I have not posted for a while but this really got to me.
I have a customer, not that elderly, but they were caught out by this guy phoning them and saying that their computer had problems. The man convinced them that he needed to get remote access to their machine and that it would cost them £149 to fix the problems.
He said he was from Leicester, yet he wanted paying by Western Union because his main office was in the US. Right here I would be screaming "Warning Will Robinson, Danger!, Danger!" because a reputable firm would at least take credit cards. The man got my customer to set up a Western Union account and send the money to Equador.
The man then spent the day "fixing" the problem. I was called the next day because the same man rang back asking for passport numbers and driving license numbers. Only then did they get suspicious.
I looked at their machine and found that the man had just installed a load of software that did nothing or was genuine anti-spyware, which was free or low cost, certainly not enough to justify £149. At least the machine was not messed up.
The shock came when I checked their emails and found that the scamers had taken out TWO payments. They clearly had control of the Western Union account and were out to milk it. They were going for a third payment and were stopped by Western Union's identity check, and that's why they needed the passport number and driving license. My worry is that they may have the customers credit card details aswell.
I believe I have had a call from the same people today. The phone number is 02032869239 . Looking then up on the internet, they say they are from Leicester yet the number is London. This is the same line they gave my customer. I felt like letting rip, but just informed them that I knew they were scamers and politely said goodbye.
These people are despicable. Why is no one in authority doing something about this scum?
Thursday, 10 July 2014
Tuesday, 20 November 2012
Microsoft Exchange Server Tip
You have two methods of changing setting for Exchange Server. The first is Exchange Management Console a nice GUI program, the second is Exchange Management Shell a command line program. You would think that both programs would at least be similar in their operation but they are not. I prefer Management Console as it does not involve alot of typing. I avoid using Management Shell because you have to know the commands and options which are long and complicated and I often have to repeat the command because of a stupid spelling mistake. The problem I had involved mailbox access rights.
The company I was working for originally wanted everyone to have access to everyoneelse's emails incase they were not in that day and needed access, however the manager did not want anyone seeing his emails. All users were in a given group so I applied that group to all users. You can do this individually through Management Console via recipient configuration, mailbox then select a user and rightclick for manage full access permissions, but it is quicker via Management Shell. I used Management Console to remove this group from the managers email and thats when the trouble started. No one had access to the mailbox, including the manager. I looked at full access permissions in Management Console for the manager and another user I had not changed and they were the same so why was it not working? I found out when I used Management Shell and saw that not only had Management Console removed access to the group it had applied denied to it aswell, so anyone in that group was denied access to the mailbox, and as the manager was in that group thats why his mailbox was locked out.
Now to fix this I could have used Management Shell, but a far better way is to use PowerGUI by quest.com . Its a free tool which allows you to view access rights a bit better and gives a dialog when changing stuff. You still need to know how acces rights work but its alot easier than a command line.
The company I was working for originally wanted everyone to have access to everyoneelse's emails incase they were not in that day and needed access, however the manager did not want anyone seeing his emails. All users were in a given group so I applied that group to all users. You can do this individually through Management Console via recipient configuration, mailbox then select a user and rightclick for manage full access permissions, but it is quicker via Management Shell. I used Management Console to remove this group from the managers email and thats when the trouble started. No one had access to the mailbox, including the manager. I looked at full access permissions in Management Console for the manager and another user I had not changed and they were the same so why was it not working? I found out when I used Management Shell and saw that not only had Management Console removed access to the group it had applied denied to it aswell, so anyone in that group was denied access to the mailbox, and as the manager was in that group thats why his mailbox was locked out.
Now to fix this I could have used Management Shell, but a far better way is to use PowerGUI by quest.com . Its a free tool which allows you to view access rights a bit better and gives a dialog when changing stuff. You still need to know how acces rights work but its alot easier than a command line.
Tuesday, 27 March 2012
Lack of service.
Iam often buying stuff off the internet for the business. I use Ebay to buy old laptop bits etc and often you can get some great deals, but recently I have had some bad experiences with sellers. Individuals who sell on Ebay are great: they take care to describe the item an package it well but frankly businesses on Ebay need to take more care in what they do.
The case in point regards the purchase of two external disk drive cases. I had a customer who had the older IDE drive from an old machine and they wanted some data off the drive, however their computer only had SATA so their was no chance to add it as a secondary drive internally, only to get a usb IDE external drive. I found a seller on Ebay with a good reputation and 30,000+ feedbacks and was confident that they would do well, indead the stuff arrived the next day, but I spent the next two weeks sorting out the problem. The trouble was they sent usb SATA external drives!
I emailed them and they first asked me to email pictures of the problem through Ebay. Now the trouble was that Ebay does not allow you to send pictures through their system, so I emailed them directly. Their next email said the first email was a mistake and replacement would be sent along with a prepaid envelope to return the other item, however I was to give the returning item back to the postie who was delivering the replacement. Now I know couriers with do this but not the post office.
The replacement item arrived five days later but it was just one item, not both which I had clearly stated in my original email. The prepaid envelope was only big enough for one item so thats what I sent back, then I emailed them and they said I would get another replacement. That arrived, again five days later, so I spent two weeks sorting this mess out.
You would think that would be my only problem, but no I bought a load of stuff off Amazon. With the stuff direct from Amazon their was not a problem, but they have vendors who sell through Amazon and I bought 100 RJ45 plugs from such a vendor. I was running a bit low and was about to do a cabling job, but what I got was quite astonishing. I recieved a single RJ45 sent by parcel post! Again I complained and did eventually get the right stuff but that was a week later.
Iam dont appreciate spending my time sorting out other peoples problems.
The case in point regards the purchase of two external disk drive cases. I had a customer who had the older IDE drive from an old machine and they wanted some data off the drive, however their computer only had SATA so their was no chance to add it as a secondary drive internally, only to get a usb IDE external drive. I found a seller on Ebay with a good reputation and 30,000+ feedbacks and was confident that they would do well, indead the stuff arrived the next day, but I spent the next two weeks sorting out the problem. The trouble was they sent usb SATA external drives!
I emailed them and they first asked me to email pictures of the problem through Ebay. Now the trouble was that Ebay does not allow you to send pictures through their system, so I emailed them directly. Their next email said the first email was a mistake and replacement would be sent along with a prepaid envelope to return the other item, however I was to give the returning item back to the postie who was delivering the replacement. Now I know couriers with do this but not the post office.
The replacement item arrived five days later but it was just one item, not both which I had clearly stated in my original email. The prepaid envelope was only big enough for one item so thats what I sent back, then I emailed them and they said I would get another replacement. That arrived, again five days later, so I spent two weeks sorting this mess out.
You would think that would be my only problem, but no I bought a load of stuff off Amazon. With the stuff direct from Amazon their was not a problem, but they have vendors who sell through Amazon and I bought 100 RJ45 plugs from such a vendor. I was running a bit low and was about to do a cabling job, but what I got was quite astonishing. I recieved a single RJ45 sent by parcel post! Again I complained and did eventually get the right stuff but that was a week later.
Iam dont appreciate spending my time sorting out other peoples problems.
Monday, 5 September 2011
Someone Tried to Rip Me Off!
I produce a DJ program called Sound Sequencer. I have not done much work on it for a few years and would like to get back into it sometime, but frankly in these times you have to stick with stuff that makes you a living, and thats the computer support work. The program is still a good program and still out there in use and is for sale via my website, however I received an e-mail from a colleage informing me that my program amungst others that were being offered at a lower price on a website called tangoradio.co.uk
I looked at this website and indeed they were selling my program. I tried the phone number on the website but it was disconnected and had no reply to an e-mail I sent. The cheeky thing was that they had my demo to download so someone could have tried the demo, liked it and bought it from these people, then they would have come to me for support. The other scenerio I thought of was that they had cracked the registration code algorithm, which frankly isnt rocket science but deters most hackers.
I checked the site every day since but now its gone so at least someone was able to talk to the owners and get them to see the error of their ways.
I looked at this website and indeed they were selling my program. I tried the phone number on the website but it was disconnected and had no reply to an e-mail I sent. The cheeky thing was that they had my demo to download so someone could have tried the demo, liked it and bought it from these people, then they would have come to me for support. The other scenerio I thought of was that they had cracked the registration code algorithm, which frankly isnt rocket science but deters most hackers.
I checked the site every day since but now its gone so at least someone was able to talk to the owners and get them to see the error of their ways.
Friday, 26 August 2011
The Wonders of Fibre Broadband
I have a customer who was on ADSL but needed faster upload speeds due to their need to support some services directly on the web. Currently with Eclipse but I investigated fibre optic broadband providers in the area but the best deal was with Eclipse and it gave them the least amount of hassel or so I thought. Virgin was a contender but curiously enough BT said it was not available in their area.
I was curious about how this fibre broadband was going to work so I contacted Eclipse and they assured me that it a simple procedure. Apparently its done by BT and yet they could not offer this service in that area? The engineer would just need to change the face plate on the phone line and install a modem and away we go. I suspected that the fibre optic cable was not actually in their street but wanted to know how much copper wire there was between us and the fibre connection. There is a big green telephone mini exchange by the side of the road at the end of the street but no sign that it has recently been modified with extra stuff or that the road has been dug up to lay a cable. If the fibre connection was coming from the main exchange then that would be a mile of copper at least. This is supposed to be a fibre to cabinet (FTTC) connection.
The day of installation came. The engineer was supposed to arrive between 8am and 5pm but we saw no sign of him. Ringing up about it we were told the installation had been defered due to "customer request". What a load of crap. I know someone was there early, no later than 8.07 so unless the guy turned up at 8am exactly I dont see how we could have missed him. Could not get another date until 10 days later! and this is how they treat their business customers.
Next installation date came and an engineer arrived at 11 am. He installed the face plate and showed me the uplink and downlink speeds on his test equipment. He then installed the vdsl modem. We could have had a router from Eclipse but my customer has a Draytek Vigor 2820 which is a great bit of kit allowing ADSL or ethernet connection. You would think that BT would instruct its engineers on how their equipment works as he did not know how the modem would connect to our network. I was assuming the modem was a bit like the cable modems you get with Virgin and it was just a case of plugging in the ethernet cable a bit of DHCP and away you go. No manual with the modem so instead I spoke to BT technical support and realised it was PPPoE so once I had set up the router with the same Eclipse settings as we had for ADSL we had broadband. The BT engineer was nice enough to try to help and his remit was just to show that the connection was working but he kept going on about his responsiblity being only up to the end point and I felt that he just wanted to get out of there so I said that I would deal with it and ring techincal support if I needed help.
Now for the speed test. We were supposed to get 40mbit download and 10mbit upload but a simple test in the afternoon gave a speed on 17mbit download and 6.7 mbit upload. They say they guarentee a 12bit download speed throughout the day and I still need to do some tests to get a sense of what speeds they can expect. There are usage limits but these are quite generous at 200GB per month and its unlimited 11pm to 9am.
The customer really needed to upload speed as opposed to download. The previous ADSL cost £30 per month with a 20GB download limit, 8mbit download (6mbit at most really) and 0.5mbit upload. The new fibre costs £50 per month with a 200GB download limit, 40mbit download (17mbit best sofar) and 10mbit upload (6.7 sofar), so in all I would say that this is a good cost top benefit improvement.
I can see where fibre broadband is the next step to improve speeds by doing the FTTC stuff. You get fibre optic as close as you can to your home without it coming right up to your door, but even if it arrives in my area I still have 2 miles of copper cable to get to my house from the cabinet. At least my customer was only 50m away, and of course if everyone uses it, will we see the same old problem of contension ratios slowing everyone down again?
I was curious about how this fibre broadband was going to work so I contacted Eclipse and they assured me that it a simple procedure. Apparently its done by BT and yet they could not offer this service in that area? The engineer would just need to change the face plate on the phone line and install a modem and away we go. I suspected that the fibre optic cable was not actually in their street but wanted to know how much copper wire there was between us and the fibre connection. There is a big green telephone mini exchange by the side of the road at the end of the street but no sign that it has recently been modified with extra stuff or that the road has been dug up to lay a cable. If the fibre connection was coming from the main exchange then that would be a mile of copper at least. This is supposed to be a fibre to cabinet (FTTC) connection.
The day of installation came. The engineer was supposed to arrive between 8am and 5pm but we saw no sign of him. Ringing up about it we were told the installation had been defered due to "customer request". What a load of crap. I know someone was there early, no later than 8.07 so unless the guy turned up at 8am exactly I dont see how we could have missed him. Could not get another date until 10 days later! and this is how they treat their business customers.
Next installation date came and an engineer arrived at 11 am. He installed the face plate and showed me the uplink and downlink speeds on his test equipment. He then installed the vdsl modem. We could have had a router from Eclipse but my customer has a Draytek Vigor 2820 which is a great bit of kit allowing ADSL or ethernet connection. You would think that BT would instruct its engineers on how their equipment works as he did not know how the modem would connect to our network. I was assuming the modem was a bit like the cable modems you get with Virgin and it was just a case of plugging in the ethernet cable a bit of DHCP and away you go. No manual with the modem so instead I spoke to BT technical support and realised it was PPPoE so once I had set up the router with the same Eclipse settings as we had for ADSL we had broadband. The BT engineer was nice enough to try to help and his remit was just to show that the connection was working but he kept going on about his responsiblity being only up to the end point and I felt that he just wanted to get out of there so I said that I would deal with it and ring techincal support if I needed help.
Now for the speed test. We were supposed to get 40mbit download and 10mbit upload but a simple test in the afternoon gave a speed on 17mbit download and 6.7 mbit upload. They say they guarentee a 12bit download speed throughout the day and I still need to do some tests to get a sense of what speeds they can expect. There are usage limits but these are quite generous at 200GB per month and its unlimited 11pm to 9am.
The customer really needed to upload speed as opposed to download. The previous ADSL cost £30 per month with a 20GB download limit, 8mbit download (6mbit at most really) and 0.5mbit upload. The new fibre costs £50 per month with a 200GB download limit, 40mbit download (17mbit best sofar) and 10mbit upload (6.7 sofar), so in all I would say that this is a good cost top benefit improvement.
I can see where fibre broadband is the next step to improve speeds by doing the FTTC stuff. You get fibre optic as close as you can to your home without it coming right up to your door, but even if it arrives in my area I still have 2 miles of copper cable to get to my house from the cabinet. At least my customer was only 50m away, and of course if everyone uses it, will we see the same old problem of contension ratios slowing everyone down again?
Monday, 27 June 2011
HP DV6000 Blank screen
Just had a HP DV6000 laptop in which the customer reported to me as having a problem with the screen. It had been restarting itself or the screen freezing in use but now it would not even start up.
It did not take me long to research this problem. I found many references and alot of youtube videos on the subject. The problem is a basic design flaw. You have heat from the processor going directly over the graphics processor chip, so you have your GPU running hotter than your processor and if it gets too hot, the solder holding the chip melts and the chip becomes unseated. The processor and GPU are upside down on the motherboard so effectively the GPU is dropping out of the board.
The fix is simply dismantling the laptop, and carefully, reheat the GPU so the solder makes contact with the motherboard again. I used the blowtorch attachment for my butane powered soldering iron to limit the area to be heated. Once cooled down replaced the paste on the processor and GPU cleaned out the fan and put it all back together. Key Presto it worked.
I use a program called speedfan to monitor the temperatures and another called hot cpu tester to get the temperature up and all was good.
Iam a bit concerned about my HP DV9500 as this has always been very hot but then I like to run it at maximum power!
It did not take me long to research this problem. I found many references and alot of youtube videos on the subject. The problem is a basic design flaw. You have heat from the processor going directly over the graphics processor chip, so you have your GPU running hotter than your processor and if it gets too hot, the solder holding the chip melts and the chip becomes unseated. The processor and GPU are upside down on the motherboard so effectively the GPU is dropping out of the board.
The fix is simply dismantling the laptop, and carefully, reheat the GPU so the solder makes contact with the motherboard again. I used the blowtorch attachment for my butane powered soldering iron to limit the area to be heated. Once cooled down replaced the paste on the processor and GPU cleaned out the fan and put it all back together. Key Presto it worked.
I use a program called speedfan to monitor the temperatures and another called hot cpu tester to get the temperature up and all was good.
Iam a bit concerned about my HP DV9500 as this has always been very hot but then I like to run it at maximum power!
Saturday, 11 June 2011
What is a book?
Iam always getting stuff through the door or on the phone trying to sell me advertising for the business. Little do they know that I come from a publishing background and do have some understanding of advertising.
An interesting twist has come my way which I feel the need to comment on. Small Print Publishing Ltd sent me some blurb enticing me to advertise in a book called "Start your own business". The book is bone-fide and published yearly even with an ISBN number but as long as I bought advertising space I could become a "Recommended Supplier". I understand magazine advertising and in such cases its always a playoff between editorial content and advertising: the more editorial content, the higher cover price, so a book generally does not contain advertising and has a high cover price. Free newspapers and magazines are at the other end of the scale with mostly advertising and very little content. This has always made me wonder about computer magazines because most cost £5 or more yet are stuffed full of adverts and those so called free software disks often contain paid for software advertising and free utilities you can download for free yourself from the internet.
I digress, so my question is how successful is this book. In newspapers and magazines you can give circulation figures, which by law you can not lie about; exaggerate a bit, say you print 5000 copies but you can say you have a 15,000 readership as up to three people may read that paper / magazine. You dont have to prove your readership and who is to say that your copies get distributed, just as long as that number of copies gets printed. With a book I have yet to see anyone who comes clean about how many they sell, they just use marketing blurb such as best-selling.
I went to the website www.smallprintpublishing.com and was disappointed as all it has was "website coming soon" but a nice piece of flash describing what they did and indeed they do small print runs of books. I have written software manuals for products and its so much easier to publish yourself, though most software manuals can be downloaded along with the programs these days.
I still come back to the advertising though. I know you get revised editions of books but have never seen one revised due to advertising. Just what is the content to advertising ratio? Does the book size depend on how much advertising they get? I was thinking about e-mailing them but wasnt that bothered. What I did find interesting was that I had received a direct mail marketing letter. If they had sent me a copy of the book I might have thought more about their offer. Oh there is also a print deadline at the end of the month just to get you to feel you will be misiing out on something - no surpise there.
An interesting twist has come my way which I feel the need to comment on. Small Print Publishing Ltd sent me some blurb enticing me to advertise in a book called "Start your own business". The book is bone-fide and published yearly even with an ISBN number but as long as I bought advertising space I could become a "Recommended Supplier". I understand magazine advertising and in such cases its always a playoff between editorial content and advertising: the more editorial content, the higher cover price, so a book generally does not contain advertising and has a high cover price. Free newspapers and magazines are at the other end of the scale with mostly advertising and very little content. This has always made me wonder about computer magazines because most cost £5 or more yet are stuffed full of adverts and those so called free software disks often contain paid for software advertising and free utilities you can download for free yourself from the internet.
I digress, so my question is how successful is this book. In newspapers and magazines you can give circulation figures, which by law you can not lie about; exaggerate a bit, say you print 5000 copies but you can say you have a 15,000 readership as up to three people may read that paper / magazine. You dont have to prove your readership and who is to say that your copies get distributed, just as long as that number of copies gets printed. With a book I have yet to see anyone who comes clean about how many they sell, they just use marketing blurb such as best-selling.
I went to the website www.smallprintpublishing.com and was disappointed as all it has was "website coming soon" but a nice piece of flash describing what they did and indeed they do small print runs of books. I have written software manuals for products and its so much easier to publish yourself, though most software manuals can be downloaded along with the programs these days.
I still come back to the advertising though. I know you get revised editions of books but have never seen one revised due to advertising. Just what is the content to advertising ratio? Does the book size depend on how much advertising they get? I was thinking about e-mailing them but wasnt that bothered. What I did find interesting was that I had received a direct mail marketing letter. If they had sent me a copy of the book I might have thought more about their offer. Oh there is also a print deadline at the end of the month just to get you to feel you will be misiing out on something - no surpise there.
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