Get Instant Computer Support @ 1 800 237 3901

Diary of a mad McAfee antivirus victim

Tuesday, April 27, 2010 0 comments
As if McAfee's bad antivirus update last week wasn't bad enough, some customers were none too happy with how the security vendor's tech support handled the situation either.

David Hellen, an independent contractor for the U.S. Navy who heads his own SAP configuration business, says last Wednesday when he noticed that his Dell Latitude running Windows XP wouldn't boot straight into Windows, he knew he had to try and figure out what was going on. He saw news stories about the McAfee antivirus update snafu, which involved the faulty DAT 5958 file, and called his McAfee Gold Service phone number for help.

"After waiting 20 minutes in the queue, they connected me to India and I got a service technician," says Hellen, whose business is called David J. Hellen & Associates. "The first thing they said is, 'You have a virus.' I said I think I have that DAT thing. They told me to run scans."

"I phoned the McAfee guy back and we ran the McAfee scan, and we came up with nothing," Hellen says. "We tried the SuperDAT tool and that didn't work, and the 5959 update. It still didn't solve it." The McAfee technician told him he needed to escalate to "Tier 2 support."

Due to his work schedule, Hellen had to postpone more attempts at remediation until the weekend, so when he called McAfee tech support back then, he was surprised to learn that Tier 2 support doesn't work on Sunday. "I said, you have to be kidding me," he notes.

On Monday, April 26, McAfee tech support did contact Hellen and a technician took full control of his computer and uninstalled the antivirus software using what Hellen viewed as a "special cleaner they have to uninstall." McAfee was completely uninstalled and then reinstalled, he says.

While he appreciated that, and McAfee's effort did seem to restore his computer to full service, "what ticked me off' was that he got an e-mail from McAfee about his case, which he believes doesn't accurately represent his interactions with the vendor.

The McAfee e-mail stated: "Customer called in that computer is infected by virus" and that the "severity rating" was "Business not affected."

Hellen is also upset that McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt issued a formal apology for the faulty antivirus update, saying that thousands of McAfee employees were working around the clock. But from Hellen's experience Tier 2 tech support didn't seem to be working on Sunday, even in the wake of a situation that McAfee itself caused.

McAfee had no immediate response related to McAfee Tier 2 support, but a spokesman did say the company is "investigating" Hellen's case.

McAfee does not intend to release the number of customers impacted by the faulty DAT update. The vendor announced Tuesday it will offer a free one-year subscription to its automated security health-check platform, an assessment of the security in the organization, on a case-by-case basis, to eligible corporate customers.


Source: networkworld.com

Computer Desktop and Laptops

Tuesday, April 13, 2010 1 comments
This is one question that asked many people. "Should we get a desktop or laptop?" It’s depending on your requirement. Desktop and Laptop both are same computer.
For and unfortunately, most uses may require the power of a desktop pc. I will list some of the more common uses of a pc and discuss the specs needed.

Office Uses:
Mostly use in office like Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. We also use for mail checking, store data and use like small server. This type of computer have not heavy requirement for extra use. You have able to handle very easy that type of any new desktop or laptop.


Multimedia Applications Uses:

laptops are mostly used for listening to music or watching movies. The only times that it will not be adequate is if you want better components like a much larger and better screen resolution and better sound quality. If you want high resolution viewing, you can connect a laptop to another separate monitor but then you might not be able to go with a higher resolution because of your graphics hardware on the laptop. Also, your sound options are very limited with laptops. All laptops use onboard cards that are adequate for most uses but for the highest sound quality, you will not have it and your external component options are very limited. For desktops, you have a wide range of choices for internal PCI slot upgrades. To sum it up, for high resolution and high definition audio, you may have to go with desktops.

PC Games:
Here I am not talking free in build games in your computer or laptop Solitaire or any other simple game. We are talking about PC Games like Counterstrike, Crysis, Sins of a Solar Empire etc. If you want batter playing of pc games then you have required heavy hardware it will depend on the graphics hardware.

Multimedia Encoding:
If you are looking any video or audio production and encoding, you better go with desktops. You will need lots of hard drive space and most laptops do not have choices for very large drives. You will also need a very good processor and a powerful video card will help too.
The most important are computer installation with Latest OS.

Features of an Operating System

Wednesday, April 7, 2010 1 comments
I will introduce some latest operating system features and what are the features that a particular operating system should have used. Some of these features are a part of all operating systems, while some of them may or may not be available in the computer operating system you are using. So I will give you online computer support 24x7 every time.

Managing Hardware/Software
As already know, it is the operating system that causes the software and hardware in a computer to interact with each other. It is also the platform that causes one software in the computer to communicate with another. Once the computer operating system in a computer loads during the booting up process, other application software’s can be loaded into the computer.

Consistent Application Program Interface
Application Program Interface which software development peoples refer to as APIs allow the applications those run on one computer to run on another computer having the same computer operating system. It is important that the operating system has a consistent API. Undoubtedly, every operating system will have deferent type’s requirements, but it should be enough to support computer hardware’s.

Program Execution
The operating system to execute all the types of computer programs running in it. It is a rather more complicated process. It allows to multitasking and allows different programs to run at the same time and share the many types of computer system resources. Here, it requires allotting RAM space to different computer applications running on the computer. The execution of more than one program may also require the computer operating system to prioritize the operations running on the computer system.

Memory Management
we already defined in the part on program execution, it is up to the computer operating system to provide memory to the different programs running on the computer system. It has to prioritize and allocate memory to each application. Even when data is saved in a secondary storage device, it is the computer operating system that decides how that particular chunk of information should be stored.

Networking
Computers need to communicate with each other via networking. A computer without Internet is not even imaginable. It is the task of the computer operating system to provide the required networking features. It allow to you used two or more computers to connect and form a network or connect to the Internet. More on computer networking.

Security
Computer system security that an operating system should provide is undoubtedly one of its most important features. We used passwords setting for logging in, to providing firewall protection; everything comes under the tasks of an operating system. Many network utilities may require printer sharing, file sharing and using TCP/IP protocols. Hence, it becomes very important for the computer operating system to provide proper security so that the computer's security is not compromised in such cases.