Someone in the house hogging the Sky Box? Away from home and missed an episode of “House”?  – I might have the answer for you.

I finally got round to trying out the new Sky Player plug-in for Windows 7 Media Center over the weekend. I must admit that I came away quite impressed with the slickness of the finished product.  Sky and Microsoft combined to roll out the Media Center Plugin in the UK before Christmas.  For unknown reasons, those of us in Ireland had to wait until the start of February before it was officially available. continue

There has been a report this week claiming that there are now over quarter of a million malicious posts on Facebook. The latest report from Infosecurity.com (click here) details how fan pages of celebrities such as Justin Timberlake are being used to trick the unsuspecting into downloading virus and malware infected files onto their system.  Links are also spreading into individuals pages.

The links can potentially be to any piece of malware but the following guidelines are a good way of minimising the risks: continue

Everyone in Europe who is currently using Internet Explorer as their main internet browsing program is powering on their computer to find a screen like this appearing on their screen. Without going into the details, this is the culmination of a dispute between the EU and Microsoft over its dominant position in internet browsing software. The outcome is that all of us here in Europe are being forced to choose a browser for our PC, even though most of us don’t really care that much as long as we can see our web pages. continue

We’ve had a number of customers recently mention that they have been cold called by someone in India claiming that their computer has a virus, system crash or other such problem. They subsequently offer to resolve the problem remotely.  I have no evidence of how good or bad their service might be but their initial claims are certainly have a hint of scam about them. They have no way of telling what problems you have with your PC without your knowledge, unless they’re already working for the “bad” guys of course. People should be suspicious of these kinds of calls.

Their website is https://www.onlinepcdoctors.com/ which looks quite professional. Don’t be fooled. They also appear to have national phone number for many countries. There are details of them operating in Ireland (click here), in the UK and in Australia (click here).

There’s also YouTube video of a simlar scam, also based in India  below:

We had a case last week where Norton 360 (version 3) repeatedly got into a hang while removing tracking cookies that it claimed to have found. On closer inspection of the Temporary Internet Files folder, the number of Cookies that Norton was claiming to have found was larger than the number of cookies that actually existed. So my conclusion was that Norton was hanging while trying to remove the non-existent cookies.

In any case, nothing seemed to fix this without a full removal of Norton 360. Even uninstalling Norton 360 appeared insufficient and in the end, we called upon the Norton Removal Tool (found here) to fully remove Norton 360. After full removal and re-installation, the application worked perfectly again.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

| Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |

Last night Home Helptech provided electronic scoreboarding for a local Schools Table Quiz. With 48 teams of 4 kids, each answering 8 rounds of 10 questions, one of the major headaches for the organisers was scoring the quiz. For the purpose, I created a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel which allows data entry on one sheet (the “Input Sheet”) and automatically generates a league table of leaders on a “Leader Board”. I thought I’d post it here in case it’s of use to anyone else.

Quiz Input Sheet

The Leader Board uses the pivot table functions in Excel to sort the teams in the order of highest points. Each time you update the input sheet you can subsequently right click on the Leader Board and click “Refresh” and the Leader Board is updated automatically. It’s ideal for displaying on a projector at the event for real time scoring updates. Or if you really want to look professional, you can try pasting it into Powerpoint.

Quiz Leader Board

You can find a report about how the actual quiz went at LisgooldLeamlara.ie

If you want to download the spreadsheet to try it out, you can find it below.

Click here to download QuizResults.xlsx

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

| Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |

We’ve had a few machines in the past few days with the same rogue anti-virus. This one is called AntiVir 2010 and it comes the usual professional looking interface which misleads the unwary into believing that they have a series of virus infections. It then looks for your credit card to buy a “licence” to clean these phantom viruses.

Here are some screenshots in case you see this rogue antivirus:

The virus blocks all the startup programs that it can and also prevents most applications from running. If you try to run an application, it will darken the screen and report the application as infected as below.

It also puts  up fake blue screen errors to panic users. These appear to be part of a screensaver and so moving the mouse gets rid of them.

A final touch is the fake Windows Security Center. Those of you with an eye for detail will notice the incorrect icon on the top left of the window and the slightly oversize nature of the firewall, updates and security icons but it is more than good enough to fool most of us.

If you can get applications to run, we have found that a combination of Malwarebytes and Spybot Search and Destroy  deals quite effectively with this rouge antivirus in most cases. However in some cases, these tools alone are not sufficient and more advanced removal techniques are required. If this is the case, we advise you to contact us directly.

In some cases, we have seen AntiVir 2010 appear on the same machine as another Rogue Antivirus called “Personal Security”. At this point we do not know if these are the same infection or different infections.

 If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

| Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |