There is a particularly nasty rogue antivirus application called 'Security Tool' doing the rounds just lately.  It's been prevelant over the past month or two and once installed on your system it can be quite a pain to remove.

"Security Tool is a rogue antivirus application that deliberately gives reports of false system security threats on your computer and displays fake security alerts or notifications to make you think your PC is infected with malware. The misleading application is from the same family as Total security 2009 and System Security. When installed, Security Tool will be configured to start automatically when you log on into Windows. Then it will imitate system scan and display a variety of infections that can't be removed unless you purchase the program. The files detected during the scan are either harmless or legitimate system files and can't cause any damage to your computer."  Source: http://www.2-spyware.com

Click to read more ...

Ah, the seemingly never ending quest to find the ultimate online backup solution!  Becoming increasingly aware of the need to back up my important documents and photo's at home I've been on the lookout for an online backup service in recent months.  Whilst having found Amazon's S3 technology impressive, without a standardised client app from Amazon themselves, I found most of the S3 compatible software on the internet to be in beta and/or just plain rubbish.  Then a friend of mine (thanks Nick!) pointed me in the direction of Dropbox.

Click to read more ...

September 3^rd 2009.  That was the day I finally managed to convince Jamie to switch to an Apple iPhone!  We had been using Windows Mobile based phones (HTC Touch) for the past 18 months and were pretty pleased with them.  However in the past 6 months or so, many of our friends, family and more importantly customers have been upgrading to iPhones.  With each small snippet of use to setup their Microsoft Exchange email, I grew more and more impressed with the iPhone and quickly became convinced it was better than any other mobile phone on the market.  All I had to do was to convince Jamie!

Click to read more ...

It’s been a long time since I've used Outlook and POP3 email delivery for personal use - I've been using Google Mail for a while now and can’t recommend it highly enough. Intrigued by the number of different area’s Google seemed to be getting involved in recently I wondered if they did domain hosting. A friend of mine mentioned Google Apps and I didn't really know what it was, so I decided to take a look.

In a nutshell, Google Apps allows businesses to deploy Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and other web apps to its employees. Everything's hosted by Google, which is what really caught my attention once I started to think about it. Instead of purchasing the hardware and software for say a Microsoft Small Business Server (to act as a File & Print server and Exchange server) and individual Microsoft Office licenses, for $50 per user per year you can deploy Google Apps to each of your staff - effectively outsourcing your IT hardware and software. Now whilst I’m not entirely sure a lot of SME's are ready to embrace this kind of forward thinking technology quite yet, I can certainly see the immediate benefits - 99.9% uptime guarantee, effectively unlimited storage, no special hardware or software requirements and all for around 1/3 of the total cost of competing solutions.

Click to read more ...