By Robert McMillen, Koin’s Tech Guru

I guess we need to take a quick break from all the iPad and other tablet news to concentrate on something that seems to plague all Windows users at one time or another, and that is what to do when you get a virus that even your antivirus can’t protect you from.

I see this every week. People bring their computers to us to fix what they thought they were protected from: Worms, viruses, Trojans. You name it, they’ve got it, and in many cases they didn’t even visit websites that were considered high risk. High risk sites would be gambling, adult entertainment, and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. The people with infected computers had antivirus software. They even may have had anti malware software. It just doesn’t seem to matter.

This hit my sister’s computer this weekend. Despite having the latest antivirus software and even a program to protect her web browser from websites that could infect her PC, she still got hit. Now I’m going to tell you how the pros get rid of your computer viruses when you bring them to us, and it’s not that difficult if you take it one step at a time.
I have previously covered the differences between viruses and other malware, so we’re not going to get caught up in terminology. We will just refer to them generically as viruses, even though technically all intrusion based software installations come under the name of “malware.”

I’m going to refer to some products for home users that are absolutely free. I don’t recommend them for businesses because they have additional security requirements that will cost money and do additional things you may not need. We will also use Windows XP as the example since most computers are running this version. Although the principles apply to Vista and Windows 7, the actual locations of various different things to check may be slightly different.

I also want to express I take no liability for any changes you may make to your computer. This is a “do at your own risk” venture. These things work for us, however, so they are based on sound advice.

Let’s assume you have obtained a virus on your computer despite having antivirus software that’s up to date and running in the background. This is what I had to deal with on my sister’s computer this weekend, so I will walk you through what I did to resolve it.
After attempting to boot the computer into Windows, the screen went blue for a second and then rebooted over and over. I went ahead and chose the F8 key during the next reboot and tried to boot in Safe Mode and other modes with no success. I had to assume that the virus had damaged the hard drive and a repair was in order. I booted from a Windows CD and I chose the repair option. When I was presented with a command prompt, I typed in a command that fixes the hard drive (hopefully) and allows me to remove the virus in Windows. The command was chkdsk /r /p. This locates bad parts of the hard drive and repairs them.

Success! I was back in Windows, but now the virus was launching itself and trying to tell me it was infected. It asked me if I wanted to fix the infection. I know this is an old trick that downloads new viruses and makes the infection even worse. Fortunately, I had disconnected the network cable so it couldn’t go online to download any more baddies.
Since I couldn’t locate the virus using antivirus software, I knew I had some choices. I downloaded a free copy of Malwarebytes which you can get online by going to Download.com. I also downloaded Spybot Search and Destroy. Since she already had this program, I knew that the Spybot program wouldn’t help with this infection, but I saved it for later. The virus wouldn’t let me go to Download.com so I had to do it on another computer and save it to a USB flash drive. I copied it to the desktop for installation after the next step.

I then right clicked on My Computer and chose Properties. I checked the box to disable System Restore. If you don’t do this when you remove the software, it will automatically re add itself from the saved files in the restore area, and the virus will come back. Then I rebooted into Safe Mode by pressing F8 on reboot and choosing that option.
I installed Malwarebytes in Safe Mode and it found ten viruses, which I was able to remove. I scanned one more time to be sure that the virus didn’t create any new ones from the time I discovered the viruses and when I cleaned them. Everything was good, so I rebooted.

I was disappointed, but not surprised that another virus appeared upon reboot. This was going to be harder than I thought, but I’ve been down this road before. I had a virus at the Hillsboro airport that took almost three days to clear out. They even named the virus after one of our techs since we discovered it.

I went back to safe mode so the virus couldn’t launch and stop my efforts and opened the registry. You get there by going to the Start-Run command and typing in regedit. I wanted to find out what was launching when Windows opened in regular mode. I had to go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
I looked to see what programs ran at startup. Some of them I knew, but just to be sure I typed each one of them into a search on the web. Some viruses look like regular files with one letter off just to be harder to detect. They were all fine except one. There was a file that ran at startup called vnvlsftav.exe. I did a search online and found nothing on this file, so I knew I had discovered a new one.

I searched the hard drive for this file and any other ones like it that started with “vnv” by going to the start menu and choosing “Search.” I typed in vnv*.* so it would find any file that started with those letters. I found two. One was the exe file that was the new virus. The other was a similar name but ended in a .pf instead of a .exe.  A .pf file is used to make the virus load and run faster. It can also be used to locate and run new viruses locally and on the web.

I deleted both files and also deleted them from the recycling bin. Then I deleted the key that looked for the file in regedit that had previously opened. It’s also a good idea to backup the registry before making any changes. You can do this from the menu at the top of the regedit program.

I restarted the computer and the virus was no longer launching. I double checked both regedit and I ran msconfig from the start run menu. This allowed me to see if it lodged itself in the startup tab from there as well. Everything was looking good, but then I had to deal with the damage the virus had done. I could put the Windows CD in and run a repair of Windows, but that takes a long time and you have to have your Windows key handy in order to reactivate Windows during the process.

Instead, I put the Windows CD in the computer and ran a very useful command. I went to Start- Run again and this time I typed in sfc /scannow. This replaces all the important DLL files that makes Windows and all your programs run. Viruses like to corrupt or replace these files to cause all kinds of havoc.

Next, I wanted to do a few more things like install Spybot Search and Destroy, and run an online scan. Spybot Search installed and ran fine. I also activated the web browser protecting Tea Timer application that’s included. I then attempted to go to Trend Micro’s website at trendmicro.com to run the free Housecall application. This does a scan of your computer online and removes any viruses. I like to run multiple programs because very rarely does any one application remove everything. You should only have one antivirus program on your computer running because sometimes they fight each other and disable each other without you knowing about it. Apparently, their programmers never learned good manners.

Unfortunately, I was unable to reach any website. However, I quickly remembered that many viruses like to change a setting in the web browser that’s easy to fix. Just go to Tools-Options, and then the Connections tab in Internet Explorer. Uncheck the proxy settings buttons and then everything works as usual. There are similar buttons for other web browsers.

If I was unable to remove the virus then I would have removed the hard drive and plugged it into a USB enclosure. Then I would have plugged it into a known clean computer and scanned and removed the virus from there. That is assuming I had a virus that is known by an antivirus program. In this case, it was a new one that no one knew about, so I had to use the sleuthing techniques I spelled out for you here.

Now she’s back to surfing the web and causing other kinds of trouble, and I can get back to … working on…… everyone else’s computers.

If you have an interesting virus story please let me know about it.

For great tips, check back here each week and listen to me on the All Tech Radio show at

9:00 Sunday mornings on AM 1360 KUIK, or listen online at http://alltechradio.com.
To buy my latest book “How to be an IT Administrator,” go to http://howtobeanitadministrator.com/

If you would like your technical question answered here, just email rmcmillen@koin.com. Even if it doesn’t get answered in the column, I will always answer by email.

By Robert McMillen, Koin’s Tech Guru

It has been a fun year for predictions and technical disasters. In January, many predicted that people would jump onto Cloud Computing, but very few people have done so although some businesses are starting to test the waters. Having T-Mobile’s Sidekick customers lose all their personal information due to no one backing up the cloud computer put a scare into everyone.

Blackberry just got through celebrating their big stock jump and then their email service for the entire country crashed twice in one week.  If you’ve been keeping up with this blog, you already knew that would happen. I predict that Blackberry will lose significant market share to other smart phone manufacturers although they will continue to grow for a while longer because of the magnitude of people moving from plain cell phones to smart ones. They built their technology on a buggy centralized system without the advantage of open programming. The centralized issue will continue although they have announced that they’re trying to open up the operating system to new programmers. Too little, too late for most of us.

Windows 7 made a big splash with consumers, but businesses are so shy about switching from something that works (like XP), they have been slow to adopt it. Well, Microsoft will have none of that. Starting in a few weeks, the last of the XP licenses will be sold and companies will have to switch over. But Microsoft has sung this song before and we’ll see if the backlash will be big enough to open it back up or not. I think this time they mean it. Expect a lot of bad press if this turns out to be true. Vista scared the crackers out of us.

So what will happen with 2010? I’ll tell you. The long dominance of Comcast and other cable companies will finally be broken. Despite having the worst recession in decades, Comcast decided to raise their rates again. Verizon Fios was supposed to give us a choice, but their prices are almost exactly the same as Comcast. When the people get mad, they turn to the internet to break the backs of companies with near monopolies that have taken advantage of them for too long. Remember Ma Bell? She’s been scattered to the wind. Remember the recording industry? Broken. Remember the book industry? In decline.  Remember the newspaper? I sure don’t.

Hulu and other websites have taken the best of TV and made it available online. You can now connect your computer to your TV in HD and watch what you want when you want it. Even the commercial breaks are shorter.

Now Netflix has added to the stress of the cable industry.  For $9 a month you can watch unlimited movies and TV shows, and the list of movies dwarfs the list from “On Demand.” You can even watch Netflix on many different mediums. There’s the elegant and inexpensive Roku player for $80. You can use your Sony Playstation 3 with Netflix.  There’s a rumor other consoles like Wii will do the same in the coming months. If your TV is already directly connected to the internet, then you can just download movies directly. TiVo can also hook up to it. My favorite is to build a media computer so you can play PC games, watch TV shows on Hulu, and download movies and shows through Netflix direct to your TV. Apple TV is even gaining ground as they have made deals with all the major broadcasters. Blockbuster has come up with their own on demand internet service due to their stores closing in droves. No one likes to rush back to the video store just to save a dollar, and remember how pleasant it was to deal with those clerks?
What has been Comcast and other cable companys’ response to these changes? First, they tried to charge you a premium for downloading movies if you use their internet service over the amount of gigabytes they allowed. The FCC and congress didn’t find that amusing, and neither did the public.  As mentioned earlier, the cable companies also raised the rates saying their costs have never been higher. Yet they have been so profitable they are purchasing NBC.

We have been screaming for ala carte channels so we don’t all have to pay for stations we will never watch. I don’t speak Spanish. Why do I have to pay for that channel? I don’t have an RV. Why do I have to pay for that programming? I don’t watch every sporting event like wall climbing contests on ESPN 3. The answer was simple. Just allow us to buy the channels we want to watch. They wouldn’t do it despite the promise to do so “one day.”That day never came, so we did it ourselves. We switched to the internet, and there’s no stopping us.

America Online did a lot for the fledgling internet in the 1990’s, but they got greedy by overselling their product so people couldn’t connect to it as promised. Although they merged with Time Warner, they have since been shed into a separate company and have been in decline despite once having 30 million subscribers at their peak. This will be the business model of the cable industry. They have compressed the programming to the point of pixilation and have caused huge lags in the TV stream. “Too big and too arrogant to change” should be their new motto. At least if they came out and said what was really happening, we would applaud them for being honest about it.

Satellite will at least have the advantage of reaching all the people that cable wouldn’t pull their lines to. They have tried to compete with cable but the technology is difficult for people to put up with. No one wants to go on the roof, even in good weather, to adjust the dish.

My first cable bill in 1982 was $7 per month. Since then, we have had programming we don’t want heaped upon us along with constant raises in our rates. By the time I get done scrolling through all the channels I don’t want, it’s time to watch a new show. Having hundreds of channels isn’t better, it just costs more. So, goodbye cable. 2010 will be your worst year yet. You can at least continue to provide internet service until fiber takes over.

For great tips, check back here each week and listen to me on the All Tech Radio show at 9:00 Sunday mornings on AM 1360 KUIK, or listen online at http://alltechradio.com.
To buy my latest book “How to be an IT Administrator,” go to http://howtobeanitadministrator.com/

If you would like your technical question answered here, just email rmcmillen@koin.com. Even if it doesn’t get answered in the column, I will always answer by email.

By Robert McMillen, Koin’s Tech Guru

My wife and many other spouses have a really difficult time buying for people like me. I pretty much have all the gadgets I need, so finding something I would want can be tough.

So to help you all out this season I have come up with a list of things that we all can find something to like, and there’s no way we already have it.
For the dog lover in your life you can go to fatbraintoys.com and get a pet’s eye view with the wireless camera that connects to your dog’s collar. For $42 you can see what your dog is doing at all times. It may help you understand what they are thinking when they take a drink from the toilet bowl.

From Brookstone you can buy the ultimate shopper’s tech gift: A voice recognition shopping list computer. It remembers what you bought last trip, and you can tell it what to get on this trip. It will print out the list so you can take it with you. It costs $99.
For $50 from LL Bean you can buy the gamer in your life a solar powered charger for a Sony PSP. I’m not sure how much your gamer will need to play in the sun and away from an outlet, but gamers can be a little weird about when and how they kill zombies.
Toys R Us is now carrying toys for adults, and this is one I would love to have (hint, hint). For $299 you can have a remote controlled car with a built in web cam that streams video to the web that you can view on your computer or your TV set. I see myself battling it out with my dog’s web cam for domination.  See the dog’s reactions on both webcams as you move the remote controlled car in a jerking motion towards his favorite dog toy.

You could also use it to drive around your neighborhood in a lazy man’s version of neighborhood watch. Now you never have to leave your couch while you do your shift for the people on your block.

Hammacher and Schlemmer is offering the ability to convert all those old slides and negatives from your family history and put them into digital format. For only $99, you can burn the images to DVD, add music, and send them out as gifts to younger family members who have no idea who these people were. Someday they will care. I promise.
Here’s another cool gift from Hammacher and Schlemmer if you have teenagers or music lovers on your gift list. You will love this very quiet high tech drum set for $60. It’s actually a drum pad with a USB connection. The drummer plays on the soft pads in any combination they want and they can listen to their work using head phones. They can record their riffs and send them off to Def Jam for consideration for the next rap album by that new and upcoming band “Bang Your Head on a Sharp Rock.”

From Uncommon Goods you can buy a pen for just $25 that can write in space! You may not get there for a while but you can buy this space pen that NASA spent millions of tax dollars trying to develop. Don’t mention to your spouse that the Russians got around the space vacuum issue by using a one ruble pencil.

Good luck with your shopping, and let me know if you find anything even more unusual than what is on this list.

To buy my latest book “How to be an IT Administrator,” go to http://howtobeanitadministrator.com/

For more great tips, check back here each week and listen to me on the All Tech Radio show at 9:00 Sunday mornings on AM 1360 KUIK and at 10:00 AM on KOL in Seattle, or listen online at http://alltechradio.com.

If you would like your technical question answered here, just email rmcmillen@koin.com. Even if it doesn’t get answered in the column, I will always answer by email.

By Robert McMillen, Koin’s Tech Guru

Black Friday is almost here and it’s time to think about what to get the geek in your family. There are lots of good new toys to pick from, as well as some upgraded standbys.
In the new category, the netbooks are all the rage.  They have no DVD or CD drive, but they are lightweight and great for class and traveling. They are also cheaper than a laptop. Don’t plan on playing high end games, however. It just doesn’t have the horsepower.
An upgraded tech toy would be either the Nintendo DSi or Sony PSP GO. I wrote a review on each of these about a month ago. I recommend the DSi for the 12 and under crowd and the PSP GO for any age over that because of its abilities to play movies and more mature games.

If you want to go with a laptop, you have many to choose from, but rather than recommend a particular brand I will let you know what most people are looking for when it comes to features. Make sure it has a built in web camera so you can chat with your favorite geek while away from the family. Get at least 4 GBs of RAM, and a minimum 120 GB hard drive, although much larger ones are now appearing. Get a built in 802.11 wireless card that supports G and N. Otherwise, you’ll have to upgrade the card by next year since N is finally catching on. If you go with Windows make sure you get the Windows 7 Home Premium for home use, and Windows Professional or Ultimate for business.

If speed is the most important thing in your geek’s laptop desires, then upgrade the hard drive to a flash based drive. They don’t hold as much data as a traditional drive, but they’re at least twice as fast.

For Console gamers, all three of the big names have dropped their prices by around $50-$100. Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii are all cheaper this year with lots more games to choose from. Expect another major upgrade by next Christmas. This may cause it to be outdated sooner than you expected.

USB flash drives are very inexpensive now, but the kind a geek wants has a built in bootable operating system and encryption software to protect the files in case it gets lost or stolen. The built in OS allows you to boot a computer off the flash drive in case the regular hard drive is broken or is infected with viruses.

A digital video recorder is on the higher end of expensive geek toys, but will be much appreciated. Besides buying the computer to record your videos, you’ll have to call your cable or satellite company to put in a digital card to be able to record HD and digital signals. This will add around $300 for the two cards you’ll need so you can record two shows at once. You could also buy a Tivo for a little less money, but pay an annual subscription.

How about a cool flat screen TV? The new flat screens are better than ever, and here are the geek must-have features: It has to be able to connect to the internet. Some new models have this built in, and it allows you to connect a computer to it so you can watch TV from websites like Hulu. It also must have many HDMI ports so you can connect all your peripherals in HD like Blu Ray, VCR/DVD combo players, console game units, video cameras, and computers. It should have an S Video connector for older connections, and a VGA connection for non HD computer hookups. Having a card reader so you can plug in your camera’s memory card allows for instant slide shows. We’ve done this at family gatherings in the past and it’s very cool.

I love the new handheld digital video cameras that cost around $200. They have all the advantages of a tape based recorder without the expense, tapes, and weight. Even the new iPod Nano has one built in, and you get an iPod that goes with it. The quality isn’t as great on a large TV, but on a 32” or smaller TV or monitor, it looks great. Some geeks attach them to their hats and broadcast their lives on the web. Unfortunately, most people don’t find the lives of extreme geeks that interesting.

Don’t forget about still cameras. I recommend no less than a 10 MP camera. A DSLR allows you to change lenses like the SLR film based cameras before them. They also don’t have that hesitation problem when you push the button like the cheap cameras do. Sometimes the moment is over by the time you take the picture on point and shoot models. Definitely get the DSLR for enthusiasts and sports photographers. Be sure to get one telephoto and one wide angle zoom lens to cover all the possible shooting scenarios. Many come with video capability, but you need to make sure it has sound with it. Silent movies are boring. DSLR packages have come down to around $600 including both lenses.

There are some unbelievable deals at Best Buy and Wal-Mart on 32” LCD TVs. They may go for as little as $250! For a guest room or other location where a high quality TV is not necessary, this is great, but the quality won’t be as good as their better TV models.

If I have missed any great gifts for geeks that you can think of, please email me to let me know.To buy my latest book “How to be an IT Administrator,” go to http://howtobeanitadministrator.com/

For more great tips, check back here each week and listen to me on the All Tech Radio show at 9:00 Sunday mornings on AM 1360 KUIK and at 10:00 AM on KOL in Seattle, or listen online at http://alltechradio.com.

If you would like your technical question answered here, just email rmcmillen@koin.com. Even if it doesn’t get answered in the column, I will always answer by email.

By Robert McMillen, Koin’s Tech Guru

Q- “Why do some people get caught while others get away with internet crime?”

Sarah L.

Portland

A- Every website you go to, and every item you post, is traceable. That now includes tweets and text messages. I remember the first tweet I sent through Twitter many months ago, and I was surprised to see it online a few weeks later. At the time I didn’t realize that I could make it private. That doesn’t mean the message is gone if someone like the police want it bad enough. (Unless of course you have a Sidekick phone. Ha! Sorry about that.)

I will not only explain how the average internet user leaves fingerprints, I’m also going to show you how a hacker does it so he won’t get caught.

When surfing the internet, the website host keeps track of every IP address that has visited their site for however long they feel they should keep the log files. Some, like WebMD, don’t track it at all because of confidentiality rules. Others, like the NSA and CIA, may keep them forever. The IP address can be easily tracked by being turned over to the police, and then the address can be matched up when the police give the internet service provider a court order to tell them who owned that IP address on that date. Then they come knocking on the bad guy’s door.

They don’t do all this for just any type of web browsing, however. They mostly do it for people who threaten harm to others, solicit something illegally, or attempt to load an illegal program like a virus onto your computer.  I have been involved in many types of these cases where they need an expert to gain access to the perpetrator’s information to build a case against them.

Your employer (or your parents) can find out about your web surfing habits by viewing the local web cache on your hard drive. Your computer keeps a list of cookies and photos on your computer for around 30 days to make it faster to visit the same sites in the future. The number of days can be changed, and you can even manually erase this information and delete it from your recycle bin. Some companies even make cache cleaners that get rid of the evidence of your surfing habits. But if the employer also caches that information on the firewall or proxy server, then deleting it off your computer won’t make any difference. I not only have helped many employers set this up, but it’s also how I track my children’s surfing habits- along with a good parental filter.

Even if the people under your administration don’t surf to places they shouldn’t because of a filter, you should also be able to check where they attempted to surf. This gives you an idea if the filter is working properly.

Many of you may have seen the movie about the Seattle riots in 1999. The group of anarchists didn’t just wander from street to street, they used technology like text messaging and cell phone calls to avoid getting arrested, and it allowed them to cause more mayhem. I managed a Seattle office from here in Portland at that time, and I was scared to death for my Seattle staff’s safety. At one point, we told our staff to not leave the building. Fortunately our people were all okay, but I wish I was on the jury to convict all of the anarchists who broke the law. A cold, damp dungeon would be all they would ever see again.

Most internet lawbreakers are not all that tough to catch. They may be good at breaking the law, but they are not good at covering it up. For instance, all text messages are stored and are easy to bring back to court. All internet postings are the same way. Email gets backed up by both the sender’s mail servers and the receiver’s.  The NSA also has an in to the major email carriers and they intercept and store email based on certain keywords in their massive database, along with the IP addresses.

If you go to the library or internet café to do something illegal on a computer thinking you’ll be safe from prosecution, then you would also be wrong most of the time. You can be caught by surveillance cameras that match up to the time of the posting, as well as by the hardware address of your computer. Let’s say you go to a wireless internet access café. Most only take credit cards, but you find one where you can pay cash. The firewall that passes your traffic onto the internet can cache your hardware MAC address. This is a hard coded address that is special to your computer and can be traced back to the place you bought it from. They look you up by your receipt and now you’re caught.

If you find an internet café that accepts cash, has no video cameras, and doesn’t cache MAC addresses, then you’ve found the perfect place to be a criminal. Of course you shouldn’t draw attention to yourself by talking to anyone, and you should wear a fake nose, beard, gloves and makeup. And you shouldn’t ever visit the same place twice. You should also have a MAC address spoofing program to be safe. If you can pull all that off, then good luck.

Another way bad guys try to hide their tracks is by War Driving. This is where you search a neighborhood with a wireless scanner. Once you find an open access point, you connect to it. You can even hack one that is secure if it uses one of the old technologies like WEP where the password and wireless keys never change. Then the police come after the person with the wireless access point rather than the perpetrator. So, if you don’t want to have police come knocking on your door, then be sure to secure your wireless with WPA2 AEP security. If you don’t know how to do this then hire a professional or turn it off.

Hackers use compromised routers they can bounce off of to do their dirty work as well. They may hack an easy to guess password on a server and use it to bounce through several other servers and then attempt to break in to a place, like a financial institution, where they can actually get a payoff. Doctors offices are starting to become an easy target because they rarely secure anything from the outside and they have confidential patient information along with credit card numbers. I have secured many of them, and despite laws like HIPAA and the Oregon Privacy Act, they rarely do anything right without professional help. In my experience most physicians hate computers and security, and if you don’t believe me then next time you see your doctor ask if they know how to log into anything other than a golf website.

Virus and other Malware writers get caught a lot because even though they do know how to write a good piece of Malware, they love to brag about it so much they eventually get turned in. They also don’t know how to cover their tracks as well because that’s not what they’re good at. The exceptions to this are hackers in Asia. When you have state sponsored hacking and virus writing, (where most of the world’s Malware comes from) then who will we arrest? I find it easier to just block any inbound access from the entire continent, and only open it back up when there is a business case to do so. When they learn how to play by the rules, then we can treat them like responsible world citizens. I won’t hold my breath.

So how do you not get caught? Don’t break the rules. It works every time.

To buy my latest book “How to be an IT Administrator,” go to http://howtobeanitadministrator.com/ 

For more great tips, check back here each week and listen to me on the All Tech Radio show at 9:00 Sunday mornings on AM 1360 KUIK and at 10:00 AM on KOL in Seattle, or listen online at http://alltechradio.com./

If you would like your technical question answered here, just email rmcmillen@koin.com. Even if it doesn’t get answered in the column, I will always answer by email.

By Robert McMillen, Koin’s Tech Guru

Microsoft may have lost something this week that belongs to you, and it’s in the cloud. What is Cloud Computing? If you have an office that stores customer data, or if you have a digital camera or collect lots of music, you have a choice of how to store that data. You can store it in the cloud or on your computer, or both.

Cloud computing is inevitable, but very premature. Cloud Computing (CC) companies say that they will save the day during a disaster. If your hard drive goes bad with all that data on it and you have no backup, then it’s gone forever. Cloud Computing allows you to save all that data to a different location that’s available online.

Prices vary, and there are different ways to do it, so before I recommend whether or not to use the cloud, you should hear about what happened last week. The biggest complaint computer consultants like myself have about CC, is that you don’t personally know who is handling your data. Plus with the recession, many CC companies have gone bankrupt and taken your data with them. We don’t know if they sold it or deleted it, but there is a risk to many that their identities have become compromised.

Microsoft purchased a company that makes phones for T-Mobile a couple of years ago. That company was called Danger, and they lived up to their name. T-Mobile has a different way of storing your contacts, emails, and other data to the Sidekick phones than do most phone companies. They keep it on a server, and if you lose your phone you can get it downloaded to your new phone automatically.

Unbeknownst to all of the unfortunate T-Mobile users, they kept a lot of that phone data on just one server, and they didn’t back it up properly. Eventually, all hard drives fail with a 100% guarantee, and in this case it happened a few days ago. Therefore, all the data went with it. Microsoft is recommending you don’t ever turn off your phone, because when you do, your data will not return. They have no confidence they will be able to restore it. If you are one of these unfortunate phone holders, then take some time to write down all of your contacts and any important personal information that may be on the phone.

Eventually your phone will die and you should have something written down so you can re input the information when it turns back on or you get a new phone. This only affects the Sidekick phones, so if you have any other model, then this doesn’t apply.

So, let’s get back to the concept of Cloud Computing. We have several customers who have dabbled in this area with mixed results. Most people don’t realize that your upload speed on most internet connections is a lot slower than your download speed. This means if you are pushing your data to an online CC company then you will notice a huge drop off in internet performance while it’s running the backups. Should you choose to do this anyway, you can schedule the backups to run at night.

The second most misunderstood thing about CC is that you need to use one that backs up more than just files if you’re counting on this to be your only backup (which I don’t recommend). You need to be able to restore your data and your operating system, your email, your programs, and your Active Directory in a Windows domain. Backing up just your data won’t do that. Only the higher quality backup firms do this and it costs roughly ten times more than a “data only” online company would cost, but it’s worth it.

So why is everyone looking to move to this form of backup? The traditional way of backing up is to use a tape or large hard drive to backup your data every night, and once a week a company would come by your office and swap out your tapes or hard drives. This is not only expensive, but impractical. Using CC to backup your data is automatic and fairly inexpensive, even when dealing with the better quality companies. So where do you get into trouble?

As mentioned earlier, having a company that holds your precious data go out of business is one way to lose your backups. You can also lose it if your internet connection goes down and you need to restore a file or an entire server. Another big problem happens if you have more than 100 GB’s of data to download and your speed is less than 30 Mbs. Try moving that much data inside your network at full speed, and then divide that number by your internet speed. It could take several days to get all your data back.

Some CC companies like Microsoft’s Live allows you to not just backup the data to their servers, but they allow you to synchronize your data to multiple locations, such as a computer in another location. If your server goes down and your internet goes down, then you just need to go pick up the computer that has the data and bring it in.

I love the idea of Cloud Computing, and it will happen, no matter how much some of us try to slow it down. But we need to not put all our eggs in that basket. We should have both an in-house backup and an online one in case of an internal disaster such as fire or flood.

I didn’t even touch on Cloud Computing for applications like Google Docs and others. Those will be the way we all eventually go in the future. Why have a high end infrastructure with expensive computer guys you always have to pay to keep things running when someone else will do it for a fraction of the cost? Because CC isn’t ready yet.

Do you remember when the first PC came out in 1981? It wasn’t ready. In fact, it should never have been released to consumers and businesses until they worked enough bugs out years later for the computer to be useful and not a tremendous vortex where all our money was being thrown away.

This is where we are with Cloud Computing today. Wait five more years and ease into it when speed and reliability have improved. Do it now and you will be sorry if this is your main protection against data loss.

To buy my latest book “How to be an IT Administrator,” go to http://howtobeanitadministrator.com

For more great tips, check back here each week and listen to me on the All Tech Radio show at 9:00 Sunday mornings on AM 1360 KUIK and at 10:00 AM on KOL in Seattle, or listen online at http://alltechradio.com. 

If you would like your technical question answered here, just email rmcmillen@koin.com. Even if it doesn’t get answered in the column, I will always answer by email.

By Robert McMillen, Koin’s Tech Guru

California made big news last week when state energy regulators stated that there may be a ban on large flat screen TVs. Apparently, the old Cathode Ray tubes (CRT) were far more efficient in bringing you your favorite shows than the new electricity guzzling TVs. What does that mean for Oregon? Well, the way California goes, so goes the nation.
Just look at the dozens of new laws in the past twenty years and you’ll find many of them originated in California. The demand for their resources is so much higher than ours that when they start running out of things, we all get nervous that someday the rest of the country will as well.

As far as electricity goes, there are two big problem products on the market. Besides flat panel TVs, the new electric cars are also going to cause a strain on the electric grid. The Chevy Volt is probably going to be a big seller when it’s officially launched, so we need to plan for this before it becomes a problem.

So let’s break this down to actual costs and usage. According to the LA Times, 10% of all home electricity usage in California is from TVs. If your electric bill is $150 per month, then it costs roughly $5 per month per TV  to watch three TVs on old fashioned CRTs, or flat screens 42” or smaller. The average TV larger than that size costs roughly three times that much, or $15 per month to use. These are not exact numbers, and your mileage may vary, but without getting into a needless discussion about volts, watts, and amps, these are the numbers we will use. If you have three of these TVs then it will cost $45 per month to watch them. You may be able to afford such luxury, but your neighborhood transformers may not.
You know those big battery looking things on top of the telephone poles on your street? On average, there is one of these for every 12-15 homes. Sometimes when the power goes out in your home, the house across the street may still be lit. That’s because they’re on a different transformer than you. These transformers have a certain amount of capacity, and very little room for growth. If everyone throws out their smaller TV sets and replaces them with big flat screens, then the capacitors will be stretched to the limit. One more hair dryer and “POOF!” no more electricity. Since the price of big TVs has gone down dramatically and CRTs are nonexistent on store shelves, it’s just a matter of time and math before that happens.
25% of the current TVs on store shelves are considered unfit for sale by the new proposed California standards. Can you imagine getting arrested for smuggling in a 58” TV from Nevada? It’s almost laughable, but there’s no doubt we are headed in that direction.
Electric cars are even more of a threat to your neighborhood when it comes to the electric grid. Electric cars use so much electricity that the grid can only handle one per transformer. So if we all do the “green” thing and buy an electric car, we will either have to find an alternative way to charge them up at night, or we will have to triple the capacity of the transformers. That will cost a lot of money.

According to the Mercury News, we could easily absorb ten million electric cars without adding much more than 1% to our total electricity usage, but if more than one car per block gets plugged in at the same time, especially in an older neighborhood, then the block goes dark. How would you like to explain that to your neighbors?

Help is on the way with the new smart meters. Many of our Portland area homes have already been converted to these marvels. The big fear of them being hacked and messed with is still a reality. The geniuses had foreign workers in Asia write the software to save money. Good thing they are all friendly to the U.S., oh wait…

Risks aside, there is lots of great innovation that comes with the smart meters. One of these is the ability to tap into the energy highs and lows of the grid and to remotely turn electric devices on and off based on usage. That could buy us more time, but the smart money is on quick recharging stations. These could use the new super capacitors that are currently in the works and not affect the local neighborhood transformers. Besides, if you want to go more than a hundred miles from home you don’t want to be stuck on the highway holding up a plug hoping someone will give you a charge.

Kermit the frog said it best: “It ain’t easy being green.”

To buy my latest book “How to be an IT Administrator,” go to http://howtobeanitadministrator.com

For more great tips, check back here each week and listen to me on the All Tech Radio show at 9:00 Sunday mornings on AM 1360 KUIK and at 10:00 AM on KOL in Seattle, or listen online at http://alltechradio.com. 

If you would like your technical question answered here, just email rmcmillen@koin.com. Even if it doesn’t get answered in the column, I will always answer by email.