PC Support Services

I have a customer who has 3 laptops and googlemail email accounts. Initially they simply used a web browser to access their accounts but as their business is growing they decided that they wanted to use Googles calendar too.

Google offers an 'exchange' type service for smart phones but not for PC's which meant that while Outlook could access their email it couldn't do anything with their contacts or calendars. After a bit of hunting I found 2 free programmes that will allow Outlook to sync with the calendar.

Result? Three happy bunnies! Read more about Getting Microsoft Outlook and Google to talk to each other.

Today a story on the BBC website tells of fake security software designed for Apple Macs. While this is a rare occurrence it is not unusual.

The software, once installed, claims to find hundreds if not thousands of viruses on your computer and then encourages you to pay while adding to the incentive by popping up various porn sites.

Full details are here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13453497 Read more about Apple Mac computers get their own scareware software.

As a general rule-of-thumb if an existing customer calls with a problem and there is a possibility that it can be fixed over the phone then I will spend up to 10 minutes trying to talk them through a fix; obviously this depends on a number of factors such as is the customer capable of doing the fix themselves and is it reasonably easy to do. Read more about Telephone support - How far do you go?

This morning I woke up to an email from a customer who had sent me an email selling various pharma-type drugs (you know, viagra etc!).

It transpired that her laptop had been nobbled by malware that was then part of a larger spamming botnet and was the cause of many humourous replies to her 'caring' email.

Combofix and Hitman Pro were run through her (Microsoft Windows) laptop which found a few items of malware which will now stop the fake spam. Read more about Spamming botnets.

Installing a new laptop recently I seemed to spend more time uninstalling the software that HP preinstalled on it than actually setting the thing up and getting it ready. Most of the 'branding' software that HP, Toshiba, Acer etc put on their computers are never used so why do they do it?

So which manufacturers don't preinstall their own software? Apple certainly and Dell up to a point. The remainder - chock full of the stuff! Read more about Computer manufacturers and 'branding'

Today I was setting up a laptop for a business customer and ran up against a mental brick wall - how to add a network folder to the documents library. It should have been a case of right-click on the document library, properties and then add the network location to the library but as this was Windows 7 Premium it can't do that.

The solution was to go into Windows explorer - Drive C - Users directory and then right-click on the document folder, choose properties and "move" the pointer for the document folder to point at the mapped network drive. Read more about Microsoft Windows 7 and indexing libraries for NAS units