Sunbelt MVP!

A Huge congrats to our very own technician Tim Gardner for being nominated as Sunbelt Software's MVP!!!

Nick Hallin, a Tier III Customer Support Technical at Sunbelt, has nominated Tim Gardner for their MVP program.

"We greatly appreciate all the time you spend volunteering on our forum helping others and would like to reward you .... As a MVP on the Sunbelt Support Forum, Tim will have the title “MVP” beneath his author icon and a MVP icon added to his signature."

Another outstanding reason why ODI's technicians are the best at what they do! Call us today to find out for yourself!

Rogue Antivirus'

Thank you to our friends at Sunbelt:

All antivirus companies are being hit with the next wave of malware: Rogue antivirus tools like Antivirus 2010. This code throws messages on the user's screen that they are infected, and "download here to get rid of the malware". Sure enough, that gets the Trojan installed.

The reality is that no AV vendor, ESET, McAfee, Sunbelt, Sophos, Symantec, etc. can give you 100% coverage against it.These new fake antivirus variants are some of the most vicious, polymorphic Trojans this industry has seen. They use extremely complex obfuscation techniques which make detection quite challenging by even the best antivirus engine. Many of these rogues are also service-side polymorphic. That means every time an exe is downloaded, it's recompiled on the server-side into a different piece of code.

There are about 75,000 new tier-1 pieces of malware coming out every day. Educate yourself! The vast majority of infections these days are caused by social engineering. A user will get a funny video link on Facebook or some other social networking site, click on it, and it will say that they need to "install a special codec", or "update Flash". Or they will be doing a Google search and a malware site will have attached itself to an innocent keyword. The user will click and start getting crazy warnings that their machine is infected. This is the malware trying to get the user to install. If something does not look right, it probably is not right - DON'T CLICK ON IT!

Be sure you have a current version of your AV program installed or updated. If you’re not sure what you have, throw caution to the wind and consult an ODI rep. Too often we’ve found clients have not 1, but 2 AV programs installed and more times than not, they either hog up space on your computer- slowing it down something terrible, or they conflict with each other! Give us a call today!

PC Clean Up

Does it feel like your computer is dragging?

There can be several reasons for this, but if you've recently purchased a computer with Vista or Windows 7, then more likely it could be related to memory.

In Windows Vista and Windows 7, if you look at your task manager under the performance tab you will see a graph labeled Memory. This is how much memory your PC is using at that moment. Sometimes that number is larger than the amount of RAM you have in your system. The "overflow" is stored on your hard disk drive for (not so) quick access.

For example, let's say your computer has 512MB of RAM. If you look at your memory graph in Task Manager, chances are your computer is using more than 512MB of memory. If that number in the graph is 768MB, this means that the PC is using all 512MB of RAM, plus it is storing 256MB worth of commands on your hard disk drive (virtual memory).

The solution is either add more memory or clean up some of those unnecessary commands. Give us a call. We can log into your PC and clean up programs that aren't needed which will bring that number down. We will also provide you a quick overview of the hardware you’re using and it's capacity. Is it an acceptable amount of storage, or do you need to upgrade?

Computer Registry Cleaners

Often, clients who thought they were doing a good thing by installing a registry cleaner find out they’ve possibly made a small problem bigger! They install a Registry Cleaner program, run it, and then problems start; Bootup errors, missing .dll errors, etc. This happens because the registry cleaner removes a key that it shouldn't have.

When you boot up your computer, the registry is loaded into your RAM not the hard disk. This means the performance you gain from cleaning the registry is so small that you will probably not notice any difference.

Running a registry cleaner may clean up 75-150 keys - not worth the risk of the registry cleaner removing something it shouldn't.

Call or email one of our certified technicians for assistance or more information!