Category Archives: How To

Palm Hotsync on 64-bit Windows 7/Vista

February 24, 2012 --- Miles V.

Ok, I know this isn’t all that new, but this week was the first time I’ve had to sync an older Palm device with a 64-bit operating system.  Surprise surprise, HP (who now owns PalmONE and “supports” all its products) says it can’t be done via USB. But, third party developer Aceeca has released some 64-bit driver for Vista and Windows 7.  And here they are: http://aceeca.com/support/technical-support/downloads/product/drivers-64-bit-usb-windows-driver-for-palmgarnet-os All you need to do is press the … Read more →

Posted in Hardware, How To, Software | Leave a comment

Restore Windows Update Services

May 17, 2011 --- Miles V.

I’ve encountered a lot of systems lately who, after being cleaned of a virus infection, are missing their Automatic Updates and/or BITS services.  Microsoft has a handy article on how to reinstall these services if they disappear.  These instructions are intended for XP, but I believe they will also work in Vista.  They’ve saved the day for me on multiple occasions. If you don’t feel like parsing the entire article, the two magic commands, to … Read more →

Posted in How To, Software | Tagged repair, virus, Windows | 1 Comment

Securing Facebook with SSL

February 15, 2011 --- Miles V.

Let’s face it: Facebook has way too much dirt on most of us.  In our eagerness to show family, friends, acquaintances, and some people we’ve never met, our photos, relationship status, and Farmville achievements, we all kinda forgot that we were putting this data on the internet.  Alarmist italics aside, we love our Facebook and we need to do all we can in this fool’s errand of keeping our massive stash of personal data private. … Read more →

Posted in How To, Internet | Tagged facebook, security | Leave a comment

Recovering Recovery Partitions

January 24, 2011 --- Miles V.

Recovery partitions are one of the most frustrating developments adopted as common practice since bundled crapware.  Computer manufacturers have decided en masse that it’s simply too much trouble to provide OS install discs to their customers. Instead, they favor using of part of the hard drive to hold the precious system reinstall files. This has very few advantages and a whole lot of drawbacks: Hardware failure: If the drive goes bad (and they do), the … Read more →

Posted in How To, Software | Tagged recovery, Windows | Leave a comment

Removing the SecurityTool Trojan

December 30, 2010 --- Miles V.

Seen this screen lately? If you have, you’re not alone. In the last week, I’ve treated 5 cases of SecurityTool, a trojan impersonating antivirus software to try and get in your wallet. It appears to be a variant of the old Zlob family of trojans; I’ve encountered this infection many times before under different names: Antivirus 2009, Internet Security 2010, XP Antivirus, etc. Its tactic is to prevent the user from running any executable file, … Read more →

Posted in How To, Software | Tagged virus, Windows | Leave a comment