A personal favorite of mine, this is a simple website that also serves its purpose — bringing web presence to dozens on businesses located in my hometown of Maywood, Illinois. though I left the town a long time ago, my heart is still there!

This website features a custom design and even custom flash animation of photos of the customer’s portfolio!

http://winebydesign.biz

This website is a completely custom site developed to showcase Wine Cellar designs and wine storage options. Created on spec for a customer in North Carolina.

Getting Started

First of all, we need to get your computer. As our customers know, we love to use remote access software to provide support over the Internet, often avoiding a visit from one of our techs to your home and office. However, most infestations of viruses and malware leave your computer in a state where we can’t gain access. So that means we have to actually get our hands on the computer. If you can drop it off, that’s great — do it at your convenience and we’ll get right to work on it. If you prefer we pick it up and drop it off, we’ll be glad to arrange that, too.

Once we have your computer in our hands, we’ll start the process. The process of removing viruses and spyware has three basic steps:

1. Regain control
2. Remove the bad code
3. Update software to prevent re-infestations

Regain Control

To regain control, we generally use a special keypress Microsoft provides to give users access to systems that experiencing problems preventing normal startups. After the BIOS screen appears, we continuously tap the F8 key located along the top of the keyboard. Usually, that will get us to a special start-up screen where we can select “Safe Mode with Networking”. This Safe Mode start-up loads only a core set of processes in Windows and give us the ability to get in and start the next step — removing the bad code.

Sometimes, we can’t get F8 to work. Sometimes that computer has been so infected — or, to be honest, sometimes the customer has already messed with their computer enough to damage the boot process — that we have to use a special disk from Microsoft (usually provided by your computer manufacturer) called a Recovery Disk, Booting from this disk we can reload some of the Windows core software, and attempt other technical recovery options. I’m going to leave that discussion for another day.

For the purposes, let’s assume the F8 process worked, and we are ready to go in Safe Mode with Networking.

Remove The Bad Code

This is where is gets tricky. Like hunting some kind of wild animal, the more often you do this, the more you start to understand the signs you see that your quarry has left behind. And that guides your next steps. But, in a general way, we start with a great tool called Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (http://malwarebytes.org). This software is available in a free unsupported version as well as a very reasonably priced version that DOES have support. We either download the software directly from their website, or,  if we are having network issues, we bring it with us on a flash drive to install a clean, uninfected copy. Once installed, we select Perform Quick Scan which will get rid of the worst of the malware and give us the best chance at a normal start-up process. Following that scan, which could find anywhere from 8 to 80 or more infections, we allow the software to remove those infections, and reboot the computer — again going into Safe Mode with Networking.

Next, we run another package to scan for infected software. This package is called Super Anti Spyware (http://superantispyware.com). Again, this is free software, but they offer a pro version for $19.95 that is well worth the cost and provides some great protection from future infection. After installing this software, we allow it to scan our computer. This software will find all kinds of infected and malicious software the Malwarebytes doesn’t flag. That doesn’t mean Malwarebytes didn’t work — it’s just that Malwarebytes has a different definition of what “malicious” is. Running Super Anti Spyware gives us a cleaner machine — free from tracking cookies, for example.

After running these two programs, we take one more step. We click Start, then Run and type MSCONFIG and press enter. This gives us access to a Microsoft Windows utility program that allows us to see what programs are loading at start-up. We remove unnecessary ones (I’ll leave those details out here — it’s taken a long time and a lot of experience to know what is important and what generally isn’t necessary– do a Google search for more tips on what to remove).

Now, we’re ready to try to boot up into normal mode.

If we successfully boot into normal mode, it’s time to run a full scan of the PC using Malwarebytes and the customer’s own anti-virus program. if their AV program is out of date — or they don’t have one — we recommend installing Microsoft Security Essentials (http://microsoft.com/security_essentials)  and using that to do a full scan.

After those scans, and removing any problem files those scans find, it’s time to make sure everything is up to date.

Update Software to Prevent Re-infestation

A long, long time ago, viruses were written by basically high tech vandals who got a kick out of damaging your computer or your data. Today, the virus writers don’t want you to even know your computer is infected. Instead, they want to control your computer silently, or they want to collect information on you — like your credit card numbers — with you knowing. And in the case of most malware infections today, they often want to force you to buy something — like a virus removal service. If they can get you to do that, they can get money AND your credit card number from you.

To do this, they need to get their software on your computer. And to do that, they use holes in software that you probably don’t even know you’re using. Currently, the most often used holes for loading this software come from Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader or Java. if you are not using the most current version, the malware authors can easily infect your machine. So, after cleaning the bad code from your system, we got Adobe (http://adobe.com) and download the current versions of Flash and Reader. And then we go to Java (http://Java.com) and download the latest version there, too. And finally, we make sure that you have loaded all of the current updates for Windows, since almost all Windows updates are security related.

So that’s it. I’ve covered almost every detail, I believe. And I think you see now why we encourage you to drop your computer off and let the pros work on it. Missing any of these steps, or using out of date virus detection, or spending hours looking for updates can cause you even more heartache than the malware on your computer.

Have we prevented any future infestation of viruses, spyware or malware. No, because unfortunately, there’s one part of the computer we can’t control — the user. But that’s another blog post… For now, the customer has the best defenses and a clean computer.

Give us a call — let us help you out — 630-492-1275.

Q: I have digital TV (DTV) ready TVs in my house, and I’ve been watching basic cable on them. However, my provider is now scrambling the History Channel, which I like to watch. I’m thinking about dropping cable service all together. Can I use the old VHF/UHF antenna in my attic to get DTV signals? Will it work way our here in the suburbs?

A: Yes, your in-attic antenna will work for digital TV. You may need to re-aim it, and there’s a possibility you won’t get every channel clearly way out here in the ‘burbs. Here’s more on antennas from the FCC:

http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/dtvantennas.html

As far as aiming and signal quality goes, here’s a guide that allows you to pinpoint where to aim from your exact location, and what you can expect:

http://www.fcc.gov/mb/engineering/maps/

A lot of people I know get great reception — even better than before — with their old antennas. Be sure you have a UHF/VHF antenna though. We have DTV signals on both bands here in Chicago.

Q: Assuming I am too far away for a good signal, and have to bite the bullet and pay for premium services, do you have a recommendation on which provider is the best?

A: I don’t really have a good recommendation for premium services. All of the options are expensive. I personally have Comcast, and while their customer service can be a pain, they’ve always come through when I have a problem — eventually.

Another option to consider is Internet TV. I have that at home and at the office. You can use the Roku XD Streaming Player 1080p from Netgear for about $80, and with that, you can receive all sorts of stuff off the web. A company called Mediafly has an app on the Roku box that will allow you to view lots of stuff that History Channel has on the internet already… Also, for $8/month, you can get Netflix service on the Roku that will allow you to view lots of Netflix movies and documentaries for free…