Eugene's observations

A significant proportion of my work comes from clients who report sudden loss of one or more hardware components. Where a thunderstorm has recently been nearby or multiple components are affected concurrently, it is usually a good bet that a jolt of electricity has passed up the power, dialup modem or antenna wires.

The power supply units within computers have to handle minor fluctuation as the power is never at exactly 240 volts, but their lives are shortened (sometimes dramatically) by coping with events such as

• Sudden resumption of power after a cut
• Sag (short term under voltage)
• Spike (short term over voltage)
• Brownout (longer term under voltage)
• Overvoltage
• Line noise (electro magnetic interference caused by other equipment)
• Frequency variation (more or less than 50Hz)

Surge protectors are available at all electrical and computer shops, and are designed to protect against these problems and thereby prolong the life of the electrical equipment connected to them. As is common, the more you pay, the better quality of protection you get. About £8 will give the bare minimum protection, but for about £14 it is better to get a device that provides an LED to warn when the device has taken a hit. This is because they normally continue to provide power after the protection has ceased. At that time it is necessary to replace the item. Periodic checks on the (normally green) LED are therefore suggested as part of periodic housekeeping procedures.

To avoid having to replace surge protectors periodically, and provide for a graceful shutdown when a power cut occurs, an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) is preferred. These are basically batteries that feed the PC and are constantly being topped up by the mains. A short power outage - say 10 minutes, will normally not cause the PC to have to be shut down so work may continue. More expensive UPS systems provide power for multiple PCs for a much longer time. Prices start at about £35.

Note that all electrical appliances (e.g. wireless phones, washing machines, TVs) benefit from protection. The cost of replacing surge protectors is normally dwarfed by the cost of repairing or replacing a computer that has taken a hit.

We all know how important it is to take backup copies of the important documents that have changed recently.

On-line backup in one option, although rather slow and not suitable for huge amounts of data, but as long as you are happy with the security, you can pass responsibility for looking after the stored data to someone else.

There are commercial sites such as RBack (http://www.rback.co.uk/) but also a couple of interesting free options.

Humyo (http://www.humyo.com/Pages/Home) will give you 30GB for free, although to get the fancy features like a desktop client, encryption and 100GB you need to pay them about £30 a year.

Gspace (http://www.getgspace.com/index.html) have rather cleverly enabled you to use the 6GB that Google gives away with their mail product. You can hold photos, music and other documents all transferred from your regular browser. And if 6GB is not enough space - just apply for another free Gmail account and pick up 6 more.

Edit: 26 Dec 08
Two other services that are worth review are http://www.webroot.co.uk and http://www.carbonite.com

In light of the millions of people's private data that has recently been in the news apparently lost due to official ineptitude, I have been asked by a small local charity how they can safeguard private data held on a publicly accessible PC.

After a thorough trawl of the options I am recommending an open source (a.k.a. free) program called TrueCrypt available from http://www.truecrypt.org/ This allows unlimited files to be encrypted on-the-fly by dropping them in to a specially created data vault. This 'vault' is really just a folder on your PC that happens to appear to contain gibberish unless accessed via a mounted drive - something that can only be done by those knowing the pass phrase.

The same program can be used to encrypt entire disk drives, optical or hard, bootable or secondary. The digital vault can be automatically closed after a period of inactivity or when a screen saver kicks in. The documentation for TrueCrypt is comprehensive and well written and the program interface easy to understand.

On a related note, sending e-mail is rightly regarded as akin to sending a postcard in that each mail passes through many servers and is easily readable by anyone with a mind to do so. There are two main ways to make life harder for would be snoopers: encryption and steganography.

Encryption is fine for some, but the recipient has to know how to decrypt the message and the fact that it is encrypted is publicly available knowledge. The recommended method for this is PGP - Pretty Good Privacy. It is one of the most time tested and respected methods and is available commercially from PGP corporation or without charge from many open source distributors such as GnuPG.

Steganography enables a message to be hidden in another file. So a seemingly innocuous photo attachment may contain a private message d'amour. The recipient would need to know that an attachment needs special treatment, but an eavesdropper would not know that there is more to the communication than meets the eye. My favourite (free of course) implementation is JPHSwin available from http://linux01.gwdg.de/%7Ealatham/stego.html

A client of mine has run into problems with Ocado - a website that collects orders for grocery deliveries ordered online. Their technical support people advised that she delete all her cookies to see if that resolved the issue. When you are advised to do this it is a sure indication that the person offering such advice has no idea of the cause of your problem, and, whether through ignorance or careless disregard for your convenience, no interest in the consequences when you visit other websites.

A cookie is a small file that many websites cause to be placed on your computer when you browse to them. They are usually helpful as they record information that you would want the website to know, gleaned from your previous visits to their site.

Cookies may be used to remember and thus save your having to re-type in your username or password. To remember what was in your shopping cart, your preferences, or the state of what you were doing before you had to leave the website last visit.

Occasionally however, third party websites can harvest information held in other website's cookies with a view to targeting marketing at you or stealing information you may regard as confidential to a particular website. The sites that allow collection of this material for advertisers are called adservers, and their cookies are usually best deleted. This is often automated in most anti-spyware programs (e.g. Spybot, Ad-Aware & SUPERAntiSpyware).

The possible problem that affected my client, the Ocado site user, was a corrupt cookie. It is just possible that the Ocado site wrote a cookie that later became corrupted - possibly due to hard disk drive error, virus activity or simply being badly written by Ocado in the first place ! Further, that the Ocado website code was written in a way that it could not handle this eventuality. In such a situation, deleting all OCADO cookies may be helpful. But advising my client to delete all cookies for all websites on the computer is recklessly bad advice.

To view and/or selectively delete cookies from multiple browsers, I use a program called Cookie Viewer - a free download from http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptcookie.asp

Another useful free program is Cookie Monster. It combines cookies from multiple browsers and makes it easy to delete cookies not relating to sites in your favourites/bookmarks list. Available from
http://www.ampsoft.net/utilities/CookieMonster.php

More information on cookies is available at Wikipedia.

I have just read on the BBC website that there are five times as many variants of malicious programs in circulation in 2007 compared to 2006.

These days all PCs need protection as there are so many routes for bad code to violate your computer. In addition to anti-virus it is essential to have a firewall and worthwhile getting some protection from spam, phishing and spyware programs. Additionally, possibly, extra features such as parental control, identity protection and intrusion detection, so a total Internet Security package is really required.

I read through many reviews of such products that compare ease of use, startup speed, scan time, effectiveness and various other metrics, and as a result I am currently suggesting either BitDefender or Panda packages, depending on the individual requirements. The big advantage of BitDefender is that is costs £23.57 for 1 PC for 1 year compared to Panda at £42.99. BitDefender also has a 'gaming mode' that users of slow old PCs will appreciate. However, Panda does offer intrusion detection and better cover for users of browsers other than Internet Explorer. Panda also has backup and tune-up facilities although these are fairly basic.

I have just (for the umpteenth time) returned a shop bought PC to an owner and had to charge about double for the repair than I would for a custom built PC.

This PC happened to be a Packard Bell/NEC one where the owner was complaining of a dark screen. Initial suspicions fell on the video card, but when I got the PC to the workshop I tested other components and found that the motherboard had failed too.

I searched for an identical motherboard to replace, but none was available even though the PC was no more than two years old. This is because being a bulk purchaser of motherboards, Packard Bell can dictate to the manufacturer not only how the boards should be laid out, but whether replacements are to be stocked and made available. Thus saving some of the cost involved in supplying more complete, customizable and functional boards, and hoping that when the device fails, a new PC will be able to be sold rather than a non-profit generating repair being undertaken.

One of the non-standard aspects of this board is that the pin arrangement for connecting the wires to the front panel of the PC is unusual. Moreover, there is no way of identifying which wire does what as neither colours nor markings revealed anything. So I had to strip the front casing down to the circuit board and try to match up each cable to its function as best I could.

I bought a replacement motherboard with a standard pin arrangement, but the plastic block that houses the wires was a different shape, so I had to improvise a make-do insulation arrangement.

Had this computer been custom built, it would comprise standard components so that not only could an identical replacement motherboard be sourced, but none of the time consuming faffing around would be necessary.

Similarly, last week I was servicing a Dell computer. It was not until I started work that I realized that the plug and socket connectors for the keyboard and mouse were non-standard. No keyboard or mouse other than the Dell ones supplied with that model of computer would work !

Incidentally, when I returned the Packard Bell PC to the owner today I realized the cause of the motherboard and video card failure. The green LED on the surge protector was not illuminated. There has been a power cut recently and the owner did not check that the surge protector had done its job in saving the PC. So when the next power cut came, she was unprotected. If only she had followed the advice in my housekeeping list she would have avoided a bill for over £100.