FIRST4TECH blog

'Security Tool' rogue antivirus

Dan Littley — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:07:53 +0000

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

Drop it like it's hot...?

Dan Littley — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:11:33 +0000

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.

Does IT drive you up the wall? Me too!

Jamie Vanstone — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:04:54 +0000

I have always been a fan of outdoor activities and over the years have tried my hand at canoeing, canyoning, mountain biking, rafting, surfing, flying (and jumping out of) planes amongst other things, all of which I have always really enjoyed, but my regular activity of late has been climbing. Since September last year me and my family all became members of a fantastic indoor climbing centre called Dart Rock in Buckfastleigh.

The centre is run by Paula and Robbie Warke along with a wonderful group of friendly, fun and helpful staff. Dart Rock is a fantastic venue with an amazing atmosphere and I must admit that both myself and my son are now totally addicted to climbing!

There's an app for that!

Dan Littley — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:29:58 +0000

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!

Cloud computing suites - is this the future?

Dan Littley — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:32:12 +0000

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.

Internet Filtering and Open DNS

Jamie Vanstone — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:58:57 +0000

Keeping access to the internet safe and manageable for use in your business or at home can be difficult to achieve. There is a vast amount of adult material on the internet as well as the time eating social networking sites, and thats before we even start on the likes of chat systems such as MSN, ICQ and Skype! For most users this is very difficult to control and can also be very expensive.

There are a number of very good packages that can be purchased for high level control of internet access such as software produced by Burstek for business level internet access and also the likes of Net Nanny or CyberPatrol amongst many others for home use. All of these work very well but do involve purchasing subscriptions and applications like Burstek require a lot of configuration. So are there any other alternatives?

New FIRST4TECH website using Squarespace

Dan Littley — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 10:46:42 +0000

One of the first things I was tasked with back in 2007 when FIRST4TECH was founded was to create a company website. At that time I convinced myself that the best way to develop the site was in raw HTML/CSS code – to afford me greater flexibility and control. For the most part this worked out well, aside from the headaches and RSI!

Times have changed, website design has evolved and (like it or not) social networking is rife. So at the end of April 2009, we decided it was time to refresh both the design and content of our website. We wanted a cleaner, fresher look as well as updating the content now that have a few years of business under our belts and know what our existing customers appreciate most, and subsequently what sells our services effectively.

Spotify the difference!

Jamie Vanstone — Fri, 29 May 2009 08:32:25 +0000

I remember the launch of things like Google Maps and the fun of discovering that yes, that actually IS the kids in the garden of your house with the tent up! Or http://www.worldwidetelescope.org from Microsoft, which to me demonstrated one of the most amazing uses of the internet that I had ever seen, even if you’re not into star gazing.

About a month ago I was sat watching Channel 5’s ‘The Gadget Show’ and they were talking about online music. Although slightly distracted by Suzie Perry, I soon became aware of them talking about a new music streaming website called Spotify http://www.spotify.com. So the next day I took a visit and downloaded the client just selecting the free option to see what it was like.

Windows 7 first impressions

Jamie Vanstone — Fri, 29 May 2009 08:28:06 +0000

As with many users, I took my time in upgrading from Windows XP to Windows Vista and once I had upgraded it took me quite a while to get to the point where I was happy running it on all of my systems. My major problem with Vista was you always got the feeling of a bloated system that seemed to eat memory and resources just to keep day to day applications running - I would find myself staring at my PC when it was sat doing next to nothing wondering why the hard disk was running flat out!

A couple of months ago I got our regular news update from Microsoft Technet announcing the Beta of Windows 7 was available for download. My first reaction was the usual...uh oh...here we go again! But on further research around the net something strange was happening, people were actually saying nice things about a new Microsoft OS! So what the hell, time for a rebuild!