Meeting Preview: Bob LaFave will do a presentation on the Digital Home. We will also have the usual half-hour Windows SIG.

Editor’s Comments

By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

Last month I mentioned how it was getting hard to fill the newsletter with our own articles. This month the situation is worse. Merle Nicholson, who has rescued me for the past two months, is apparently running out of steam. However, he still contributed a short piece this month. Others who have been so helpful in the past apparently have writer’s block, and those who have never contributed are still withholding their creativity from us.

So what to do? Perhaps I should shorten the newsletter by four pages (one sheet of paper). I had planned to write the Wireless article for this month, and it is here, but I hadn’t planned on doing more. Necessity then led me to write the article on programming for the Pocket PC using Visual Studio .Net. I know, most readers tolerance for programming articles is pretty low, so I tried to keep that fairly short. Thus, there is still over a page to fill. Forgive me if I am forced to fill the space the best way I can; thus, the following observations.

Never click on anything in an email without hovering your cursor over it to see where it leads and never click on attachments. I have told that to myself and others many times. Last week a relative received an email from her ISP stating that it had detected a large number of emails originating from her computer and that she was obviously infested with a mass-mailing worm and she needed to click on the attached file and read the instructions on how to clean up her computer.

As you might have guessed, the email was not really from her ISP--it just appeared to be--and the file to be clicked on did not contain the promised instructions. It contained the latest version of the MyDoom mass-mailing worm --and her computer ground to a crawl. The mouse would only move in slow jerks, programs took forever to open, etc. When she called me, I had her start in Safe Mode and run msconfig to see what was in the startup. There were a couple of things there that were obvious problems. Service.exe is the only one I can recall at the moment. Anyway she had loads of things starting up that shouldn’t be. I had her uncheck all of those and reboot. The computer seemed much better but was still not normal. Next she ran Norton Antivirus, but it found nothing. Oh, I forgot to mention that Norton gave her a warning when she clicked on the attachment--but somehow it did not protect her. Since I wasn’t there I don’t know, but maybe it gave her several options and she chose the wrong one.

Next day when she boots the computer, Norton comes up and gives her some message, she then goes to the Symantec site and based on that message determines that she has MyDoom, but her computer is so crippled that she cannot download the fix. So I go to Symantec, get the FixMyDoom.exe and send it to her as an email attachment. It takes her forever to download her email. Finally it comes in and she is able to run the fix. It says that it has found all these problem files and quarantined them and reset the registry settings to what they should be, etc. Then, per instructions, she shuts down and reboots and runs the fix program again to remove any remnants of the worm that may have been in memory during the first fix.

I will say it again--do not click on anything in an email--and I will add do not believe any email that tells you it is from your ISP, your bank or Nigeria.

Now that I am on a do-not-do-thing jag, here is one more: do not hold down the shift key when deleting anything. If you do, you will not be able to retrieve it from the recycle bin for files and folders or from the deleted items in emails. But you say, “I only hold down the shift key when I know that I will never want the item again.” My answer to that is there is always a chance that I will make a mistake and actually want it tomorrow or I will make a mistake and delete something other than what I think I am deleting.

The recycle bin is there for that purpose--to save you from mistakes. It causes no problem to let deleted items sit there for, say, a week before being deleted permanently. You don’t even have to look at the items before emptying the bin. Most, if not all of them will have been there long enough to be retrieved in case you suddenly find a need for them.

In the past two years I have had at least two queries from members who used the shift key when deleting, but then wanted their stuff back. There is only one possible solution , and that is to purchase software that can under the right conditions restore the deleted files.

Just recently someone deleted an entire folder of email (the entire folder, not just the messages in it) by holding down the shift key while supposedly deleting only one message in the folder. It was a relatively unimportant folder, so the consequences were not grave, but what if had been the inbox containing two years worth of messages?

Finally, let’s talk about buying computers. When the Gateway store was in Tampa, I tried to always buy from it, since I had bought Gateway computers for many years, was happy with them and wanted to support the store since they had been nice to our group. Well, Gateway closed all its stores this year, so that is no longer an option. Thus, when the relative of MyDoom fame said she wanted a new computer, I first went to the Gateway site, but things were different. There is now very little that you can customize, I confirmed in an online chat with Gateway. In fact, only one of the 710 series computers (not the one we wanted) came with Windows XP Professional. All the others came with XP Home, and when you click on the customize button, there is no way to change XP Home to XP Professional--even though on a previous page there is the message: “Gateway recommends Microsoft Windows XP Professional”. You also cannot change the hard drive size. This is not the Gateway I have bought computers from since 1991. So it was off to the Dell and HP sites.

The Dell site was a bit tacky to my taste with messages in red that read something like “Limited time offer”; “ends Wednesday”. So after a quick look around it was on to the HP site. The HP desktops seemed aimed at the low-end market, and I must admit a long standing prejudice against HP computers based on a few bad encounters with them. However, at the same site Compaq desktops were available and infinitely customizable. You can have Windows XP Professional if you want, you can have any type of monitor, hard drive and amount of RAM you want. This is the way it should be. So, this time, the order goes to Compaq. I am afraid, at least for the time being, 13 years of buying mostly Gateways is over.

Now, couldn’t one of our members have written something similar to the above, giving the newsletter more variety and adding to my knowledge, too.u