Back after a holiday

We spent the bank-holiday long weekend up at my parents’ house on the Wirral. It’s the first time we’ve driven up there for a while, because cramming two children (3 and 1), wife and luggage into the car for a 4-5 hour journey isn’t always fun! However, the children are a bit older now and the journey was good (especially while they were asleep :-) ). We also spent some time with my brother Alan, his wife Lindsay and their son Archie, because they were coincidentally over for the evening on Saturday for a friend’s party. Catching up is always nice.

As well as the usual family things (Adam especially enjoyed spending Monday morning helping his grandpa in the garden, carrying bricks and logs, ferrying things from the front to the back of the house and so on), I was helping my dad sort out his “Mission Control” style computer setup – at the moment, he has 3 computers in his office, with a laptop in another room and several carcases lying around. You’d think from this that he’s pretty PC-savvy, and he is, but he is a Windows person and needed help setting up the linux box I’ve persuaded him to use as the gateway to the internet. Sorting that out wasn’t too bad, not even getting the tape archive system sorted. However, I was amazed to find him being taken in by a simple messenger spam. He’d thought that his Windows machine was broken because he kept getting messages about his Registry being corrupted, and that he should go and download this program to fix it. The warning bells, of course, are sounded by the “go and buy this” part.

Of course, it wasn’t a real error message at all, simply a piece of Windows Messenger spam – and finding this out stopped him spending US$40 on this pointless piece of software. Downloading a simple 22 kB piece of software stopped him ever having this problem again simply by turning off the completely pointless Windows Messenger Service – nothing to do with the MSN instant messaging client, just a stupid way for people to send you spam. Any Windows users, please visit grc.com and download the same thing if you haven’t already. There are also some excellent tools there to check how vulnerable your PC is to hacking; if you’re not already running a firewall, download ZoneAlarm for free and get one of the best pieces of protection you can have online.

pax et bonum

Article posted at 11:45am on 31 May 2005
Category: Computers, Life, Struggling, General