The Everyday IT Blog

Many Internet service providers bundle antivirus protection in their service offerings for high-speed Internet service.. and Comcast is no exception.  I heard rumblings that Comcast was making a change to the software that they provide so I had to check it out for myself.  What I heard was indeed true.. Comcast has apparently dropped McAfee for Symantec!  This is good news for many for several reasons :

1. McAfee was a pretty sorry product in my opinion.  I’m basing that solely on my personal experience.
2. Easily 90% of the systems I see in my consulting practice are running a version of Norton that isn’t being updated because the user won’t pony up the cash for a subscription.
3. There’s a Mac version!

With this new offering brings a new concern.. since Comcast has apparently ended their relationship with McAfee, how long until current McAfee users stop getting virus definition updates?  I’ve got a Comcast source I’m going to engage to see if I can get an answer to that question.  Mind you, I’m sure that it isn’t going to be a question of if.. it will certainly be when.  Stay tuned for the answer on that.

Bottom line.. you should switch.  Go to http://security.comcast.net for more info.

PS.. happy 2010!  I haven’t posted in over a  month, sorry for that.  Things are incredibly busy at work, and honestly – I just don’t want to look at a computer once I make it home.  Even as I type I’m out of town on business.

See you round the Internets!

With the release of Windows 7 in time for the holiday buying season I’ll bet that more than one of you plan to purchase a new PC this year.. and you may already have. Congratulations! You’ll certainly

Photo by ercwttmn

enjoy better performance and increased efficiency from your new system, no doubt.  So, what do you do with your old system?  You could pass it down to a family member – many folks do that.  You could keep it and use it for the kids.  You could prop a door open with it.  The list goes on and on.  If you’re like most folks though.. you’ll gather up that old PC and take it down the street to your favorite charity and donate it for the good feeling and the tax writeoff.  If this is your plan, STOP!  Charity is a great thing.. but you need to think this through.  You have personal data on that PC.  You’ve done your online banking on that PC.  You’ve probably allowed your browser to save some of your passwords on that PC.  Just a few of the above items are more than enough information to allow someone to gain access to your entire electronic life at your expense.  Did you attempt to delete the data?  That delete key on the keyboard probably doesn’t work the way you think it does.  For example.. say I keep a Word document on my hard drive that has all of those passwords that I don’t want to forget in it.  I’ve decided after some time that I’m going to sell my old computer at a yard sale, so I go to “My Documents” and delete the file before I sell it.  The file doesn’t show up in “My Documents” anymore and I’ve emptied my recycle bin, so it is gone, right?

Wrong.  Very Wrong.

What really happened inside the guts of your machine is this: your operating system marked the spot where that file lives on disk as “overwriteable” so the space on disk can be used later.  The file is still very much there, only hidden.  Theoretically.. I could purchase your machine, take it home, remove the hard disk and plug it into my already-running PC with an adapter.  I can run one of several programs I have for examining your old hard disk and “undelete” those files.. and Voila!  I have your password file.

I’m going to do a little experiment.  I’m going to head to my local donation center and purchase a used PC.  I’ll bring it home and do just what I illustrated and see what I can see.  I’ll chronicle the experience here to illustrate what I’ve been talking about and I’ll then properly destroy what I’ve found.  Stay tuned!

PS.. by now you know that I support my little blogging habit with affiliate advertisements.  Basically.. if you click a link or ad on this site and make a purchase I get a small cut.  Please take a look at the ads.. there are some big names there.  If you plan on making purchases with those advertisers anyway I’d appreciate it if you’d click on my ads to make those purchases.  Thanks!

Over the past few weeks a few friends of mine have asked for my advice about different types of software.  Each of them have a need and the software industry has the solution.. but that solution is horribly expensive.   The good news is that there are tools for these needs that don’t have a retail price tag attached to them – the software we’re talking about is open-source.  Open source software is generally written by individuals or small groups and is intended to be free to use – but donations are gladly accepted by the authors to help fund continued development.  I’ll stand up for the open-source community right now and tell you straight up – if you use open-source software you should by all means donate!  The quality of software that is out there is often far superior to its retail competition – support is done by the user community and the release/upgrade cycle is usually much shorter than retail products, which means that new features show up much more quickly.

Here’s a few selected OSS selections that are quite appropriate for the holiday season:

GNU Image Manipulation Program (The GIMP)

Image by Al Brown

If you need to do serious photo editing – say, for instance you decide that picture you have of your friend Eric wearing his full-face MTB helmet just needs some creative editing to make it pop.  Just fire up your favorite photo-editing software and, voila!  Eric now has Darth Vader’s body!  Hilarity ensues – especially if you post the picture where all of Eric’s friends can see it.  Everyone has heard of Adobe Photoshop.. that brand name has become synonymous with photo editing and it is indeed a powerful program.. but it is almost prohibitively expensive for the home computer user.  A great alternative that is equally powerful is the GNU Image Manipulation Program, or The GIMP for short.  I haven’t found anything that I can do with Photoshop that I can’t do with The Gimp.  You can get The GIMP from here.. and if you like it, please donate.

InfraRecorder

I’m greatly annoyed by the fact that until recently you had to use a third-party program to perform what I consider to be basic operations with your CD/DVD burner – for instance, creating an .ISO image of a CD/DVD.  If you still use Windows XP you’re still stuck in that spot without third-party software.  You could go buy Nero or Roxio to perform those tasks.. or you could go download a copy of InfraRecorder.  From InfraRecorder’s site, here’s some of what you can do with it:

Features

• Create custom data, audio and mixed-mode projects and record them to physical discs as well as disc images.
• Supports recording to dual-layer DVDs.
  
• Blank (erase) rewritable discs using four different methods.
• Record disc images (ISO and BIN/CUE).
  
• Fixate discs (write lead-out information to prevent further data from being added to the disc).
• Scan the SCSI/IDE bus for devices and collect information about their capabilities.
  
• Create disc copies, on the fly and using a temporary disc image.
• Import session data from multi-session discs and add more sessions to them.
• Display disc information.
• Save audio and data tracks to files (.wav, .wma, .ogg, .mp3 and .iso).

If you need these functions, go here to download InfraRecorder.  If you like it, please donate!

Have any OSS suggestions you’d like to share?  Leave a comment!