I recently went to one of my customers who is a farmer. He is breeding rare breeds of chicken and apparently you can not tell the sex of a chicken at an early age. You need to know this because sadly the male ones get the chop and its the female ones you really want. With these rare breeds there is a simple way to tell the sex of a chicken . In one breed its brown chicks are female and white chicks are male.
Anyway the farmer wanted information on various breeds and searched for "self sexing chicks" and you can guess straight away what he got. He clicked on one of the links and ended up on a porn page. His anti-virus was way out of date so he was a easy target for what is known as a driveby download: just going to a website can get a load of crap downloaded to your machine without you knowing.
It was easy enough to remove the virus/spyware that was installed but the moral of the story is to keep your anti-virus / anti-spyware up to date.
Thursday, 16 September 2010
Thursday, 8 July 2010
Google Adwords and other hangers on
I was given a £50 voucher by Google to try their adwords system. You may know that this is how Google makes their money and I can tell you how. I did a campaign based on getting people who would be interested in making their computer go faster, and who would not want that? This was a pay-per-click campaign, so basically they put your ad on a web page when someone searches Google. This is called an impression. You pay when someone clicks on the link to your website.
Google is very good at giving statistics about what clicks have occured and how much they cost. They allow you to limit your daily spend and limit your maximum charge per click which is a good thing otherwise you can easily spend alot of money. In the six weeks it has been in operation I have had 71 clicks with a minimum spend of 34p and a maximum of £1 a click. Kerching!
Clicks dont relate to sales, just that someone looked at your site. The trouble is that its clearly not customers clicking, its other advertisers. I have has a least three of these companies phone me to try to get them to do campaigns through them on Google, and that accounts for alot of wasted clicks in my opinion.
I have been in publishing for many years and have seen many tricks. This is analogous to a practice in advertising where a paper gets rival papers and canvases the advertisers in those rival papers to put adverts in their paper. They give you the blurb either way. If the advert was good they say go with us and expand your coverage, or if the advert was bad, they suggest that you might do better with their paper.
I have a customer who does sign writing, and Google has certainly expanded his business, but I feel that this type of advertising only really works in a niche market. I suppose you have to speculate to accumulate but in my business their are losts of players and the only way for me to get any results in advertsing is to stand out from the crowd and have a niche service. Frankly I have had a better response from the Yellow Pages because people who have a broken computer or do not have access to the internet wont find me from that type of adverstising.
Google is very good at giving statistics about what clicks have occured and how much they cost. They allow you to limit your daily spend and limit your maximum charge per click which is a good thing otherwise you can easily spend alot of money. In the six weeks it has been in operation I have had 71 clicks with a minimum spend of 34p and a maximum of £1 a click. Kerching!
Clicks dont relate to sales, just that someone looked at your site. The trouble is that its clearly not customers clicking, its other advertisers. I have has a least three of these companies phone me to try to get them to do campaigns through them on Google, and that accounts for alot of wasted clicks in my opinion.
I have been in publishing for many years and have seen many tricks. This is analogous to a practice in advertising where a paper gets rival papers and canvases the advertisers in those rival papers to put adverts in their paper. They give you the blurb either way. If the advert was good they say go with us and expand your coverage, or if the advert was bad, they suggest that you might do better with their paper.
I have a customer who does sign writing, and Google has certainly expanded his business, but I feel that this type of advertising only really works in a niche market. I suppose you have to speculate to accumulate but in my business their are losts of players and the only way for me to get any results in advertsing is to stand out from the crowd and have a niche service. Frankly I have had a better response from the Yellow Pages because people who have a broken computer or do not have access to the internet wont find me from that type of adverstising.
Wednesday, 30 June 2010
HMRC scam
Yet another scam.
I received a genuine letter from HMRC saying my claim for repayment, some £2000 would be transfered to my bank account. First of all I had not made a claim, and second it was not going to my bank account.
Suffice to say I rang HMRC immediately. It transpires that someone had submitted a self assessment in my name and was claiming back some tax. They assured me that they knew that this was a problem and would send me a letter confirming the problem. Nothing to worry about.
I immediately phone my accountant, who normally does the self assessment form for me, and he knew what it was all about before I had chance to tell him. Apparently the Revenue have been getting a number of these bogus claims. My concern was that his system had been compromised and that someone was able to get hold of my details. Sure you can get my name and address from Companies House, but would they not need my National Insurance number? So where did they get that from?
My accountant said it was not from his system and put the blame on HMRC, mind you he did point out that these people are pretty stupid, as I traced the sort code to a Bank in London so Iam sure HMRC can trace the muppet who is trying to get the money.
I received a genuine letter from HMRC saying my claim for repayment, some £2000 would be transfered to my bank account. First of all I had not made a claim, and second it was not going to my bank account.
Suffice to say I rang HMRC immediately. It transpires that someone had submitted a self assessment in my name and was claiming back some tax. They assured me that they knew that this was a problem and would send me a letter confirming the problem. Nothing to worry about.
I immediately phone my accountant, who normally does the self assessment form for me, and he knew what it was all about before I had chance to tell him. Apparently the Revenue have been getting a number of these bogus claims. My concern was that his system had been compromised and that someone was able to get hold of my details. Sure you can get my name and address from Companies House, but would they not need my National Insurance number? So where did they get that from?
My accountant said it was not from his system and put the blame on HMRC, mind you he did point out that these people are pretty stupid, as I traced the sort code to a Bank in London so Iam sure HMRC can trace the muppet who is trying to get the money.
Reinstalling Vista on DELL ha!ha!
I have just done a laptop where the customer needed the laptop wiped and Vista re-installed
Apparently he was given an install disk with the laptop and when he tried to do it himself it failed.
The real problem with the laptop was due to a faulty hard drive. If you are lucky you can sometimes get way without having to buy a new hard drive if you are willing to sacrifice some disk space. You can try to reduce the main partition until you have a working volume, thus avoiding the bad area of the disk. I took the drive out of the laptop and hooked it up to another machine to look at the partitions and found four! One was a bit of space at the beginning followed by a recovery partion, then the main partition, and finally another small unassigned partition.
I left the 10GB recovery volume alone, got rid of the small unassigned partition and reduced the main partition down to 100GB, formated and tested and was ready to install Vista.
Now here is the thing. The install disk is useless because to does not have any device drivers. The restore partition is ok but to get to it you need a working DELL windows system where you can use CTRL+F11 to fire up the restore process. I found a way to fire up the restore process by using a Vista Boot disk to get to a dos command prompt and using a tool called imagex on the tools folder of the restore partition.
The system restored nicely, just had to remove Mcafee and install AVG and some other software and it was done.
My bone of contention is that manufacturers say you can restore from a restore partition but if the whole disk is trashed then you have no chance, and if the windows system is trashed then you can not get to it. They want you to make your own restore disks. Its like the supermarkets wanting you to use the self service tills: and that get my goat because they want you to do their job for them aswell!
Apparently he was given an install disk with the laptop and when he tried to do it himself it failed.
The real problem with the laptop was due to a faulty hard drive. If you are lucky you can sometimes get way without having to buy a new hard drive if you are willing to sacrifice some disk space. You can try to reduce the main partition until you have a working volume, thus avoiding the bad area of the disk. I took the drive out of the laptop and hooked it up to another machine to look at the partitions and found four! One was a bit of space at the beginning followed by a recovery partion, then the main partition, and finally another small unassigned partition.
I left the 10GB recovery volume alone, got rid of the small unassigned partition and reduced the main partition down to 100GB, formated and tested and was ready to install Vista.
Now here is the thing. The install disk is useless because to does not have any device drivers. The restore partition is ok but to get to it you need a working DELL windows system where you can use CTRL+F11 to fire up the restore process. I found a way to fire up the restore process by using a Vista Boot disk to get to a dos command prompt and using a tool called imagex on the tools folder of the restore partition.
The system restored nicely, just had to remove Mcafee and install AVG and some other software and it was done.
My bone of contention is that manufacturers say you can restore from a restore partition but if the whole disk is trashed then you have no chance, and if the windows system is trashed then you can not get to it. They want you to make your own restore disks. Its like the supermarkets wanting you to use the self service tills: and that get my goat because they want you to do their job for them aswell!
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
Watch out for this scam
I have been advertising on the internet so I thought I had a chance at a big job when someone contacted me about fixing a number of computers.
The e-mail came from someone called Zoran Radusinovic and he first wanted the know if I could fix computers in volume. I replied yes I could, and asked for some details.
I received a reply giving a specification, basically asking to wipe 10 DELL laptops, put some software on them and clean them up. In my reply I gave a quote but asked if he had all the licenses for the OS and the other software he wanted installed.
His next reply fired up my spidersense as he wanted my address and phone number and went on about sending me a "check" and "shipping" the laptops to me. I live in the UK so I was suspicious that someone was sending me some laptops from abroad and wondered why they could not get someone more local to do the job. I queried him about this, asking if he was in the UK and he said he was American British doing a contract and needed a subcontractor to do this job, and that he would mail a cheque out to me for full payment of the work, and the laptops would be sent to me at his expense. This I thought a little strange as I would have asked for half upfront and the rest after the job, not all upfront. I gave him my contact details anyway, which is no great deal as this information is available on my website.
My next e-mail to him specified a time scale for the job and I asked him how he had found me to do the job. I had just started using Google Adwords and wanted to know if this advertising had worked already. I normally get work through recommendations.
The final e-mail I received fired off the alarm bells AWOOGA! AWOOGA! He wanted to send me a "check" for the job and the "shipping" and I was to pay the shipper's money from this cheque through Western Union: which as we all know is how scammers get their money without being traced.
I sent a reply saying I did not want any further contact, and that I would tear up any cheque that he sent me and that I would call the police if any laptops landed on my doorstep or if he used my contact details in anyway.
This is how I think the scam works:
1. The cheque is a dud. They get you to pay the "shipper" i.e. them; some money before the cheque clears so you loose out paying to get some nonexistant laptops sent to you.
2. The cheque is stolen. They get you to pay the "shipper" i.e. them; however these laptops do arrive but are no doubt stolen, so when you have done the job they get you to send them on to someone else and so you are effectively handling stolen goods, and when the banks chase you up over the cheque you get done for fraud aswell.
I have learnt from this experience. At no time did I get a proper name, address or contact number from Zoran. He signed his e-mails with the name Bill, except for the last one when he was again called Zoran. I looked up his name on the internet and got the name of an actor but then again he could have had the same name as a famous person. His e-mail address was with rediffmail.com which might indicate he is in the US or India but frankly he could be anywhere.
The moral of the story is be wary of any contact via the internet.
The e-mail came from someone called Zoran Radusinovic and he first wanted the know if I could fix computers in volume. I replied yes I could, and asked for some details.
I received a reply giving a specification, basically asking to wipe 10 DELL laptops, put some software on them and clean them up. In my reply I gave a quote but asked if he had all the licenses for the OS and the other software he wanted installed.
His next reply fired up my spidersense as he wanted my address and phone number and went on about sending me a "check" and "shipping" the laptops to me. I live in the UK so I was suspicious that someone was sending me some laptops from abroad and wondered why they could not get someone more local to do the job. I queried him about this, asking if he was in the UK and he said he was American British doing a contract and needed a subcontractor to do this job, and that he would mail a cheque out to me for full payment of the work, and the laptops would be sent to me at his expense. This I thought a little strange as I would have asked for half upfront and the rest after the job, not all upfront. I gave him my contact details anyway, which is no great deal as this information is available on my website.
My next e-mail to him specified a time scale for the job and I asked him how he had found me to do the job. I had just started using Google Adwords and wanted to know if this advertising had worked already. I normally get work through recommendations.
The final e-mail I received fired off the alarm bells AWOOGA! AWOOGA! He wanted to send me a "check" for the job and the "shipping" and I was to pay the shipper's money from this cheque through Western Union: which as we all know is how scammers get their money without being traced.
I sent a reply saying I did not want any further contact, and that I would tear up any cheque that he sent me and that I would call the police if any laptops landed on my doorstep or if he used my contact details in anyway.
This is how I think the scam works:
1. The cheque is a dud. They get you to pay the "shipper" i.e. them; some money before the cheque clears so you loose out paying to get some nonexistant laptops sent to you.
2. The cheque is stolen. They get you to pay the "shipper" i.e. them; however these laptops do arrive but are no doubt stolen, so when you have done the job they get you to send them on to someone else and so you are effectively handling stolen goods, and when the banks chase you up over the cheque you get done for fraud aswell.
I have learnt from this experience. At no time did I get a proper name, address or contact number from Zoran. He signed his e-mails with the name Bill, except for the last one when he was again called Zoran. I looked up his name on the internet and got the name of an actor but then again he could have had the same name as a famous person. His e-mail address was with rediffmail.com which might indicate he is in the US or India but frankly he could be anywhere.
The moral of the story is be wary of any contact via the internet.
Computer Support
This will be a blog of all the things that happen in my job in computer support.
Hopefully you will get some idea of what I get up to!
Hopefully you will get some idea of what I get up to!
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