GuruNews, Volume 9 Number 5, 2-5-09

Thu Feb 5 21:11:28 EST 2009

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Vol. 9, No. 5                   

2-5-09

1 Snow days, surge protectors  

2 Who is she?

3 Facebook for Dummies, Google your teen, the coming big things, Ham geeks

4 Picture picker     

5 Social networking threat

6 File recovery

Part three of the VoIP article will be delayed due to bad weather.  I've not been able to get to my NID to take pictures and a friend's house that has a different type has been worse.  As soon as the weather clears we'll continue and, since I just purchased a Magic Jack over the weekend it will be sort of a project journal.  I'll even have real results to report.

Instead, this week I'll address power problems and what they can do to your computer equipment but first, a little explanation of last week's problem with the newsletter and why if you got it it looked odd.

Something happened with the remailer that prevented me from accessing it so I emailed Kyle, our web host and team member.  He checked and reset everything but I was still blocked.  Over the course of several days we tried everything we could think of between us so I sent the issue to Kyle who then resent it to the subscribers.  It went to most people but looked funny.

Keep in mind, this was written with Word and then pasted and formatted into Outlook Express, then copied and re-pasted and formatted into an email client on a Mac.  Through all of that it lost some of the formatting such as font and size but at least it finally got out.

If you didn't get last week's issue I apologize.  Please email me and I'll send it to you as an email or a Word attachment, your choice.  Also last week I misspelled Matt's last name, which is Datillo, and Carmine's, which is Allocco.  Sorry about that guys, you may flog me publically at our next get-together ;)

There have been plenty of lengthy power outages in this area over the last couple of years, most recently from the hurricane last fall and the ice storm last week.  Many of you are still without power.

Back in September I gave you some tips about charging portable units and turning off breakers during outages but so far this week I've heard probably twenty people complain that their PC wouldn't come back on.  To a person they've told me "It was plugged into a surge protector".

Surge protectors are fine for protecting you from transient spikes in the power system caused by heavy usage, a sudden drop in usage or the occasional electrocuted squirrel.  They will not protect from nearby lightning strikes, nor will they protect from major spikes experienced as the power company bring power back on after an outage, especially a lengthy one or one caused by extensive damage such as the current ice/snow storm.

They also offer no protection from sags or brownouts, which are under-voltage conditions that can cause almost as much damage as surges.  They most definitely don't protect from outright power failures, which cannot only damage hardware but can result in the loss of any file you have open, especially databases.

Lower end UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supplies) units are no better at protection other than keeping your PC from dropping if the power goes off.  Most aren't meant to allow use without AC power, just time to save files and do an orderly shut down.

Higher end UPS units do something called line conditioning, which means in a nutshell that your PC runs strictly on battery all the time.  The battery is trickle-charged constantly by power from AC.  In theory this protects you better from brownouts and spikes and it does, to an extent.  Drops in voltage won't affect your PC at all but major spikes can still jump the protective circuitry and damage hardware.

It all boils down to this:  If the power goes out start unplugging things.  Anything and everything that is important or expensive to replace.  I said back in September to turn off all the breakers, which is a good idea and will likely protect your electronics and appliances, but I'm a belt and suspenders kinda guy.  If a computer or a refrigerator or a television is unplugged it's no more susceptible to spike damage than a book or a coffee table.

This sort of thing will happen again.  And considering this area has had four major winter and/or windstorms in the last couple of years it will likely happen again soon.  Next time you get hit you'll know what to do, and you won't come carrying a dead PC in to guys like me saying, "It was plugged into a surge protector".

Kevin Mefford, Editor

pcguru at microdome.net

Terry Wise

www.ratland.com

Tech News of the Week

Stanford now offering Facebook classes. for parents:

http://tinyurl.com/bl9dqk

Track your kids using Google.  Is there anything they CAN'T do?

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=6800142

Ten sites to watch this year:

http://tech.msn.com/products/articlepcw.aspx?cp-documentid=17052178

Canadian college students build radio to chat with the International Space Station, eh:

http://tinyurl.com/cbk39d

Download of the Week

Just as duplicate songs somehow find their way into music libraries, so do duplicate photos seem to crop up in photo collections. Fortunately, there's a great freeware utility that can find and remove them for you: VisiPics. I turned VisiPics loose on my "My Pictures" folder, which contains over a thousand photos. It took about 20 minutes to complete its scan, but it did an amazing job.  You can get it here:

http://www.visipics.info/index.php?title=Download 

NOTE:  This program is fully functional donarware.  If you like it, give the author a little token of your appreciation via the Donations link on his website.

Carlita Lupino

Cards57 at gmail.com 

Threat of the Week

Driveby download malware is all over the web but shows a certain affinity for profiles and banner ads on MySpace and Facebook.  Now there's another worry for users of the two big boys in the social networking arena:  email scams using hijacked email accounts.

It would seem cyber thugs have figured a way to steal information for those website's users and send fake emails to "friends" begging for money for various non-existent emergencies.

Needless to say, don't send money to people you don't know personally, and if you use the social networking sites please read the full story at:

http://tinyurl.com/c7t5t2

Kevin Mefford

pcguru at microdome.net

Email Question of the Week

Q:      My nephew has a CPU that got infected with virus's and malware.
Before he called me He did a system restore(He did not do a full system
restore). He has around 800 pictures we aware unable to retrieve. He
used Adobe photo shop 3.2.

We can go into the program and in pulls a thumbnail of the picture
but the link to it is broken. Does anyone know of a good program(Doesn't
matter if free or if he has to pay for it) that we can get the pictures
off of the hard drive before I wipe it clean and start fresh?

A:  I've used Recuva http://recuva.com to do things like this before, but mostly from flash drives.  Wouldn't hurt to give it a shot. 

Daniel A. Williams

daniel at thepcgurus.com

Contact info and legal stuff

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