How to

Everyone in Europe who is currently using Internet Explorer as their main internet browsing program is powering on their computer to find a screen like this appearing on their screen. Without going into the details, this is the culmination of a dispute between the EU and Microsoft over its dominant position in internet browsing software. The outcome is that all of us here in Europe are being forced to choose a browser for our PC, even though most of us don’t really care that much as long as we can see our web pages. continue

We had a case last week where Norton 360 (version 3) repeatedly got into a hang while removing tracking cookies that it claimed to have found. On closer inspection of the Temporary Internet Files folder, the number of Cookies that Norton was claiming to have found was larger than the number of cookies that actually existed. So my conclusion was that Norton was hanging while trying to remove the non-existent cookies.

In any case, nothing seemed to fix this without a full removal of Norton 360. Even uninstalling Norton 360 appeared insufficient and in the end, we called upon the Norton Removal Tool (found here) to fully remove Norton 360. After full removal and re-installation, the application worked perfectly again.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

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| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |

Last night Home Helptech provided electronic scoreboarding for a local Schools Table Quiz. With 48 teams of 4 kids, each answering 8 rounds of 10 questions, one of the major headaches for the organisers was scoring the quiz. For the purpose, I created a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel which allows data entry on one sheet (the “Input Sheet”) and automatically generates a league table of leaders on a “Leader Board”. I thought I’d post it here in case it’s of use to anyone else.

Quiz Input Sheet

The Leader Board uses the pivot table functions in Excel to sort the teams in the order of highest points. Each time you update the input sheet you can subsequently right click on the Leader Board and click “Refresh” and the Leader Board is updated automatically. It’s ideal for displaying on a projector at the event for real time scoring updates. Or if you really want to look professional, you can try pasting it into Powerpoint.

Quiz Leader Board

You can find a report about how the actual quiz went at LisgooldLeamlara.ie

If you want to download the spreadsheet to try it out, you can find it below.

Click here to download QuizResults.xlsx

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

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| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |

We’ve had a few machines in the past few days with the same rogue anti-virus. This one is called AntiVir 2010 and it comes the usual professional looking interface which misleads the unwary into believing that they have a series of virus infections. It then looks for your credit card to buy a “licence” to clean these phantom viruses.

Here are some screenshots in case you see this rogue antivirus:

The virus blocks all the startup programs that it can and also prevents most applications from running. If you try to run an application, it will darken the screen and report the application as infected as below.

It also puts  up fake blue screen errors to panic users. These appear to be part of a screensaver and so moving the mouse gets rid of them.

A final touch is the fake Windows Security Center. Those of you with an eye for detail will notice the incorrect icon on the top left of the window and the slightly oversize nature of the firewall, updates and security icons but it is more than good enough to fool most of us.

If you can get applications to run, we have found that a combination of Malwarebytes and Spybot Search and Destroy  deals quite effectively with this rouge antivirus in most cases. However in some cases, these tools alone are not sufficient and more advanced removal techniques are required. If this is the case, we advise you to contact us directly.

In some cases, we have seen AntiVir 2010 appear on the same machine as another Rogue Antivirus called “Personal Security”. At this point we do not know if these are the same infection or different infections.

 If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

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| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |

If you wish to turn off Buzz, the good news is that it’s very simple to do.  Just look at the bottom of your gmail page and you’ll see “turn off buzz”.   Clicking on it will grant your wish and turn it off.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

| Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |

In the last few weeks we have seen a sudden, marked increase in the number of calls we’ve been receiving about virus infections. There seems to be one main culprit – Internet Security 2010, a rogue anti-virus programme which appears more invasive than normal. We haven’t been able to work out a source yet. The bad news appears to be that many of the off the shelf internet security packages damage critical system files during their repair, often leaving the use facing a blank, un-responsive desktop when they log in.
For those who have been infected and still have a working desktop, we recommend using a combination of rkill.com, a command file and malwarebytes as the first steps in a clean up.

If you have a blank desktop left, specialist assistance will be required and you should contact Home Helptech who can arrange nationwide pickup, cleanup and delivery.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

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| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |

In cases where you have an old McAfee backup disk but no longer have McAfee, don’t despair. McAfee provide a free tool which allows you to recover your data from a McAfee backup disk. It is located at http://us.mcafee.com/root/eol_mback.asp though at the moment it doesn’t appear to support Windows 7, so you’ll need to use a machine with either Windows XP or Vista.

Download the tool and install it. You might also have to install Microsoft .Net Framework 1.1 if you don’t already have it.

Then pop your backup disk in the your DVD drive and start it up. By default it will scan the DVD automatically and show you the difference between your system and the files that are backed up.

Be careful here, if you are restoring to a new machine, it will map the previous users path to your current path. So if your old path was, for example “Ted\My Music” and you do a restore to the “Simon” account, then the restored music files will appear in “Simon\My Music” unless you change the settings. Nevertheless, at least you get your files back…  So tick the boxes next to the files you wish to restore,  press  the “Restore” button and watch your files flood back in.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

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| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |

From time to time, we get questions on the best package to generate an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file. What many people don’t know is that Microsoft provide a simple “Save to PDF and XPS” add-in for their Office suite of software. This options is not turned on by default. Instead, you need to download it from the microsoft website at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F1FC413C-6D89-4F15-991B-63B07BA5F2E5&displaylang=en 

Once you’ve downloaded the software, run it and click on the  licence agreement.

Click Continue and the add-in will install.

Click OK once the installation is complete.

If you now go into Word or any other Office application, you should see a new option under the Save As menu which allows you to save PDF or XPS files.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

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| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |

A windows update pushed out this week for Windows Vista is causing the blue screen of death on certain machines. The update, KB973879,  is aimed at resolving another issue caused by installing Vista Service Pack 2. The blue screen caused by this update is pictured below – picture provided by a customer who had the presence of mind when it occured. It causes a STOP: 0x0000007E or a STOP: 0×00000050

See:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973879/us

To rectify the problem, go into safe mode and remove this patch from Add or Remove Programs applet in the Control Panel. View updates by clicking on “View Installed Updates”. Select update KB973879 and click Uninstall.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

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| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |

With the many publicised cases of laptop and data theft that have been in the news lately, many people are beginning to think seriously about how to protect the data they have on their laptops. You may simply have private documents, pictures and passwords stored on your laptop or you may carry important, confidential information that really needs to be protected. One of the ways of doing this is to use the bitlocker full-drive encryption system which is included in some of the upmarket versions of windows.

Bitlocker is a feature that comes with the Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7. If you have one of the other editions of windows, you can upgrade by buying a “Windows Anytime” upgrade for Ireland or the UK. Bitlocker can be configured in quite a few ways but the easiest and most common is where the laptop concerned contains a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) which is a chip that supports encryption. That is what I will demonstrate in this blog.

Finding out if you have a Trusted Platform Module (TPM)

The first thing you need to do is establish if you have a TPM module. You can do this by checking in your device manager.

Log onto your machine using an account that has Local Administrator priveledges. If your computer is a business machine which is part of a domain, you may need to ask your domain administrator for access.

 Click on the start button, right click on “Computer” and then click on “Manage” to open the Computer Management window.

Click on Device Manager to access the device manager. Then click on “Security Devices” in the right pane to reveal your TPM. If it’s not there then you either don’t have one, or it is turned off in BIOS and you need to turn it on.

While you’re there, right click on the TPM device and click on the driver tab to ensure you have the correct driver. The name of this has changed in Windows 7 (at least on my machine). The important thing is that you’re running v1.2 of the TPM driver.

Preparing your TPM

The first thing you need to do is to prepare your TPM. Click on your Start button and type tpm.msc as shown below.

This will open the TPM management console as shown below.

Click on “Initialise TPM” to start the process.

Click restart to restart your machine.

When the machine reboots, a BIOS screen will ask you to confirm the modification. Once you’ve agreed, windows will restart and ask you to create a password.

Click “Automatically create the password (recommended)”. You’ll then see your password in the next window. I’ve blurred out the one I generated

Save the file to a USB key as shown below. 

Label the USB key carefully and put it in a safe place. You will need it if anything goes wrong with bitlocker in the future.

Back on the Save TPM Owner windows above, click “Initialize”

The TPM will be initialised.

Click Close

Your TPM should now be intialised and set up. You can check this by going back into the TPM management console, it should look like this now.

Hard Disk Preparation for Bitlocker

Bitlocker also requires a small partition at the start of your disk where the unencrypted boot volume resides. I created this partition manually. However, there is now a tool to do it automatically which you can download at the following link: BitLocker Drive Preparation Tool. After the drive is prepared, there should be a partitioning scheme similar to the one below. You can check this by clicking the Start button and typing diskmgmt.msc.
N.B. This snapshot was taken after encryption, so initially your partitions will will not show as “BitLocker Encrypted” as shown below – that comes later.

Setting up Bitlocker

Now it’s time to start Bitlocker. You can find it in the Control Panel under System and Security.

Click on Bitlocker Drive Encryption

Click Next

Click Next

Click Next

Using the same USB key as before,click on Save the Recovery key to a USB flash drive

Click save and then next on the previous window. 

Click Run Bitlocker system check and then click Continue, which appears instead of Start Encrypting.

Click Restart Now when it appears.

The machine will reboot, will briefly show a Bitlocker message when it is restarting and will then re-enter windows. Log in as normal.

It will then start encrypting your disk.

You then need to wait for the encryption to complete. In my case a relatively high spec laptop took around 6 hours to encrypt around 130GB of data. When the encryption completes, the following message is displayed.

That’s it. You’re done and your data is safe from prying eyes in the future.

If you have any problems with these steps or any other problems please don’t hesitate to call one of our qualified engineers and technicians and we will be delighted to perform the required steps to deal with your problem.

    | Lo-Call 1890 219 219 (Ireland) | Freefone 0808-CALHELP (UK) |

| Business Hours: Monday – Friday 9:45 to 6:30 & Saturday 9:00 to 12:00 |