Half Price Services until August 31!
Summer is fast approaching, the weather will hopefully get better, and you and I and everyone else will be heading outdoors and spending less time on the internet.
Yeah, right! As a confirmed Facebook addict, all the warmer weather means is more Slurpee™ cups on my computer desk. It's 2011, and viruses and other computer problems don't take the summer off!
With that in mind, I have decided that this would be a great time to meet some new customers and win them over to my old-school, no-nonsense, safety-first approach to solving technology problems! To do this, I have cut my rates for labour and flat-rate services in half! That's right, half-price!
Why would you trust your irreplaceable files, your baby pictures, and your private emails to some high school kid when you can get a true veteran of technology's progress for the same money or less?
CLICK HERE for the half-price rate sheet. Then, after you've sworn off Craigslist, call me. 
Windows 7 Service Pack 1 released
Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and for Windows Server 2008.
For Windows 7 users, this means that a number of security and stability fixes have been made. If you are using Windows Update (and you should be!) you may already have SP1 installed. If not, you will need to either turn on Windows Update or download the service pack and install it manually.
Not sure if you already have the service pack? Click the Start button, then select Control Panel. Click "System and Maintenance" and then "System." You should then see a display with some basic information about your system, including the version of Windows you are running. If a service pack is installed, it will say which one. If it is not installed, it won't say anything about a service pack at all!
If you're not sure if your Windows is up to date or even if it is updating, I can help with that. Call or email me to book a service call!
Wi-Fi and the glass shower stall
In recent privacy/technology news, it was revealed that Google, while driving around the cities of North America gathering photos for its popular "Street View" feature, was gathering something else at the same time: Unsecured wireless networks. The camera cars would drive around taking pictures, and computers on board would also analyze the wireless environment, connecting to unsecured wireless networks it found. In many cases, it would gather data from these networks, which could include passwords, credit card details, personal and sensitive emails, the porn people were downloading... you get the picture. Lots of privacy advocates were up in arms and today, the Canadian Privacy Commissioner declared Google's actions illegal.
But were they?
Years ago, I used to listen to the police on a radio scanner often. The instruction manual assured me that even though I might hear lots of exciting and sometimes embarrassing things, this activity was perfectly legal because the radio airwaves are a public medium, at least from a listening point of view. Radio signals propagate through the air, but also through solid objects, into your home, through your body, into the ground somewhat and out into space to travel until the end of time. How could the law forbid you from intercepting an eternal signal that is already traveling through your brain? Under a Radio Act written with that rationale, I could listen all I wanted as long as I kept what I heard to myself. The police knew this, and often deflected truly sensitive conversations to their cell phones (which were themselves unsecured back in the stone age when I was a scanner listener). Today, wireless networks transmit all kinds of data out into the same ether, and some of that data is stuff that its owners would never want made public. Google, meanwhile, drove around gathering that data from the public airwaves, and guess what they did with it: They kept it to themselves, as the law requires.
Is what Google did indescribably creepy? You bet it is.
Is it legal? That's in question, although the privacy commissioner says no.
But is Google responsible for that teenage girl's breakup email being found in the first place on the airwaves that we Canadians all own? I think not.
Until today's announcement, it was widely accepted that anything you said or did on the public airwaves was subject to being intercepted and used in ways you would never approve of. Most of the uses for that information are illegal or unethical or both. But the information shouldn't be out in the open in the first place. Not if you actually care about your privacy.
Would you build a bathroom made entirely of clear glass, with a shower made of clear glass, on the front of your house on a busy street? Where everyone could see you bathe and shave and do your business?
That is exactly what you are doing with your sensitive data when you use wireless technology "out of the box" without ever setting up any of its security features. Your passwords, your account details, your personal and private emails, every second of TV you watch, every online game you play - it's all out in the open for every hacker, stalker, sinister three-letter-agency and yes, even Google, to see and do with as they please. It's like taking a bath in that glass bathroom and wondering why everyone is staring.
Don't even get me started on what a spammer can do with an unsecured wireless connection. At your expense. I started to imagine a similar metaphor for that situation but stopped when I realized I wouldn't be able to use it on a family-friendly blog!
Even the most rudimentary encryption standard available for Wi-Fi - the WEP standard - is enough to deter all casual snoops, opportunist hackers, and yes, even Google. Your wireless hardware is capable of protecting you much more strongly, however, with WPA2 encryption and looooong encryption keys. This encryption plus a few security countermeasures such as MAC filtering and disabling SSID broadcast, will keep out even the most persistent stalkers and hackers who may be specifically targeting you, maybe even the three-letter agencies and yes, even Google. Not that you're likely to ever be the target of any of these super-creeps. Except maybe Google. But the point I am trying to make with all of these technical acronyms and scary what-ifs is that you already have the equipment you need for a safe, secure, and above all truly private home or business network. You just need to turn the security on and set it up.
My new router, a Cisco Linksys E3000, asked me three questions as soon as I turned it on and connected to it: What kind of encryption did I want to use, what passphrase did I want to use to secure it, and finally, what did I want to call my wireless network. If every piece of wi-fi hardware put security first as the E3000 does, Google would have had no information to gather and the whole privacy issue wouldn't be there!
If you've got a wireless network, and you aren't sure if your private information is staying private, please call me at 
or email me at 
to arrange an evaluation. Your digital life doesn't have to be... err... "exposed!"
More about the Privacy Commissioner's opinion on Google's gathering of information from wireless networks can be found in this news article.
Smoking and computers
About a year ago, a news story on The Consumerist reported that Apple repair depots were refusing to honour extended warranties on Macs when the technicians discovered cigarette smoke resin inside the machines. This touched off a heated discussion that continues to this day, an unusual occurrence for a news article's discussion thread.
Apple's take on this is that cigarette smoke is an environmental condition, much like using a computer in a too-cold or too-humid environment, that voids the warranty. Now, those of you who know me know that I am not one to side with Apple on any issue, and those who know me also know what I think of extended warranties (they are a high-profit scam). So it is perhaps surprising that I am 100% in agreement with Apple on this.
I have serviced many PCs with cigarette smoke damage. Cigarette smoke leaves a resin on every surface of the inside of your PC, especially around the fans where air movement is greatest. This resin is sticky and tenacious to remove. Because it is sticky, dust accumulates on internal components at a far faster rate than a computer in a clean air environment. The extra-thick dust-bunnies insulate heat like crazy (when the object of the fans and heat sinks is to do the opposite), and eventually the CPU and power supply fans will completely seize up - years before they would have failed from age. The resin is also dark and opaque, so optical sensors - such as the read and write head in your DVD burner - very quickly fail as well. It's even slightly electrically conductive, greatly increasing the likelihood of "random" memory and CPU errors.
This problem was actually greater before flat-screen monitors became commonplace, because the high voltage circuitry in old CRT monitors would electrostatically attract the smoke and its sticky resin to the monitor and whatever was near it - such as a desktop computer box right underneath it! But the high heat inside newer computers has led to a profusion of cooling fans which suck in cigarette smoke like never before, there to be trapped as resin. So the problem has definitely not gone away with the end of CRTs, and as more and more components need their own fans, resin accumulation in smokers' PCs might actually increase in the future! Worse, all those high-heat components are much more likely to overheat and fail once their cooling systems have failed.
A few years ago, I was called to find out why the picture on a customer's monitor had turned yellow and fuzzy. My thought on the way to the service call was that a cabling problem or something like that had caused the blue signal to the monitor to fail, but I wasn't sure why the picture would be fuzzy. As soon as I arrived and got one sniff of that customer's house, I knew what the problem really was. One wipe with an alcohol-soaked chamois revealed a perfect, full-colour picture underneath the resin.
On top of all of it, smoke-damaged PCs are very unpleasant for a technician to work on. Try working on something complex and delicate with a full ashtray in your face for an hour. That's what it's like. And that's why a lot of techs simply refuse to work on them, and why Apple is not making them do it.
Your computer's warranty won't cover you if you drop the computer, or if you pour coffee into it, or if you plug it into a 220 volt outlet. Cigarette smoke damage is another kind of damage that is completely caused by the user and not the fault of the manufacturer.
It's not my place to tell you what to put in your body. That's your doctor's job. As your technician, however, it is my job to tell you that if you want your computer to last a long time, if you want to save money on replacing heat-damaged components, and if you must smoke, do it outside, do it away from your computer.
Although I'm a lifelong non-smoker, I'm not one of those technicians who won't service smoke-damaged PCs. If your PC is overheating, it is very likely that the repair will cost more if smoke is a factor - simply because of the detailed cleaning required and the higher likelihood of the need for parts replacement. If your computer is crashing a lot, even if you've been smoking around it, call me at or email me at to book a service call!
D-Link DIR-615 router: a review
I used to be a big fan of D-Link, I still have much of their hardware in service years after my first purchase. Decent quality, high performing hardware at low prices kept me buying more and more until most of my network, wired and wireless, was D-Link.
Last saturday, I decided to upgrade my network to 802.11n. That's the really fast "new" wireless standard that is faster through the air than many wired networks are through their cables! For this I went down to my local big-box technology store and, after a brief search, found a router that could give me that upgrade at a reasonable price: the D-Link DIR-615.
But I returned it after two frustrating days of the DIR-615:
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For most people the last one is not an issue but in my network it breaks the major security and performance advantage of its topology.
A quick google midway through the ordeal turned up numerous similar complaints about this router, so we can rule out a fluke manufacturing error. Buggy, poorly designed firmware seems to be the underlying issue here and even the most recent update failed to address any of the problems I experienced.
My previous router, a D-Link WBR-2310, had none of these shortcomings; its only fault was that it died after a few years of 24 hour service.
My recommendation: don't buy this router, or its cheaper sibling, the DIR-601. In fact, after reading customer reviews on the website of the big-box technology store where I purchased this item, I would even say that the whole DIR-600 series is suspect!
I have only just now begun doing my due-diligence homework on a replacement, and although I have no recommendations yet, the early favourites are the mid-priced ($100 range) routers by Cisco/Linksys. I'll post an update when I find a router I can feel good about installing for my customers.
D-Link DIR-615 rating: 0 out of 5 - avoid!
Nintendo 3DS game console announced
Straight from the planned-obsolescence department:
Just a few weeks after I gave my daughter a new Nintendo DSi XL for her birthday, Nintendo has announced the first 3D portable game console: the 3DS.
Featuring a larger, 3-D upper screen and improved Wi-Fi capability, the 3DS will also include dual lenses for one of its built-in cameras, allowing your kids to take 3-D photos. Something that even my wife's professional DSLR can't do.
No price or release date has been announced yet, but it's nice to know that my 12-year-old's third DS is already obsolete. At least the bigger XL case should live longer than the previous two, as the clamshell hinge should be stronger - an advantage I don't expect to see in the smaller sized 3DS.