Is your Company in our Directory?
Prestige Computer Repair
Prestige Computer Repair, virus removal and upgrades in Crandall, Texas
Think about this; once your email address is compromised there is really nothing you can do to get it back. Here are some tips to protect your email address from the spammers.
Dont post your email on public websites. There are spiders, bots crawlers or whatever you can to call them out there that do nothing but collect email addresses for spammers. This has become a parasitic business in the spam world. I personally think the information brokers and data collectors make more money than the spammers.
When signing up for a new account on a website be careful what you click and agree to. Often one of the options is share my email address with our partners. By partners they could mean the ad agencies that make money by bringing traffic to the website. These people often do this with spam.
Dont include your email address on public profiles. This is another place that data collectors troll for addys
If you must forward your jokes and funny pictures to your friends, use the BCC function of your email program to keep the entire list of your friends private. There are plenty of ways for spammers to get their hand on these emails and use them to send you spam or sell them to other spammers.
If you do get Spam in your mail dont bother clicking the remove me or stop these messages links in the email. Of course on legitimate websites this is ok but if your suspect at all that the email was unsolicited, dont click the links. In the spammer world confirmed email address are worth more than just plain email lists. By clicking these links you may only be confirming your address to the spammers.
Make sure your email client or web email account is set to block images in email until you decide that an email is legitimate. Spammers use what is called a beacon image, a small image that is unique to the message sent to you. This image, once loaded, confirms your email address to the spammer and also confirms the message was delivered.
Set up a disposable email address. Yahoo! and other email providers offer these. They give you a chance to decide if you can trust your email address with a site before they get your actual real email address.
Report Spam. Use your email clients spam features to make sure spam gets reported. The more IP addresses the good guys collect the better our spam protection gets.
Use your judgment when someone asks for an email address. Sometimes just being a skeptic is enough to keep your email address safe.
I have seen more hard drive failures in the last two years than I have in all the other years I have been doing computer repair. With that said I think I should let everyone know what can be expected with a loss of hard drive.
Lets start with a best case scenario on this one. You bring your computer in to me because its freezing up, or slow or making a clicking noise. If the hard drive is failing but has not yet completely failed I can create an image of it and replace it with a new one. Since I created the image you will have a new hard drive and wont be able to tell a difference with your machine. All your pictures music and programs will be just as you left them.
The next level of damage would be a hard drive that is already damage. In this case the dive is operational but it will crash when a certain area is accessed. Your computer probably wont boot but I can get to at least some of your information for backup. In this case all the programs on your computer and at least some of your files will be lost.
The worst case scenario unfortunately is the most common with hard drive failures. The drive crashes suddenly and without warning. In this case all your data and programs are lost. A new hard drive can be installed. The cost on this is usually around $125 to $150. The problem is that this does not include the retrieval of your data. Data retrieval for a hardware failure on hard drive usually starts around $750.
The moral of the story? Back up your data!
A battery backup can do more than just allow you to save your work before your computer shuts down in the event of lost power. It can also save your computer. As anyone who lives in Crandall knows a storm can mean loss of power. One other thing you may have noticed is that power doesnt usually just power of smoothly. It is usually a flicker followed my dim lights, clicks and surges. These surges can destroy a power supply or worse your whole computer. The cost of a power supply replacement is usually $100 to $120. This beats the cost of a new computer but both can be avoided by if you use a battery backup or UPS (uninterruptable power supply). These not only allow your computer stay on during the turbulent power flickers they also provide a buffer for the surges. This is much more effective than a simple surge suppressor. A surge suppressor will cut the power to the computer immediately when it trips. A battery backup allows you time to properly shut down a computer which minimizes the chances of lost data.
One thing to look for in a battery backup is a phone line and Ethernet protection. Fewer people are using phone lines now days but a good battery backup will have Ethernet (network) protection as well. This is especially important if your internet connection is through a radio on your roof (Wi-five). This antenna not only catches the signal from your local water tower it also catches the static discharge from lightening strikes. I have replaced more than a few network cards after lightening storms. These are cheap to replace. Usually around $15 but the labor will push the repair cost to $90 to $105.
Check at Best Buy, Wal-Mart or Microcenter or with me for the cost of a battery backup. Remember you can back up more than hard drives.
I have a lot of customers that download trials or pay for registry cleaners hoping to speed up their machines. Let me preface this article by saying that a registry cleaner is not a replacement for an antivirus program. They are simply a way to speed up your computer after you have removed Malware or if malware is not the problem with your computer.
One of the most popular is registry mechanic. This is a good program but its not free. On top of that it loads some things at start up and can use up some of your resources. A better and free alternative is CCleaner. It deletes your old temp files and removes unneeded registry keys. It also will allow you to disable start up programs but I would leave that part of the program alone unless you know what you need to run and what you dont. The two buttons that most users will need to become familiar with are Cleaner and Registry. Try these and let me know what you think.
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download
All information contained in these blogs are provided as is and without warrantee. Prestige Computer Repair and or Billy Posey are not responsible for any damages caused while using the information provided.
Ok, lets tackle a pet peeve of mine in the computer repair industry. This is a hotly debated topic among computer technicians and some people will argue that I am dead wrong on this one. When is it necessary to format and reinstall the operating system on a computer? I say rarely. Like I said there will be a few people who will adamantly disagree with me on this but I feel strongly on this one.
First lets visit the idea that its just faster to reinstall an operating system than it is to repair the computer. This idea comes from corporate IT guys who deal with computers that are all exactly the same and all have the exact same software installed on them. These workstations are set up for office duty and not as a personal computer. While they may have a lot of documents (word, excel, power point, PDFs) they probably have very few pictures, music and videos. Documents are relatively small compared to pictures and music. There is even a chance that most of these documents reside on a network drive and not the local hard drive inside the machine. For this reason the time it takes to backup the data on these is far less than what a home computer would be.
These guys also have at their disposal an image. An image is a copy of a hard drive. Its a file that can be loaded on to a blank hard drive that when finished leave the drive loaded with the Operating system and all relevant drivers and software including Microsoft Office and Adobe Reader. These are usually loaded with what is called a volume license. So the technician doesnt have to input the license numbers into the machine. This again makes the reimaging of a computer a better choice, but only in a corporate environment. Home users on the other hand could have any combination of software all of which have unique license numbers. This makes an image for home users impossible and requires the technician to actually install the Operating system with takes much longer than it does to simply load an image. Once this is complete they have to load whatever drivers were not native to windows (usually video, sound, network and chipset). Once this is done the tech has to run all the updates that have been release since the disk they use was created. Then reinstall all the software, if they have the disks, license numbers or install files. . All this can take hours. Much longer than it would take to run two or three scans and remove the viruses.
The other big problem that comes with an OS reinstall is the software that is currently installed on the system. Maybe the customer has it, most of the time they dont. They got it from a friend, lost the disk or downloaded it from the web. If they paid for it they may not have the email that gives the license number. The biggest concern is programs like Microsoft Office that can cost hundreds of dollars. Its a big misconception to a lot of end users that this is a part of the Microsoft operating system. For this reason they may not know what they are getting into when they agree to have their computer wiped clean. When I ask technicians about how they handle this, all too often they just shrug and act as if its not their problem or act as if the customer is to blame for the loss so who cares. Its this low level of customer service that really gets under my skin.
With all this said there are some instances when it is absolutely necessary to reinstall the OS. Hard drive failure and registry corruption beyond repair are a couple of reasons. These are rare and should be considered exceptions to the rule. But for the most part a computer can be fixed and its files and settings left intact by a good technician that takes the time to learn the methods of malware removal.
Well, really in my opinion, nothing. The press uses the phrase Privacy Concerns to sell copies like they use the phrase terror alert. Basically what happened was companies like Zynga (Farmville, Frontierville, Mafia Wars)hired third party developers to write some of the code for the games we all love (or hate). Some of this code allowed the advertisers on Facebook to gather your user ID number. With your User ID the companies could get your Name. Thats it, just your name. Not your email address. Not your date of birth, Social security number, mothers maiden name or blood type. Just your name. Facebook quickly fixed the problem or shut down the offending apps but now congress wants answers. Again just my opinion but I think this is 2 parts overreaction and 1 part slow news week. Mark Zuckerberg should just sit back and wait for a celebrity DUI or CEO scandal to take the press off of his back.
I have had a lot of customers say this to me My computer was slowing down so I delete a lot of pictures and/or documents but it didnt help. This is a very common misconception that I will attempt to explain in this article. I hope by reading this you will be able to know when it is and isnt necessary to delete files to create more Hard Drive Space.
First let explain that there are rare occasions when deleting files will increase your computers performance. This is only the case when your hard drive is more than 90% full. Windows computers need at least 10% of the available hard drive for something called a swap file. This file is used to copy internal data that you cannot see. Todays computers are designed with Pictures/Music and video in mind and come with large hard drives that the average user will not out grow.
To check to see if your hard drive is getting close to full follow these steps. Click on Computer for Vista or Windows 7 (My Computer for XP/Windows 2000) Look for the Hard drive that contains Windows (Usually C:\). Right click on the drive you want to check and click Properties. You will see a pink and blue pie chart. The pink represents the free space and the blue represents the used space. If you have more than 10% pink in that chart then deleting files will not help your performance. Hope this helps. Happy Computing!
RAM! No question about it. RAM (also referred to a Memory) stands for Random Access Memory and is gives the most noticeable performance increase of all the possible upgrades to a computer. RAM is also the least costly upgrade. The parts cost usually around $40-$60 for a 1 Gigabyte stick of RAM (Plenty for most users).
These days the minimum I would recommend any computer have is 1 gigabyte of RAM. This allows your computer to operate without having constant access the hard drive for more information. If you notice that crunching sound when you open a web page or program you are hearing your computer copying data from your hard drive to RAM. If you have sufficient RAM this will only happen for a short while (5-10 seconds) and then stop. If it continues throughout the duration of your online session you probably need more RAM.
One thing I have noticed is there are a lot of Windows XP computers out there with 256 megabytes of RAM. This was ok when these older computers hit the market in 2001-2002. This was before the service packs and before all the security upgrades that XP has received since. These updates cause the Operating system to use more resources. Most computers with Windows XP are still viable for today. Before you buy a new computer, check to see if your computer can be upgraded.
First of all Id like to thank the Greater Crandall Chamber of Commerce for inviting Valiant Media out to the last Chamber meeting for a presentation on the power of social media. That meeting inspired me to revamp the website and start a regular blog. This is the first post of many. I plan on offering advice on everything from how to make sure your files are backed up to the best free stuff on the web. Stay tuned and this will be your source for information on how to keep your PC up and running.
| Address | Serving Dallas & Kaufman Counties |
| Phone | (214) 683-2849 |
| Website | prestigehelp.com |
10 Things You Can Do (or not do) to Protect Your Email Address.
Date: 27 Oct 2010 Comments:0Think about this; once your email address is compromised there is really nothing you can do to get it back. Here are some tips to protect your email address from the spammers.
Dont post your email on public websites. There are spiders, bots crawlers or whatever you can to call them out there that do nothing but collect email addresses for spammers. This has become a parasitic business in the spam world. I personally think the information brokers and data collectors make more money than the spammers.
When signing up for a new account on a website be careful what you click and agree to. Often one of the options is share my email address with our partners. By partners they could mean the ad agencies that make money by bringing traffic to the website. These people often do this with spam.
Dont include your email address on public profiles. This is another place that data collectors troll for addys
If you must forward your jokes and funny pictures to your friends, use the BCC function of your email program to keep the entire list of your friends private. There are plenty of ways for spammers to get their hand on these emails and use them to send you spam or sell them to other spammers.
If you do get Spam in your mail dont bother clicking the remove me or stop these messages links in the email. Of course on legitimate websites this is ok but if your suspect at all that the email was unsolicited, dont click the links. In the spammer world confirmed email address are worth more than just plain email lists. By clicking these links you may only be confirming your address to the spammers.
Make sure your email client or web email account is set to block images in email until you decide that an email is legitimate. Spammers use what is called a beacon image, a small image that is unique to the message sent to you. This image, once loaded, confirms your email address to the spammer and also confirms the message was delivered.
Set up a disposable email address. Yahoo! and other email providers offer these. They give you a chance to decide if you can trust your email address with a site before they get your actual real email address.
Report Spam. Use your email clients spam features to make sure spam gets reported. The more IP addresses the good guys collect the better our spam protection gets.
Use your judgment when someone asks for an email address. Sometimes just being a skeptic is enough to keep your email address safe.
What hard drive failure means to you.
Date: 26 Oct 2010 Comments:0I have seen more hard drive failures in the last two years than I have in all the other years I have been doing computer repair. With that said I think I should let everyone know what can be expected with a loss of hard drive.
Lets start with a best case scenario on this one. You bring your computer in to me because its freezing up, or slow or making a clicking noise. If the hard drive is failing but has not yet completely failed I can create an image of it and replace it with a new one. Since I created the image you will have a new hard drive and wont be able to tell a difference with your machine. All your pictures music and programs will be just as you left them.
The next level of damage would be a hard drive that is already damage. In this case the dive is operational but it will crash when a certain area is accessed. Your computer probably wont boot but I can get to at least some of your information for backup. In this case all the programs on your computer and at least some of your files will be lost.
The worst case scenario unfortunately is the most common with hard drive failures. The drive crashes suddenly and without warning. In this case all your data and programs are lost. A new hard drive can be installed. The cost on this is usually around $125 to $150. The problem is that this does not include the retrieval of your data. Data retrieval for a hardware failure on hard drive usually starts around $750.
The moral of the story? Back up your data!
What Can a Battery Backup Do for you?
Date: 25 Oct 2010 Comments:0A battery backup can do more than just allow you to save your work before your computer shuts down in the event of lost power. It can also save your computer. As anyone who lives in Crandall knows a storm can mean loss of power. One other thing you may have noticed is that power doesnt usually just power of smoothly. It is usually a flicker followed my dim lights, clicks and surges. These surges can destroy a power supply or worse your whole computer. The cost of a power supply replacement is usually $100 to $120. This beats the cost of a new computer but both can be avoided by if you use a battery backup or UPS (uninterruptable power supply). These not only allow your computer stay on during the turbulent power flickers they also provide a buffer for the surges. This is much more effective than a simple surge suppressor. A surge suppressor will cut the power to the computer immediately when it trips. A battery backup allows you time to properly shut down a computer which minimizes the chances of lost data.
One thing to look for in a battery backup is a phone line and Ethernet protection. Fewer people are using phone lines now days but a good battery backup will have Ethernet (network) protection as well. This is especially important if your internet connection is through a radio on your roof (Wi-five). This antenna not only catches the signal from your local water tower it also catches the static discharge from lightening strikes. I have replaced more than a few network cards after lightening storms. These are cheap to replace. Usually around $15 but the labor will push the repair cost to $90 to $105.
Check at Best Buy, Wal-Mart or Microcenter or with me for the cost of a battery backup. Remember you can back up more than hard drives.
Free Stuff Friday CCleaner
Date: 22 Oct 2010 Comments: 1I have a lot of customers that download trials or pay for registry cleaners hoping to speed up their machines. Let me preface this article by saying that a registry cleaner is not a replacement for an antivirus program. They are simply a way to speed up your computer after you have removed Malware or if malware is not the problem with your computer.
One of the most popular is registry mechanic. This is a good program but its not free. On top of that it loads some things at start up and can use up some of your resources. A better and free alternative is CCleaner. It deletes your old temp files and removes unneeded registry keys. It also will allow you to disable start up programs but I would leave that part of the program alone unless you know what you need to run and what you dont. The two buttons that most users will need to become familiar with are Cleaner and Registry. Try these and let me know what you think.
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download
All information contained in these blogs are provided as is and without warrantee. Prestige Computer Repair and or Billy Posey are not responsible for any damages caused while using the information provided.
Just say no! (To format and reinstall)
Date: 21 Oct 2010 Comments:0Ok, lets tackle a pet peeve of mine in the computer repair industry. This is a hotly debated topic among computer technicians and some people will argue that I am dead wrong on this one. When is it necessary to format and reinstall the operating system on a computer? I say rarely. Like I said there will be a few people who will adamantly disagree with me on this but I feel strongly on this one.
First lets visit the idea that its just faster to reinstall an operating system than it is to repair the computer. This idea comes from corporate IT guys who deal with computers that are all exactly the same and all have the exact same software installed on them. These workstations are set up for office duty and not as a personal computer. While they may have a lot of documents (word, excel, power point, PDFs) they probably have very few pictures, music and videos. Documents are relatively small compared to pictures and music. There is even a chance that most of these documents reside on a network drive and not the local hard drive inside the machine. For this reason the time it takes to backup the data on these is far less than what a home computer would be.
These guys also have at their disposal an image. An image is a copy of a hard drive. Its a file that can be loaded on to a blank hard drive that when finished leave the drive loaded with the Operating system and all relevant drivers and software including Microsoft Office and Adobe Reader. These are usually loaded with what is called a volume license. So the technician doesnt have to input the license numbers into the machine. This again makes the reimaging of a computer a better choice, but only in a corporate environment. Home users on the other hand could have any combination of software all of which have unique license numbers. This makes an image for home users impossible and requires the technician to actually install the Operating system with takes much longer than it does to simply load an image. Once this is complete they have to load whatever drivers were not native to windows (usually video, sound, network and chipset). Once this is done the tech has to run all the updates that have been release since the disk they use was created. Then reinstall all the software, if they have the disks, license numbers or install files. . All this can take hours. Much longer than it would take to run two or three scans and remove the viruses.
The other big problem that comes with an OS reinstall is the software that is currently installed on the system. Maybe the customer has it, most of the time they dont. They got it from a friend, lost the disk or downloaded it from the web. If they paid for it they may not have the email that gives the license number. The biggest concern is programs like Microsoft Office that can cost hundreds of dollars. Its a big misconception to a lot of end users that this is a part of the Microsoft operating system. For this reason they may not know what they are getting into when they agree to have their computer wiped clean. When I ask technicians about how they handle this, all too often they just shrug and act as if its not their problem or act as if the customer is to blame for the loss so who cares. Its this low level of customer service that really gets under my skin.
With all this said there are some instances when it is absolutely necessary to reinstall the OS. Hard drive failure and registry corruption beyond repair are a couple of reasons. These are rare and should be considered exceptions to the rule. But for the most part a computer can be fixed and its files and settings left intact by a good technician that takes the time to learn the methods of malware removal.
Facebook Privacy Concerns: What does all this mean anyway?
Date: 20 Oct 2010 Comments:0Well, really in my opinion, nothing. The press uses the phrase Privacy Concerns to sell copies like they use the phrase terror alert. Basically what happened was companies like Zynga (Farmville, Frontierville, Mafia Wars)hired third party developers to write some of the code for the games we all love (or hate). Some of this code allowed the advertisers on Facebook to gather your user ID number. With your User ID the companies could get your Name. Thats it, just your name. Not your email address. Not your date of birth, Social security number, mothers maiden name or blood type. Just your name. Facebook quickly fixed the problem or shut down the offending apps but now congress wants answers. Again just my opinion but I think this is 2 parts overreaction and 1 part slow news week. Mark Zuckerberg should just sit back and wait for a celebrity DUI or CEO scandal to take the press off of his back.
To delete or not to delete?
Date: 19 Oct 2010 Comments: 2 so farI have had a lot of customers say this to me My computer was slowing down so I delete a lot of pictures and/or documents but it didnt help. This is a very common misconception that I will attempt to explain in this article. I hope by reading this you will be able to know when it is and isnt necessary to delete files to create more Hard Drive Space.
First let explain that there are rare occasions when deleting files will increase your computers performance. This is only the case when your hard drive is more than 90% full. Windows computers need at least 10% of the available hard drive for something called a swap file. This file is used to copy internal data that you cannot see. Todays computers are designed with Pictures/Music and video in mind and come with large hard drives that the average user will not out grow.
To check to see if your hard drive is getting close to full follow these steps. Click on Computer for Vista or Windows 7 (My Computer for XP/Windows 2000) Look for the Hard drive that contains Windows (Usually C:\). Right click on the drive you want to check and click Properties. You will see a pink and blue pie chart. The pink represents the free space and the blue represents the used space. If you have more than 10% pink in that chart then deleting files will not help your performance. Hope this helps. Happy Computing!
Best Upgrade for the Money?
Date: 18 Oct 2010 Comments:0RAM! No question about it. RAM (also referred to a Memory) stands for Random Access Memory and is gives the most noticeable performance increase of all the possible upgrades to a computer. RAM is also the least costly upgrade. The parts cost usually around $40-$60 for a 1 Gigabyte stick of RAM (Plenty for most users).
These days the minimum I would recommend any computer have is 1 gigabyte of RAM. This allows your computer to operate without having constant access the hard drive for more information. If you notice that crunching sound when you open a web page or program you are hearing your computer copying data from your hard drive to RAM. If you have sufficient RAM this will only happen for a short while (5-10 seconds) and then stop. If it continues throughout the duration of your online session you probably need more RAM.
One thing I have noticed is there are a lot of Windows XP computers out there with 256 megabytes of RAM. This was ok when these older computers hit the market in 2001-2002. This was before the service packs and before all the security upgrades that XP has received since. These updates cause the Operating system to use more resources. Most computers with Windows XP are still viable for today. Before you buy a new computer, check to see if your computer can be upgraded.
First Post!
Date: 17 Oct 2010 Comments:0First of all Id like to thank the Greater Crandall Chamber of Commerce for inviting Valiant Media out to the last Chamber meeting for a presentation on the power of social media. That meeting inspired me to revamp the website and start a regular blog. This is the first post of many. I plan on offering advice on everything from how to make sure your files are backed up to the best free stuff on the web. Stay tuned and this will be your source for information on how to keep your PC up and running.
Related items:
We provide all computer services. From computer repair, computer boost and upgrade, virus removal, software and hardware installation to file recovery, setting up network and internet security.
- 240 Glenview Drive
- +1 (361) 592-6790
ICertifiedGeek Tech Repair Service Store in North Dallas Plano Texas iFix Mac PC Laptop Windows Apple Data Recovery Virus Removal Slow Computer iMac Service iPhone iPad Screen LCD.
- 3131 Custer Rd suite 140 Plano, TX 75075
- +1 (972) 685-1669
Lyons Computers is a family-owned business serving this area since 1989.
- 914 Scott Avenue Wichita Falls, TX 76301
- 1 (940) 691-1727
We offer professional Computer Repair Services, network installation, Server installation and maintenance services We serve mainly in Boerne, Bulverde, San Antonio and other parts of Texas
- 113 Pleasant Valley Drive Ste 206
- +1 (343) 042-7
Amarillo's Premier Web Design Company. We offer Web Design, Computer Repair, Virus Removal, Network setup and repair all at affordable prices
- (806) 322-2866
Texas
company, product and service directory
company, product and service directory
Business Network 2008-2024
All rights reserved
All rights reserved