pcns

Welcome to PCNS - Affordable PC Service

On Site PC Service for Dallas, Richardson, Allen, and McKinney, for home and small business.  If your small business has 10 or fewer PC's you may be a good fit for my business.  Unlike larger operations who want to sign you up with contracts and commitments, I offer a "pay as you go" service.

By far the two biggest single requests I receive by new customers:

1.  Malware removal:  Malware removal is getting increasingly difficult to remove, as I have an about 85% success rate in removing the nasty, rootkit and mbr based malware, on occasion it is necessary to do a windows reinstallation.  I make every effort at avoiding this, because often times your PC has to be taken off site while Windows is reinstalled.  Furthermore, I find, especially with home users, less then half of the general public actually makes their Windows recovery DVD's.  While I stock many older Operating Systems, to reload your PC (provided you have the COA sticker on the unit), I don't have all of them.  Vista 64 bit edition is such an example.  In this event your repair job will not cost more than $150 labor (plus malware software, if we decide to move you over to something like PrevX 3.0).   If you do not have your Recovery DVD's you would have to purchase a Windows 7 license, in addition to the recovery fees.  In addition, I can't make software appear out of thin air.  If you have borrowed or bootleg software I cannot reinstall software without the original media, I can't reload it if I don't have it and you don't have it available.  You should weigh the repair costs with the age of the PC.  Often times repair costs can approach the price of replacing the PC.

2.  Hard Drive Failure:  I stock a few laptop and desktop hard drives.  I have a good success rate with getting your information off the drive onto the new drive, often without having to reinstall Windows.  If you make backups, the job is infinitely easier and can cost significatly less.  I implore all customers to backup to an External Hard Drive AND Offsite backup source, such as Mozy, Carbonite, or Ibackup.   There are instances when your hard drive may become completely inaccessible, and may require professional clean room data recovery, such as Kroll On Track, or Drivesavers.com.  Be aware, this kind of data recovery is medical-grade expensive, and usually in the range of $2,000 and up.

Feel free to keep reading, the rest of this page are recent service highlights.  These are technical notes I've documented while encountering various customer issues.

May 14, 2012: To Windows my Mac, or not to, that is the Question

New Appleland trouble.   You can't always depend on Parallels on a Mac to provide a seamless Windows 7 experience.  A problem with emailing service work orders from some vertical market software running Parallels, as I discovered, was an application issue.  Don't always bet that your software provider is going to support your running their software from a Mac in a virtualized Parallels or VMWare Fusion software.  Sometimes it just isn't completely functional.

March 25, 2012: Apple iPhone, to Sync or not to Sync?

Things not as happy in iPhone Land as you may have been lead to believe.  Though revolutionary in design, iPhones are not problem free when it comes to local Syncing.
http://www.pcnsdfw.com/apple-sync.html

February 10, 2012: ZeroAccess Rootkit Spells Serious Trouble

I expect this thread to be quite long and detailed, so I'm posting it on a separate web page.   The ZeroAccess rootkit is one of the most complex and advanced rootkits on the web today.  
http://www.pcnsdfw.com/zero-access.html

January 2, 2012: Long live Windows XP

As we approach the 10 year anniversary of Windows XP, Microsoft wishes you'd move off XP faster to Windows 7.  Granted, Windows 7 Professional has some nice features, but would I throw the XP baby out with the bath water, just to get Windows 7?  I continue cleaning up malware infections off Windows 7 PC's.  Windows 7 64 bit is impressively fast - provided you throw a fast, quad core processor in the mix.  But so is an XP box, even with an older generation quad core.  I recently installed an AMD Phenom x4 9750 in a lowly Dell Optiplex 740, which has Windows XP Pro.  I replaced a slowish AMD Athlon 64 x2 4000+ dual core processor. This quad core processor has given it a new boost in life, and it should give me at least two more years service life.  On another PC, I installed XP on a SSD, and I am seeing blazingly fast performance improvements.
http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/it-pro-perspective/long-live-windows-xp-141341

Dec 20, 2011:  New Antivirus Product Shows Promise

Traditionally my attitude regarding antivirus security software is "pick your poison." While they do protect your PC the cost - performance slowdowns, popups, false positives, and unyielding firewalls.  In the thick I've discovered a new Antivirus product which installs in less than 15 seconds, and shows promise.

I have deployed Webroot's Secure Anywhere base Antivirus product on a small handful of PC's.  This is based on the underlying technology of PrevX, a European software firm Webroot acquired in 2011.  PrevX was the only software at one of my client's Classroom lab that blocked every malicious attack in the computer lab over a one year period and survived unscathed.  Competitive products GFI's Vipre Antivirus, and Symantec, both of which missed infections, GFI's product was running with active malware in memory, while the Symantec Antivirus PC's had registry and file traces left behind.

PC Magazine Review: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2393678,00.asp

Dec 11, 2011:  Bit Defender 2012 and Trusteer Rapport blue screens

Trusteer Rapport is security software which major banks distribute - such as Bank of America and BBVA Compass Bank.  It prevents copy/paste hijacking, wherein someone can get your on-line banking passwords if you copy and paste your username/password onto your on line bank account.  However with Bit Defender 2012 Antivirus Plus it can cause a blue screen stop error.  Needless to say, if you use Trusteer Rapport you'll want to find an AV application that is compatible.

Forum Thread: http://forum.bitdefender.com/index.php?showtopic=29864
Compatible security applications: http://consumers.trusteer.com/compatibility-other-security-software


December 7, 2011 - Reasons to pass on Facebook

A handful of people inquire why myself or my company are NOT on Facebook.   I thought I'd address this.

December 4, 2011 - The new Lenovo Thinkpad T420S

I transferred a client's files from his old Dell D820 to a new Windows 7 x64 Professional on a Lenovo Thinkpad T420.  The customer purchased it from Lenovo direct, and ordered it with the 160 gig SSD.   While the startup and preboot (laptop powerup bios test, up to "starting windows") seemed a tad slow - it seems like my D630 does the self tests faster, starting Windows x64 is pretty quick, and once it settles down into the operating system, launching Word, Excel, and Outlook (Office 2010) is awesomely fast.   SSD's, in my opinion, should be phasing out magnetic hard drives ASAP - NOW is an ideal time, given the flooding problems in Thailand with hard drive supplier shortages.  The Lenovo has consistently high user reviews.  In contrast, Dell, with their Latitude e6420's, users have a much more polarized opinions.  One thing I'm not a fan of - whether it be Lenovo or Dell - the widening of laptop displays, making them shorter in height.  Things like web pages and portrait orientation for word processing this is less than ideal. I think I'll stick to my square screened XGA Panasonic Toughbook.

November 25, 2011 - A busy Thanksgiving

Had about half a dozen malware related calls all during the Thanksgiving weekend.  One was serious enough on a Vista PC to warrant a complete reinstallation.  Malware, contrary to popular belief never went away, despite the Russian credit card processor getting shut down.  The PC in question was a highly infected teenage son's laptop with Vista.  

October 15, 2011 - Corruption of Quickbooks 2011 Transaction Logs

This is an infrequent but show stopping problem.  It has the potential of shutting down Quickbooks for everyone on your network, because a corrupted DLG transaction file can shut down the database engine.  If you have multiple users accessing Company Files on your PC, or on a Server, or on a PC acting as a server and the Quickbooks database engine stops, nobody will be able to access any company on the server in multi-user mode.

This problem occurred with one of my customers with Quickbooks 2011 Premiere. It is not limited to the premiere edition or the 2011 edition.   They have their company files on a dedicated Windows 2003 server, and they run the software from their workstation. After trying some things on my own, I called Intuit, and 3 hours later going from Level 1 to Level 2 support we got it resolved. The traditional tools in quickbooks, such as Verify and Rebuild company files, as well as the standalone Quickbooks Company File Diagnostic Tool did not detect any problems with the company file.  This is because these tools are not designed to check the transaction log file. In case you are confronted with this issue, and no matter what you try the Quickbooks Database Engine stops, here are some things to try.

October 7, 2011 - When good ink goes bad

Use it or lose it.  A customer complaining about Canon print quality called me for help.   I suggested he open his printer and check out the ink tanks of his Canon i960 printer.   These are OEM Canon cartridges, never refilled, but the printer was rarely used.  Well you can see what happens to Canon ink!  Unlike wine, it does not get better with age.   At least many Canon Ink Cartridges are transparent so you can see the ink.

Bad Ink - Yikes!	Good Ink

September 9, 2011 - Beware PC Buyers On occasions I run into odd PC problems, a AMD Athlon based PC intermittently would not start Windows 7.   This PC contained a 80 gig PATA 5400 rpm hard drive, and a second Sata 160 gig drive - that's an odd combination.  It had a copy of Windows 7 Enterprise, and oddly when bringing up system properties there was a logo of a skeleton/sword.  Now that's odd.  Well first things, Windows 7 Enterprise is not available to the public, it's only available as a volume license to corporate customers.  If you buy a PC that has Windows 7 Enterprise most likely you're getting a copy of Windows which came from some large corporation, in which an employee (or thief) has acquired the product keys and a copy of the operating system, and is using it and selling it with systems.  The seller of the PC may not be the employee, it could have been obtained over a peer network or pirate website.  While it's genuine software, it's stolen software.

Consumers purchasing this software should know, as the software phones home Microsoft could issue new product keys and place the leaked product key on the black list, so you may eventually see "This Software is Not Genuine."  Long story short, if you don't see a Windows COA (Certificate of Authenticity) sticker on the PC (which was the case here), or you see Skull/Sword (or other omnimous pictures in System Properties), you're getting ripped off.  If a computer deal seems too good to be true, it usually is.

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