve never done much with our partner sites anyway!

Here’s the first part of our decision….

In both partner plans, you have to purchase the CDs or skew products from a distributor. Our customers and clients don’t do that. We no longer go on site and install this stuff. Our customers and clients download their software.

Hello? Symantec and Trend? This IS the 21st Century!

Secondly, we can no longer support their products because they suck. Or as my sister puts it, “They suck pond water.”

Which is the second and final reason we stopped supporting and recommending them.

As many of you old timers know, we’ve given you unlimited support (unlike Symantec’s support site) for which we’ve never been paid. It’s become too costly to support Symantec and Trend without payment. And to be honest, we don’t want you to pay us to support their products because we don’t want you to buy them!

Symantec’s Norton Antivirus is so top heavy it eats up your resources and slows your PC to a slow crawl. Now I don’t know if it does that on the newer Vista capable machines, and frankly I don’t care. Because if Symantec doesn’t slow you down, I’m sure Microsoft will!

TrendMicro’s Internet Security 2006 was a god-send after dealing with Symantec/Norton’s AV. It ran well and fast. You never noticed it was there.

But alas, Trend must’ve grown up and grown big because their software went down the drain with 2007. I know that if you read my previous post in the repairs section that TrendMicro will slow down if you don’t undo the immunize function in Spybot, but I’ve done a clean install on a PC that NEVER ran Spybot and Trend PC-cillin 2007 degraded over time.

The minute I closed it down and disabled the running services in the management console, the PC sped up so fast I sat there with my mouth hanging open in shock. I could NOT believe it! The difference was unbelievable. (And I have a very fast running client who’s very happy and will back-up my claims here!)

So, if you have a PC that’s running Symantec or Trend Micro products, uninstall baby! You’d be surprised how fast your PC really is!

What do we recommend? Grab AVAST free Home or professional version. Right now, they are the best on our list for AV software. (And we are joining their affiliate program!)

AVG is okay, but the free version is extremely annoying. The coverage is great, but I really prefer the interface with AVAST. Even in the free version. But be warned! It talks to you! I mean in an audible voice when it updates or traps a suspicious message. The first time it scared the heck out of me!

Firewall Software? ZoneAlarm. They’ve recovered from their crappier versions and the newer ones work well. Either way, it’s better than M$ Firewall! (Ok, never mind that comment. ANYTHING is better than M$ firewall!)

And yes, we’ve joined ZoneAlarms affiliate program also! For now.

Stay safe, Debbie

written by Admin \\ tags: computer slow, internet security, norton, norton antivirus, pc-cillin, slow pc, symantec, trend, trendmicro

As if we’re not busy enough with this website and our clients, our eBay account was hacked this morning.

I received an e-mail this morning from eBay confirming that they had changed my e-mail address as requested. What???? My real name was in the e-mail BUT, the ISP address and the IP address of the alleged “me” did not match!

First of all, the IP address is registered to Road Runner according to http://ws.arin.net/whois/

I have Comcast as an ISP and a Comcast IP address, not Road Runner.

Secondly,  the ISP address is part of the “Blackhole” so it’s not a valid ISP.

Now, this raises two questions.

1. How did my account get hacked when my password was not a hackable one?

2. Why did it get hacked when there is nothing in the account that would be of benefit. No checking account information, and so forth.

Now, mind you, I’m not what you would call a “Conspiracy Theorist” but I’m beginning to wonder about some strange things I’m noticing recently.

I had sent in for one of those PayPal key chain automatic password generators and never activated it. (It was more for research then anything else.)  Could PayPal have purposely hacked my eBay account because I wasn’t using it? Makes you wonder!

The reason I’m suspicious of this type of activity is because I’ve seen some activity on our web logs that bothers me.  But more on that later.

For now, make sure your eBay account has not been compromised in case this is going around.

Now, back to changing ALL my passwords on every account I have to make sure they are tighter then they were before…..

Stay safe, Debbie

Debbie

written by Admin \\ tags: ebay, ebay account hack, ebay hack, hack, hacked, hacker, password, paypal

We go live on November 1, 2007!

written by Admin