Online Backup - a Cloud With a Silver Lining

There’s a lot of talk about ‘The Cloud’ these days, despite the fact that many people are a little hazy about the meaning of the expression. For those who don’t already know, the Cloud a metaphor for the Internet which we all use already – what people are really referring to are cloud services, which is to say products that use the internet for both for service provision and data storage. This can be something as simple as Hotmail which has been around for ages, and keeps an effective backup of your emails on-line, all the way through to complex business solutions such as  Salesforce which give you feature rich tools within your browser.

What they all have in common is that they keep your data stored safely online so that if disaster strikes you can still access it even if your laptop is at the bottom of your swimming pool.

As a business we deal with a great deal of data loss and see first-hand the distress that this can cause our customers, and we have been pushing online backup as our preferred backup solution for some time as it separates you data from your computer – backup drives are great too but they usually sit next to your laptop or PC and a fire or a theft can mean the loss of both.

For a long time we recommended Mozy, but a few months ago we stopped using them because we received several complaints from customers who had been charged for renewals on their credit cards despite having stopped using the service. Mozy’s small print is quite clear about the fact that the subscription will automatically be renewed, but who can remember what they read a year previously? They could send out renewal reminders by email as most other companies we work with do, but instead they opt to inform you by means of your credit card bill. One customer was incensed as she had traded in her old laptop for a Macbook (with iCloud backup) a year and a half previously and had been billed twice even though Mozy must have been aware that the computer hadn’t once connected to their servers in that time. Mozy were refusing to offer her even a partial a refund for the remaining portion of the service that she wasn't going to use. How hard can it be to send out reminder warnings, or, if a computer hasn’t backed up in ages, firing off an email asking the customer if they still require the service? So I’m pointing my finger directly at Mozy and accusing them unethical conduct.

For on-line backup we now recommend Livedrive which allows us far more control over the backup options. Unlike the current Mozy products we can offer unlimited backup, and we also have a great deal of freedom over the level at which we set the pricing. Best of all is that it’s an evolving product; we’ve seen it go from good to better and the developers aren’t sitting on their laurels with new features constantly in the pipeline. At present we are trying their Briefcase feature which offers online workgroup sharing features, and unlike the 100GB limit of DropBox which we currently recommend we can store up to 2TB of data. we’ll keep you informed of our progress…

We’re presently offering a year's unlimited Livedrive backup for £39.99, so contact us if you want to know more! www.computerangels.co.uk

A Quick Buck

I’m inevitably going to sound as if I’m blowing my own trumpet as I write this, but one of my aims when I founded this company was to create an organisation that treated both employees and customers fairly, and if I’m hitting that target then I’m proud to announce it to the world.

Unless you service your own car (in which case you don’t probably need a garage) you’ll know that experience of taking to the mechanic who is explaining why you are about to become sever hundred pounds poorer, and having absolutely no idea if he’s being straight with you. I’m lucky enough to have learned through experience how my car works and I’m fortunate enough these days to have a garage I trust, but there have been times when I’ve confronted a lying mechanic and explained loudly enough for all the other customers to hear in no uncertain terms why he’s full of shit, and where exactly he can get off. I can’t say I don’t enjoy it when this happens because I do get a certain pleasure out of exposing corruption at every level.

This week we’ve come across two eyebrow raisers. The first was a woman who turned up with a MacBook and a 4GB memory module which she’s bought at an official Apple reseller. Our job was to install this for her, which would have been a pretty easy while-you-wait job had the memory actually worked. When we explained that she would have to return it we were horrified to find that she had been charged £120 for a SODIMM which should have cost less than £30. It seems garages aren’t the only culprits when it comes to taking advantage of middle aged women.

The second case was a small business using a single hosted Exchange mailbox. We were tasked with specifying and installing a replacement PC, and in the course of discussing their requirements I discovered that they were paying £110 a month for about 9GB of server storage for this mailbox. Now I know that this won’t mean much to anybody who doesn’t themselves use hosted exchange, but the point is that the going price for this service is about £10 a month. The original price had been about £50 a month, but then the mailbox had apparently reached an arbitrary size limit, and the company involved, realising that they had a real sucker on their hands, decide to really stick the knife in and more than doubled the charge. I initially assumed the customer was confusing annual and monthly billing cycles, but they were very organised and had all the paperwork to support the case for the prosecution.

Sadly we live in a world where consumers are at constant risk of the rip-off merchants, and it isn’t limited to the shady back street when companies such as Adobe think the great British public should pay 38% more than our American cousins. We might expect our politicians to defend us were they not too busy selling out to whichever corporate lobbyist  is entertaining them this afternoon, or whichever media mogul they are most beholden to.

Personally I think there a lot to be said for an honest wage for an honest day’s work. I may not drive a shiny black Range Rover like most of the subjects of your average Watchdog exposé, but as any Land Rover driver will tell you, there’s a lot to be said for setting out in the certainty that you are going to arrive, even if it may take a bit longer because you’re doing it properly.

The Joy of Updates

We have a 40” screen in our shop window to advertise our products and services, and until recently we were using a laptop to feed this with looping video. I recently repurposed a 7 year old Mac Mini to free up the perfectly good laptop for other uses.

If you’re not familiar with the Mac Mini, it’s a small rectangular white box which is cool, quiet and unobtrusive, and perfectly suited for leaving running in a cupboard for months at a time without needing attention. Unfortunately a few days after I set it up an Apple update screen popped up in the middle of our video, and since it’s impossible to plug in a keyboard and still see the screen (which is facing the street) I had to plug in a second monitor in order to get rid of the update screen. While there I installed Logmein so that I could remotely administer the Mac without all that palaver next time. Two days later I came in to see our display was now fronting a Logmein update screen. It seems there’s no winning.

After a quick hunt through their respective settings I disabled both the Apple software updates and the Logmein updater, which will of course put the Mac at risk as security vulnerabilities aren’t being patched, but given that this isn’t a computer that’s used for any risky activities such as file downloading or web surfing, this shouldn’t be an issue.

This reminded me how frequently we are bombarded with update requests, and how badly some programs handle these. Windows user will know that these are fairly benign, and will often happen in the background according to you settings. Apple updates are fine on Macs, but on PCs I’m constantly having to unselect QuickTime and Safari – surely once I’ve said no the update program should be smart enough to know that I don’t want these programs installed, but it seems that the penalty for using iTunes on a PC is to forever be nagged to install QuickTime and Safari, programs which to my mind have no place on a PC.

Adobe Reader has its own overly obtrusive updater. I periodically disable it using msconfig.exe, but every time I go back in to check on start-up processes there it is again, turning up like an unwelcome social disease. After incessant nagging we all eventually apply updates, which is wise given the security vulnerabilities that Adobe exposes us to, and our reward is that for the hundredth and fifth time we get an unwanted Adobe Reader icon on our desktops. I have never met anybody who has ever opened a PDF by any other method than clicking on a PDF file, so the purpose of this icon escapes me, yet however many times I delete it from my desktop Adobe don’t seem to get the message. Exactly the same criticism applies to QuickTime, with the added irritation of a new icon in your Quick Launch bar that is so useful in Windows XP. You’d think it would be common courtesy to ask, but the software updater blithely decides that QuickTime IS going to be one of our most commonly used programs, and damn you for disagreeing.

It wouldn’t be fair of me to miss out AOL, which took the shotgun approach to scattering your system with icons, and would no doubt have tattooed a start-up icon onto your chest if that had been possible, but I’m happy to report that in a neat demonstration of Darwinian selection we rarely get to see that program any more. 

Tools of the trade: Part 1

We like free things. A great many of the tools we use every day in our work are free. Many of these fall into the category of technical utilities, and some of them require a fair measure of expertise to use. On the other hand, some are pretty straightforward. There are a few products that we recommend to businesses and home users alike which are offered for free initially, with the option to upgrade if you like the product and want to get more out of it.

One of our favourites is Dropbox, a utility which allows you to synchronise a folder on your computer with the cloud. There are a few similar free products available, but what we like about dropbox is the ease with which it can be used, as well as the flexibility it offers.

In the first place it’s a simple way of making sure you are backing up important data offsite. There’s another trick up its sleeve though – it allows you to connect to the same cloud storage from different devices, be they Macs, PCs, iPhones or Android devices. This means you can easily share data between your devices, and whenever you make changes to a file on one device these changes are pushed out to your other devices.

Businesses can use it to share information both internally and externally – you can quickly create new folders and then send colleagues a link to that folder which allows you to create a collaborative workspace with the minimum effort.

Once you start using it in anger you may well want to upgrade from the free account, which has a 2Gb limit, to a paid-for account – it costs $99 for a 50Gb account and $199 for 100 Gb. This certainly isn’t the cheapest storage option, but when you consider the alternative of running a dedicated file server (as well as the responsibility of backing this up) it represents excellent value.

For home users a great tip is to use your Dropbox as your My Documents folder. In Windows Vista or 7 this is easy to setup. Simply right click on your My Documents folder then select the Location tab, click on Move... and select your Dropbox folder. When you hit OK it’ll ask if you want to move all your files and folders to the new location; click Yes and you’re done. 

Note: first check the size of your My Documents folder as music and photos will quickly push you over the 2Gb free storage limit.

Peace and Good Will to All Men

V lets me into her flat with a smile and offers me tea.  At 67 she’s a tiny woman. She leads me down the gloomy hallway, then turns, her eyes magnified by the thick glasses she’s wearing, and asks me if I need more light. I knew that she was partially sighted but it’s only when we get to her PC that I realise how poor her eyesight is. She holds her face four inches from the screen and peers at the huge icons that Windows Magnifier has increased to 400% of their original size. On a good day she’d represent a glowing triumph of the Windows 7 Accessibility suite, but today isn’t a good day.

Yesterday she’d been called by a man claiming that he worked with BT and that they’d identified a problem with her PC. Over the next hour he installed several tools that would allow him to access her PC and spy on every keystroke and mouse click. He also claimed to have installed a 12 year license for antivirus software that was remarkably conspicuous in its absence when I arrived. For some reason he also screwed up her Windows themes so that her colour scheme had changed to some contrastless brown mess, and more importantly she couldn't use the magnifier tool. So having messed with a woman who he knew to be almost blind, what else is he going to do but charge £150 to her debit card for the trouble.

Today I set about undoing his work. The task is made harder by the absence of Windows task manager which means I’m prevented from checking on the running processes, and that in itself is a sure sign of a malware infection. After fumbling around for a few minutes on a painfully slow machine I work out that the hardware is fine, so the performance is down to the malware. For ease of use I turn off the accessibility features that are blocking most of the screen and reboot into safe mode. We have a varying palette of tools according to the changing nature of the threats we meet – today it’s Combofix followed by Malwarebytes, two superb free tools that we rely on pretty much every day. Interestingly the remote tools installed by the scammer have been embedded with nasty payloads – classic Trojans that I swiftly delete. A couple of reboots later and everything is running at a good speed and along the way I remove shedloads of crap installed by the nasty man. Then I do a low level sweep for any AVG components that I suspect may have been doctored, before installing Microsoft Security Essentials which is one the best free antivirus packages out there.

Now that I’m working on a responsive PC it only takes me a few minutes to figure out the issue of the themes that are affecting the magnifier tool (it requires an Aero theme to be turned on). Somewhere along the way V takes away the cup of tea which I’ve let go cold and brings me another. Then we sit down and I make sure she’s able to use the PC again. I’m learning as much as her – because she can’t see them very well the huge icons (four to a full screen) have to be in the right place – the scammer had added a few of his own, and it’s a bit like someday moving the furniture about – until I’ve got rid of them she can’t find her way about. I’m impressed that she know the exact order of each of the 20 or so icons on her desktop.

At the end she wants to pay me, but I've already decided not to charge her – it is Christmas after all. But actually it’s more than that; I wouldn't want to profit from the actions of the scum who caused her the problem in the first place. We arrange to talk later about recovering the £150 from the bank- I just hope they share the same ethos. And as for good will to all men? I'm afraid that doesn't stretch to everybody today.

Thieves and Scoundrels

She is an attractive woman in her late twenties. Her accent is East-European but her command of English is fair to middling. She knows very little about technology, only that her laptop isn’t working. It’s soon evident that this is a motherboard issue, and we start by explaining that given the age of her laptop a repair wouldn’t be economical. We’re surprised by her claim that the laptop is only two years old, so we look up the specifications to confirm that manufacture of her particular model had stopped over four years previously.

It turns out that one of our local competitors had sold her the laptop a month earlier. She’d already been back to them but they had refused to look at the laptop without payment, so she’d come to us, as we do this for free. We advise her to return the laptop and insist upon a refund, but first we want to recover her data from the hard drive which is still working. And there’s surprise number two. The drive cover is removed to reveal a drive encased not in a drive housing but wrapped in corrugated cardboard and wedged into place. It’s amazing it’s still working as hard drives get hot, and wrapping them up in an insulating layer is a perfect way to kill a drive in very short order.

The absence of the drive housing is in itself telling – the original owner would have removed the drive for privacy reasons (always essential when you’re disposing of an old computer). If you are scrapping a laptop there’s no point in unscrewing the drive from the housing before getting rid of the laptop, which tells us that this laptop had been consigned to the scrap heap once already.

I return to my desk and return with a letter on headed notepaper for her to give to the other computer repair shop. In it I explain the concept of merchantable quality and warn them that if they don’t give her a full and immediate refund I, not the customer, would take up the matter with the local trading standards officer.

Sadly this is not an isolated incident – some of our local competitors even make national news. At present there's no recognised national trade body to represent consumer interests in our field. A few years ago  - we joined the Technology Channel Association only to discover that it did little to regulate its members; I remember smiling when I heard a critic describe it as a glorified golf club for the trade. After a year I wrote them a long letter explaining why I was leaving. I didn't get a reply.

So what does a consumer do if they want a trustworthy service? That's a question I can answer - over 70% of our business comes through referrals. A marketing consultant once took exception to this fact and insisted that it meant we were getting our marketing strategy completely wrong. I disagree. It turns out that all you have to do is ask a friend.

On Changing Trends in Computer Hardware Problems

We often spot the most unlikely trends in hardware failure – it’s a bit like the old adage of waiting for ages, and then three come at once. This can be as simple as a specific model of laptop which will come in with, say, a failure of the graphics chip due to overheating. Followed quickly by several others of the exact same model. Sometimes this can be explained by, in this case, the first flush of spring bringing unseasonably warm weather to thermal paste that has spent a cold winter decomposing.

Sometimes it can be a little sinister – several laptops, again of the same make and model, all failing just days out of warranty, again with, GPU issues.

Nathan has recently spotted an new trend – we get an inordinate amount of MacBooks that come in  with damage caused by white wine spillage. Recently we’ve noticed that this has, with the colder weather, changed to red wine damage. I wonder if there’s a demographic indicator in there somewhere?