It’s raining viruses

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Saturday September 13, I spent all day at the C4 Comic con. On my feet all day and I was tired. Got home turned on computer for less than an hour to check if there was anything important.

Sunday turn on the computer and it acts funny. Slow and the mouse barely works. New batteries in mouse doesn’t help. It’s a Logitech wireless tackball and I like it a lot more than a mouse.

Microsoft has pushed several updates to my machine recently and I have had the updates foul things up. A check of the technical blogs and no one is complaining about anything like that.

Remember that sometimes a major update push from Mircosoft will turn on Windows Defender (the Windows antivirus program) and that program will conflict with the antivirus program I use. Search the Internet for how to turn off windows defender, I am not a programmer and I don’t want to be a programmer. Yes, windows defender was on and I turned it off. No it didn’t help.

Run a virus scan. The quick scan finds a virus and deals with it. The computer is still acting bad, very bad. I run a deep scan. It takes hours. The deep scan finds nothing.

I’m now ready to take the computer in for repair. They want to much money, I can almost buy a cheap (as in $220.00) laptop for what they want to do check up and repair.

I now have a budget. I go to Cnet and download another antivirus program. Run the new program and it says my computer is clean.

I am pounding the table the computer is so slow and the mouse has to be clicked several times to get any program to do something.

I download the MalwareBytes antivirus program. It’s scan didn’t take as long as the program I was using and I was using the paid version of that program. MalwareBytes found twelve viruses. Twelve viruses and I had a paid version of a well known antivirus program running with Windows Defender also running and I was only on the computer for an hour.

Write on, draw on.   Professor Voltage.

CCN and losing subscribers

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CNN use to be my home page. Then early last week I fired up the computer and the anti-virus program flashed a warming. The anti-virus program wanted to change the home page because of virus problems. I logged out of IE and ran a virus check. The check said my computer was clean. The anti-virus program wanted to change the home page to a common site and the site checked out clean.

Since then I have seen nothing about a virus that changed home pages (and asked before doing it). I felt should I would find something if the virus was changing home pages to infected web sites. I found nothing about CNN improving the security of their home page or having problems with the security of their web site (of course I don’t think most sites would admit they had virus problems, they would just hope no one noticed). Was I spoofed or does CNN need to hire some IT people instead of laying off people. If I’m not the only person who got this error, even if the error is fake, CNN is losing customers very quickly. CNN could have a bad earning report next quarter.

 

Write on, draw on.     Professor Voltage.

C4 or Central Coast Comic Con in Ventura Ca

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C4 is this weekend at the Ventura County Fair Grounds. Looks like a good crowd this year. Lots of Cos Players. Also lots of artist and comic makers to talk to about making your own comic. The people who put on the show need to advertize better.

Your plan should be to; take camera, take notes, buy lots of comics and have a good time.

 

Write on, draw on.

email newsletters and updating email addresses

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I’ve been updating my email address to many newsletters since I changed ISPs. Look at your newsletter. If the user has to unsubscribe and then resubscribe to your newsletter the user may not resubscribe. All I want to do is change the email address. Several newsletters and web sites make it very confusing. A user should not have to try many different things to change an email address. One site hid the change email address button under the New tab, that was a low blow. It may have made sense to the programmer but not to me.

If the web site or newsletter made it very difficult to change the email address then I thought very hard about how much I wanted to get the newsletter. I now do not subscribe to several newsletters since it was to much effort to resubscribe.

I’s called voting with your feet, so go make tracks people.

 

Write on, draw on.

Windows Live Mail Error, Or How I Love a Good Conspiracy Theory

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I recently switched from Time Warner Cable to Verizon FIOS. TWC email service went out twice in one month then there was a internet outage early one morning. No real explanation was given for the second email outage or the internet outage. After switching to Verizon FIOS internet the Live Mail Program inside Internet Explorer would generate error messages “Unexpected Server Termination”. This happened every three to three and a half minutes.

Researching on the Internet I found:

1. Posts that indicated that this problem has been around since 2011.

2. It would cost money to have this fixed by Microsoft.

3. That if the server you get your mail off of is throttling, just have your IT guy fix it. This is obviously for a enterprise user, or some rich guy who can afford to have an IT guy.

Conspiracy theory. Verizon and Comcast throttle your internet. Evidence, they throttle Netflix don’t they and users of these ISPs report this problem. If you ping an Internet route you only do so for a couple of microseconds so no one would notice if they throttled the little user. You think you’re getting fast speeds? Well you are for about three to three and a half minutes then the throttle kicks in. What does the throttle do? It cuts the link to the high usage server or terminates the connection (for several tries). I have Live Mail set to check for new mail every ten minutes but testing shows that it checks constantly, image software lying to you.

Verizon wants you to use their mail client (they won’t talk about Live Mail). I like Live Mail and have used it for years. Besides how do I know Verizon doesn’t scan emails so Verizon can send you targeted adds. Google has done that and they haven’t even slapped Google’s hand. Of course in the small print you signed you allow Google to scan your emails and Google will never forget what it found in your emails. If Google can do it Verizon would be dumb not to do it.

With Live Mail popping up error messages every three minutes and reloading deleted emails or marking read emails as unread every three minutes, those actions get to be un-tolerable quickly. Maybe this is why so many people have switched from Internet Explorer when all they needed to do was switch email clients.

I’ve switched to Firefox browser and Thunderbird email client now and do not have problems.

Write on, draw on hopefully without error messages.