The Twelve Days of Spyware

Writen by Doug Woodall

The Twelve Days of Spyware

On the first day of Spyware,
A Sender Forger sent to me
A SoBig Virus in a Email.

On the second day of Spyware,
a Phisher sent to me
A Nigerian Email Scam,
And a SoBig Virus in a Email.

On the third day of Spyware,
Webforce sent to me
A unauthorized Bank Charge,
A Nigerian Email Scam,
And a SoBig Virus in a Email.

On the fourth day of Spyware,
A Homepage Hijacker sent to me
A Homepage of Sleeze,
A unauthorized Bank Charge,
A Nigerian Email Scam,
And a SoBig Virus in a Email.

On the fifth day of Spyware,
Advertising Software sent to me
A hundred annoying Popups,
A Homepage of Sleeze,
A unauthorized Bank Charge,
A Nigerian Email Scam,
And a SoBig Virus in a Email.

On the sixth day of Spyware,
A Hacker sent to me
A Keylogger that stole my Identity,
A hundred annoying Popups,
A Homepage of Sleeze,
A unauthorized Bank Charge,
A Nigerian Email Scam,
And a SoBig Virus in a Email.

On the seventh day of Spyware,
A Dialer stealer sent to me
A huge Phone bill,
A Keylogger that stole my Identity,
A hundred annoying Popups,
A Homepage of Sleeze,
A unauthorized Bank Charge,
A Nigerian Email Scam,
And a SoBig Virus in a Email.

On the eighth day of Spyware,
A free download sent to me
A lil program that stole my chatroom logs,
A huge Phone bill,
A Keylogger that stole my Identity,
A hundred annoying Popups,
A Homepage of Sleeze,
A unauthorized Bank Charge,
A Nigerian Email Scam,
And a SoBig Virus in a Email.

On the ninth day of Spyware,
A Drive By Download sent to me
Xupiter,oh joy,
A lil program that stole my chatroom logs,
A huge Phone bill,
A Keylogger that stole my Identity,
A hundred annoying Popups,
A Homepage of Sleeze,
A unauthorized Bank Charge,
A Nigerian Email Scam,
And a SoBig Virus in a Email.

On the tenth day of Spyware,
Grokster sent to me
Gator,oh NO,
Xupiter,oh joy,
A lil program that stole my chatroom logs,
A huge Phone bill,
A Keylogger that stole my Identity,
A hundred annoying Popups,
A Homepage of Sleeze,
A unauthorized Bank Charge,
A Nigerian Email Scam,
And a SoBig Virus in a Email.

On the eleventh day of Spyware,
DoubleClick sent to me
Lots of Ad Cookies,
Gator,oh NO,
Xupiter,oh joy,
A lil program that stole my chatroom logs,
A huge Phone bill,
A Keylogger that stole my Identity,
A hundred annoying Popups,
A Homepage of Sleeze,
A unauthorized Bank Charge,
A Nigerian Email Scam,
And a SoBig Virus in a Email.

On the twelfth day of Spyware,
Malware sent to me
A unbootable computer,
Lots of Ad Cookies,
Gator,oh NO,
Xupiter,oh joy,
A lil program that stole my chatroom logs,
A huge Phone bill,
A Keylogger that stole my Identity,
A hundred annoying Popups,
A Homepage of Sleeze,
A unauthorized Bank Charge,
A Nigerian Email Scam,
And a SoBig Virus in a Email!

Stay Safe Online and Happy Holidays to you and yours.

Screensavers – Now Get Energized With Inspirational Text

Writen by CD Mohatta

Till now, screensavers have been a tool to enjoy watching scenes. A good screensaver was supposed to have great photographs or animations and good to look at. Not many had thought that screensavers could be used to inspire with text that can re-energize anyone. They are getting made now.

When you watch such screensavers, you will see beautiful images of nature such as mountains, rivers, waterfalls, tress, flowers etc. And a short inspirational text fading in and fading out. Accompanied with great music these screensavers are a delight to watch and great tool for getting inspired.

How do they inspire? Think of person who is feeling depressed and hopeless. Most of the times the thoughts that enter his/her mind are negative and such a person only thinks of defeat. Not many friends will find time to meet him/her and give a pep talk. Most of the times such people are on their own. When they watch Inspirational screensavers, they read the message again and again and that message fights their negativity.

This is a self-help tool. There are more than hundreds of such screensavers available online at no cost and you can download as many as you wish for free. Watch them whenever you need to get into inspirational mood. Before a presentation, before an examination or before going for a surgery or anytime you are feeling little low in spirit. Send them to your friends, who you feel may need the screensavers to fight any problems. Screensavers with Inspirational messages are a fun way to get inspired right on your desktop at no cost.

Refills for Half the Price?

Writen by Catherine Pulsifer

I stood in the line up at the store and noticed a new booth displaying refills for printers. The cashier noticed me looking at the booth, and she quickly said, “They are just new here.” I asked her if she had ever used their services, and her face lit up. “Oh yes” she said, “I saved over $20.00 I used to buy new print cartridges for my ink jet printer and I would pay an arm and a leg for them. Now, I just get the cartridges refilled at a fraction of the price.” But, the question running through my mind was, does it work? It was as though she could read my mind. Before I could ask the question, she said, “It works just as good as a new cartridge; there is no difference in the printing.” I paid for my purchases and thanked her for her help.

I then went over to the booth selling the refills. The employee was very helpful. I asked her a series of questions, and she basically told me, that millions of cartridges are thrown away each year and end up in landfill sites. The cartridges can be refilled with ink, and give you the same quality as if you had bought a new cartridge. She said the cartridges do eventually wear out. Usually after the second to third refill, they are no good. What amazed me the most was the difference in the cost. For the type of printer I have, it cost close to $40.00 for a new cartridge, but refilling it only cost me $18. Half the price!!

I came home intrigued by this new discovery. I am always looking for new ways to be more frugal – getting more for my money. I researched the Internet and found there are many organizations that have programs in place to accept your old cartridges. They recycle them. In Canada alone, less than 5% of the millions of cartridges are ever recycled. It takes at least 2 ounces of oil to produce a new inkjet cartridge, and the plastic used in many cartridges takes centuries to decompose. When I thought of the millions being thrown out filling our landfill sites, and the cost of new vs. refilling, I decided to give it a try.

When my ink ran out, I took my old cartridge in and had it refilled. It works great. The one downside is that some manufacturers of printers will not warrant your guarantee if you use refills vs. new cartridges. I purchased my printer over 5 years ago, and it is not an expensive one so I am not concerned over the warranty as it has probably expired long ago.

So, if you want to save money, and you want to help reduce the amount of cartridges going to landfill sites, have your ink cartridges refilled before you buy a new one! A great way to be frugal – getting more for your money!

If you are concerned about your warranty on your printer and would prefer to buy new cartridges don’t throw out your old one. Donate your empty ink cartridge to the many organizations now willing to recycle them. You will be practicing reduce, recyle and reuse which will help our environment!

IT Service Agreements: The Offer is About Timing

Writen by Joshua Feinberg

The best time to offer IT service agreements to clients is immediately following emergency service calls. Since you’ve just rescued a client, you are in their best graces, and they are at their highest point of liking you, knowing you and trusting you, three critical elements that make up a good client-IT professional relationship.

Damage Control For The Future

Right after you handle an emergency, a client is most interested in talking about how to prevent future panic, since the feeling of helplessness and frustration is fresh in his mind. Give them a proposal for ongoing maintenance from your firm under the protection of IT service agreements.

Audits And It Service Agreements

Right after IT audits, many customers will be thinking about the next step, so this is also a good opportunity to offer IT service contracts. Particularly if clients have agreed to the audits in the first place, they will be looking for someone to be regularly available to them. They want to find a consultant who can pay attention to their needs and approach them as long-term projects.

In order to sign IT service agreements, the party needs to be your paying customer. An IT service agreement will create a long-term client relationship because they have stepped beyond being a transaction-oriented customer.

Long Range Option

Another way to get clients to sign IT service agreements with IT audits might take somewhere between a couple weeks and a couple months. It involves helping your customer realize he is not happy with his current technology provider.

There could be a range of things wrong with the provider: it doesn’t deliver the promised product; it has a bad response time; it’s too expensive; or personalities don’t match. A lot of different things can happen, but it will send them shopping for a new consulting firm. The thing to do if this happens is to take a lot of notes on the client’s business and suggest an IT audit. The IT audit will give you an excellent “in” for IT service agreements.

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Getting Rid Of Spyware

Writen by Michael Russell

To get rid of spyware, you have know what spyware is. Spyware is software installed on your computer that tracks what you do, whenever you are online surfing the internet. It then sends information back to the source and shows you banner ads that are based on what sites you surf. Most spyware is bundled in free software that you download from the internet. You can tell if the software you have has spyware, because you will see a banner in your web browser that is not normally there, or you will get pop ups offering you products or services whenever you surf.

Spyware can take up your memory and then make you computer run slower, and finally, will make your computer freeze. So to get rid of spyware you have to find it on your computer. A program that can help with this problem is Adaware. Make a search for this program on Google.com and you should find a site to download it.

Run this program and notice what it finds. Then restart the computer and run the program again and see if it finds any more spyware. If it does, run a search online on Google for Spybot Search and Destroy. Follow the same steps and see if you still have spyware. If you do, reboot your computer in safe mode then run both the programs again. This time the computer will search all files and should find other spyware that could not be found earlier.

Once the programs finish running, restart your computer, run them again, then go online and check for updates for the programs. If updates are available, download them and rerun the programs to identify and remove any newer spyware.

If you want to get rid of spyware and keep it from getting back on your computer, you should buy a spyware software CD from the computer store. Having this will allow you to subscribe to the service which will provide updates. If the software suspects that spyware is on the computer, it will alert you and will remove the intruder.

You should use one of these methods to identify and remove spyware because it will cause your computer to not run correctly. If you do not want to use any of these programs and do not download files from the internet, then you should tell anyone else that uses your computer not to do so either.

What’s the Point for Computer Optimization?

Writen by Ted Peterson

I am sure you’ve heard a lot of things about computer optimization. Everywhere you look you see ads that invite you to “boost your performance” or “improve your computer”. So, what’s the idea? Is anything true about it? Does your computer really need optimization?

Unfortunately, it does. There are many weak zones in Windows operating system. Here are a few of them:
– registry
– hardware management
– internet connection

Registries are Windows’s internal database. All sort of information are stored there, from hardware and drivers info to applications’ settings. After each removal of any device, like a printer or video card, pieces of information remain there. The biggest problem is when you uninstall a program. Unfortunately, many applications fail to erase all their data on removal. A solution for this is to run “regedit” and manually search for all references to the program and erase them.

By hardware management I mean memory and hard-disk management. As you know, each program uses some of your computer’s memory. Memory allocation is determined by how much the program needs and, of course, if the resource is available. When the application stops, the used blocks of memory should be freed. But this is not happening all the time. So, when a new programs requests memory to run, your computer will slow down because it will compete with other applications for the remaining resources.

The same situation appears when you remove files from your computer. They are not really erased. They remain on your hard-disk and affect other files that you want to read or write. It’s the same principle as described above regarding memory usage. To avoid problems you should use at least once a month a hard-disk defragmenter, in order to clean remaining pieces of information.

Because so many people use the Internet today, internet speed has become very important. I am talking about download speed and browsing speed. Actually it’s the same concept. When you browse a webpage, you computer creates by default a channel with the page’s server and starts downloading it. Download speed is of course given first of all by your internet subscription, but there is something that affects it too. The connection channel can be single threaded or multi threaded. As I said that channel is by default single threaded. What your computer should do is to break the downloaded file (image, text, archive, etc) into several smaller parts, and create a download channel for each of them. After they are all downloaded it should, of course, rebuild the source. That is what all download accelerators do.

Those are only a few ideas why your computer needs optimization. Registry tweaking, memory flushing, hard-disk defragmenters and an accelerated Internet connection would speedup your activity because you won’t have to loose so much time waiting…

You can find several software releases that would do the job on CoreDownload, a software archive with over 23.000 titles to choose from.