What is the single most important piece of equipment used in your business?  In your home?

Your computer!  If it’s not at the very peak of the list it is certainly near the top.

So why do so many people want to spend as absolutely little money as possible on what is arguably one of the most important pieces of equipment that you use?

The adage is ‘pay now or pay later’, and nothing could be truer when it comes to your computer.

Sure, you can find a computer at Fry’s or one of the other big-box stores for $300 but ask yourself, ‘why is it only $300?’

In a nutshell, you get what you pay for.  The reason those systems are cheap is because they use cheap parts internally.  It may look good on paper – 4GB of RAM, 750GB hard drive, etc., but if you could see what we’ve seen – the frustration, the tears and the anger from folks who have purchased one of those ‘bargain’ computers only to have it fail after a matter of seconds (never boots up out of the box), minutes, hours or months you would want to stay very far away from these ‘bargain’ systems.

Computers are fairly simple devices – they consist of just a few main parts – case, power supply, motherboard, processor, RAM, DVD/optical drive and maybe a video card.  The cheap systems use cheap parts.  A cheap power supply can (and will) fail, potentially taking out the entire system with it.  A cheap motherboard will fail and when it goes the whole system is gone.  These are the two most common failures we see in the ‘bargain’ systems.

You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars for a good system, but to date we’ve yet to find a quality business class desktop system for under $600.  Generally speaking most business class systems (systems designed to be used daily, all day) will run in the $700 to $1,000 range.  Those systems will contain quality parts, designed to last.

If you are in the market for a new desktop computer we would love to show you our *quality* desktop computers. We have models ranging from a solid home system for $650 to a business system with a SSD (think jaw-dropping fast) hard drive for $999.  More information can be found at this blog post, and our main website’s products page.

We’ll leave you with one example of what happened to one of our clients.

We got called out to a business client who had purchased two new computers and both of these brand new computers were running slower than their 5-year old systems.

We found that while the systems (desktops) looked normal on the outside, what we found on the inside blew our minds.

These systems were both made by a major name-brand – one of the top three in the market.  What they had done was use a full-size desktop case, but instead of putting in a regular motherboard, processor and RAM they had used a Netbook motherboard, processor and RAM.  A Netbook is a $200 sub-notebook with very limited power and memory.

What our client had was basically a netbook computer running in a desktop case.  The system was nowhere near powerful enough to run their business applications.  The client got a great deal on the systems (he thought) at $350 each, but he basically spent $700 and ended up having to purchase two more *real* computers.

Remember, pay now, or pay later.

We welcome any feedback, and as always if you have any questions don’t hesitate to give us a shout!

Web www.scurlocksystems.com and www.ssaremote.com

Scurlock Systems and Associates LLC

866.665.1750 | 972.633.1111

Scurlock Systems is located in Plano, Texas and provides both remote computer service and computer repair in Plano, Dallas, Richardson, Allen and surrounding areas.

**SOLD**

We have a (gently) used Compaq Presario desktop system for sale for $150.00

The system includes:

• Desktop Computer
• Keyboard
• Mouse
• DVD Writer with Lightscribe

The computer is running an AMD Athlon 64 3800+ processor at 2.4GHz with 1GB of RAM.  We installed a new 160GB hard drive and have loaded a fresh installation of XP Media Center Edition with Service Pack 3.

All subsequent operating system updates have been downloaded and installed, and the following software installed:

• Mozilla Firefox with Adblock Plus and Web of Trust Addons
• Microsoft Security Essentials Antivirus
• Malwarebytes Antimalware (free) Antimalware

Comes preinstalled with genuine Windows XP Media Center license, with the Certificate of Authenticity located on the desktop case.

This is certainly no gaming system, but would be perfect for someone needing a computer to check email, do homework and do some light surfing.

Please call us at 972-633-1111 if interested.  The system is available if you would like to take it for a test drive.

Thank you!

Web www.scurlocksystems.com and www.ssaremote.com

Scurlock Systems and Associates LLC

866.665.1750 | 972.633.1111

Scurlock Systems is located in Plano, Texas and provides both remote computer service and computer repair in Plano, Dallas, Richardson, Allen and surrounding areas.

UPDATE MESSAGES

As we use our computers we’re constantly bombarded with notices to update this program!  Update that program!  It gets to the point where we tend to do one of two things; we just ignore all the popups, saying ‘I’ll do that later’ but never do perform the updates, or we click the ‘OK’ or ‘Update Now’ button for every update notice that pops up.

I’m not sure which is worse – not performing updates will leave you open to myriad security holes in programs, while doing every single update notice that pops up can get your system infected with a nasty malware program faster than you can say ‘Here’s the keys to my computer kingdom’

So what should I do?

The majority of the update notices are valid – things like your antivirus program(s), Microsoft updates, Adobe reader, Java and the like. When you do download and apply updates for valid programs be sure you take a close look at what you are downloading.  Many of them will try and add additional unwanted software to your downloads.  See our article about downloading unwanted programs.

When you get an update notice, determine what program it is that is wanting to be updated.  If it’s a program that you have installed on your computer go ahead with the update.

If it’s an unknown, such as ‘Windows Antivirus 2011’ don’t do the update!  The key is *knowing* what programs are installed on your system, particularly your antivirus/antimalware programs.  If you are using Microsoft Security Essentials and Malwarebytes Antimalware (the two programs we use here at Scurlock Systems) and you get a popup from any other antivirus program do NOT do that update.  It’s a popup from an infected website just hoping you press the OK button.

A very common way for computers to become infected with nasties is by using scare tactics.  You’ll be surfing away and suddenly get a popup that says something to the effect of ‘WARNING! Your computer is infected by eighty-gazillion viruses.  Click here now to run a scan!’.  Whatever you do, do NOT run that scan.  If you press OK or run the scan you’ll be infected by a nasty and at that point you’ll be in a world of hurt.

If you get one of those popups simply reboot your computer and run a full virus scan using your valid antivirus program.

If you haven’t updated your computer in several months or more you might consider having a professional go over your system, perform the necessary updates and do a tune-up on your system.  Of course we here at Scurlock Systems would be honored to assist you via a remote session in updating your system, but whatever you do, make sure your systems are updated and stay that way!

We welcome any feedback, and as always if you have any questions don’t hesitate to give us a shout!

Web www.scurlocksystems.com and www.ssaremote.com

Scurlock Systems and Associates LLC

866.665.1750 | 972.633.1111

Scurlock Systems is located in Plano, Texas and provides both remote computer service and computer repair in Plano, Dallas, Richardson, Allen and surrounding areas.  We also make killer desktop computers.

When you take your computer in for service one of the questions that you (I hope!) are asked is if you have a current backup of your data. Think this through fully before answering – if you have a backup from ‘several months ago, I think…’ then the answer is no, you do not have a current backup.

One of the services that we offer at Scurlock Systems to clients is to image their hard drive, which is a complete, 100%, bit by bit copy of *everything* on the drive. The cost is minimal ($45), and the process involves pulling the hard drive out of the computer, mounting it in one of our servers and obtaining the image.

The process takes all of 90 minutes to an hour to complete, after-which you *know* your data is backed up before any work is performed.

The next time you take your computer in for service and you aren’t 100% sure that you have a current backup, ask about getting your hard drive imaged as a precaution.

I’ll leave you with one example of how a simple image saved the day…

We had a client who needed several of their computers’ hard drives to be encrypted, and while the program used to encrypt the drives, PGP Whole Disk Encryption by Symantec, was world-class, anytime we perform disc encryption we take an image of the drive before beginning the encryption process.

We imaged each of the system drives, then proceeded with the encryption process. On all of the systems but one the process was textbook. Installed the software, encrypted the drive, rebooted, Bob’s your uncle, we’re done.

On that one system though… The software was installed and the encryption process run, the system rebooted, and… Nothing. Zilch. System would not boot. Seems something got corrupted during the encryption process and fried the drive.

After spending time on the phone with tech support it was determined that the only option moving forward was to reload Windows, applications and data. ‘I hope you have a backup…’ was all the tech could say at the end of the call.

Not to worry, we had a full image of the hard drive! We placed the image back on the drive, putting the drive back to just how it was before starting the process, booted into Windows with no harm done. We reran the encryption process, this time without any hitches, and all was right and good with the world. Had we not had the image, and even if the client had a full backup of all their data we would have wound up reinstalling Windows, updates, antivirus, applications, the list goes on…

The imaging software we use is made by Acronis.

We welcome any feedback, and as always if you have any questions don’t hesitate to give us a shout!

Web www.scurlocksystems.com and www.ssaremote.com

Scurlock Systems and Associates LLC

866.665.1750 | 972.633.1111

Scurlock Systems is located in Plano, Texas and provides both remote computer service and computer repair in Plano, Dallas, Richardson, Allen and surrounding areas.  We also make killer desktop computers.

A great computer doesn’t have to break the bank.

http://scurlocksystems.com/products.html

When you have your computer worked on by your trusted computer IT professional, treat that person like you would your own doctor.  Tell them everything – even the most minor of annoyances can be signs of something larger, and the more information you can give your person the better, and certainly don’t withhold information!

Trust me, if you’ve been to a naughty website and got infected by a nasty, don’t withhold that info out of embarrassment – we’re not here to judge you, we’re here to fix your computer, and we *need* to know these things.

Here’s an example of a job we had last week where the client withheld information from us, which ended up costing the client money; had he volunteered this information at the beginning the time it took to fix his problem would have been cut in half.

We’ll call the client ‘Joe’, and yes, names have been changed to protect the innocent.

So Joe calls us up and says that his mouse isn’t working.  He sees the cursor but try as he might the mouse won’t move.  He’s tried plugging in a different mouse from another system but has the same problem.  ‘Joe’, we asked, ‘has anything recently been installed, uninstalled or changed on your system?’  ‘Nope’ he said, ‘Mouse was working one day then stopped the next’.

We had a software program already installed on his system that allowed for remote access so we remoted into his system and found we had full control of the mouse cursor – yay!

We took a look and found that under Device Manager his mouse had an error that the driver couldn’t load.  We grabbed a backup copy of the mouse driver, replaced the ‘bad’ driver with the backup but still had the same issue.  No local mouse.

We tried doing a System Restore back to the day before but the restore failed, tried going back a week, restore failed.

Checked the log files, no standout errors other than the mouse driver not loading.

At this point we needed the system in our hands to further troubleshoot, and Joe had the system sent over to our shop.  We researched the error (Google for the win!) and found quite a few folks with the same issue with myriad ‘fixes’ which ranged from using a different mouse (nope) to installing a new driver (nope) to reinstalling Windows (not going there) but we found one person who had the same issue that was caused by a corrupt copy of a particular antivirus program that just so happened to be installed on Joe’s system.

We uninstalled his antivirus program and viola! His mouse was back and in action.

We called up Joe with the good news and after telling him about the antivirus program being the cause of the issue he proceeded to tell us about how the previous evening he had attempted to upgrade his virus program and it hung at 98% of the process and his machine locked up and rebooted itself, after which his mouse no longer functioned.

/facepalm

If Joe had only let us know up front about the antivirus program upgrade fail the evening before we could have had this fixed in a jiffy via a remote session.

PLEASE, tell us everything – we’re your PC doctors!

We welcome any feedback, and as always if you have any questions don’t hesitate to give us a shout!

Web www.scurlocksystems.com and www.ssaremote.com

Scurlock Systems and Associates LLC

866.665.1750 | 972.633.1111

Scurlock Systems is located in Plano, Texas and provides both remote computer service and computer repair in Plano, Dallas, Richardson, Allen and surrounding areas.

When was the last time you rebooted your computer?

We don’t mean putting it in sleep mode or hibernating, but an honest to goodness full shut down and restart.

Many of us (Scurlock Systems techies included) leave our desktop systems up 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

When you do that, you may notice that your system begins to bog down after a while, and may even begin displaying strange behavior (great name for a band…) such as programs locking up or not running, browser not loading some web pages and general goofiness.

What we do here is reboot our systems once a week, and by reboot we mean a complete power down of the system, then turning it back on.  This clears out the brain and allows for a fresh start of Windows.  If you are running XP, Vista or Windows 7 simply click on the Start button and choose either Shut Down or Turn Off Computer.  Once the system has been powered down turn that baby back on.

If you cringe at the thought of rebooting your computer because in the time it takes to boot up and load Windows you could have made a 7-course meal then you should have your system tuned up by a professional.  If you are in need of a tuneup to whip your computer back into shape we would be honored to have the opportunity to help you.  It’s something that can be done remotely, so there is no need for you to unhook everything and schlep the system around in your car.

We welcome any feedback, and as always if you have any questions don’t hesitate to give us a shout!

Web www.scurlocksystems.com and www.ssaremote.com

Scurlock Systems and Associates LLC

866.665.1750 | 972.633.1111

Scurlock Systems is located in Plano, Texas and provides both remote computer service and computer repair in Plano, Dallas, Richardson, Allen and surrounding areas.