Keith, I'v currently own 8 pc's (for work) and now we have an ipad, iphone, ipod, and the iAirport Extreme . I absolutely love the apple stuff. If I needed a computer for personal use I'd go with an ipad and buy the external wireless keyboard -like my daughter has. Then buy the iAirportExtreme and wifi your house with it. The apple stuff sure just seems to work fast and thus far never a virus. My experience of getting viruses on my work computer is not good. Unless you have time and knowledge, you end up having a pro like Zane completely flush the computer of the virus and that is not cheap. usually runs me about $300+. In my case time is money and I actually think if the computer is a few years old it is cheaper to throw it and get new. The only thing that stops me from doing that is the duanting task of spending another full day reloading software. These virus writers need to be treated like the criminals they are. Hang a few buy a rope for the whole world to see and maybe it wouldn't be such a game to them anymore.

I love my ipad, but you really can't replace your computer with it.

Doing a complete re-boot is a pain in the ass for sure, but I just got a new faster larger, faster HD, doubled the ram and reloaded my 6-yo dell. Man, its a new computer. Still have to worry about viruses though. I would love to go apple, I just have too much invested in software to make the switch. Someday. I love all my Apple gear.

So Marty and Zane. I have two dead PC laptops. One is a Compaq the other is an HP. Both were built with XP in mind and both got to the point where they were unusable due to speed and hangups. One has a Sempiron (sp?) processor and the other has an Athalon 64 bit processor. Would I be able to load either one of these with linux and open office, sketchup, and an older version of Corel? I've got tax data on the Athalon one that I really would like to keep. Turbotax. Is that savable on the systems you are talking about?

I would set up the Athalon one I think with a desktop monitor and run it off the net just for CAD and the odd older application.

Thanks again everyone for the replies. After driving all over the area and trying to find something reasonable I believe for now I may just get a Samsung Galaxy and then after I get back home get either a desktop or another laptop. Right now I mainly just need access to my emails and of coarse these forums.
I think one of the reasons is my wanting to use it for charts this summer for flying. Now the question I am needing answered is if the 16GB is sufficient or would I be best spending the extra $100 for the 32GB? Just had to move into a new place last week so money is a little tight right now.
Thanks,
Keith

Emory, my Linux friend thought the 64 bit processor had potential but was going to meditate on whether the Turbo tax could be saved. Maybe Zane has a good idea.

Gang,
I have 3 laptops which I have been saving as I need the files in side. The operating systems have failed. Can I get a cable and access the files just like it was a USB?
Thanks in advance,

Tom, this might help

http://www.ehow.com/how_5796248_access- ... er-up.html

Zane,
Do you or anyone else here know how to fix the issue caused by this malware? The wife has been trying to fix my laptop that as infected but she has had no luck. She can't even do anything in safe mode. Good wife though....she says F' it, lets just go buy you a new computer. Of coarse this has all been discussed on the thread I started a couple days ago but I still would like to get my laptop fixed.
Keith

TomKatz wrote:Gang,
I have 3 laptops which I have been saving as I need the files in side. The operating systems have failed. Can I get a cable and access the files just like it was a USB?
Thanks in advance,

I think you gotta take the drives out. Then you have to transplant the files onto machine with an operating system that will run the program that accessed the files on the original computer. But I'm the Sargent Shultz of computer tech these days. It changes faster than my poor little ol' brain can keep up.

WW - I bought a new one. The old one was 8 years old, but a good buddy just called me who has the old one. He said my hard drive locked up on him. Every thing was dead, no lights, noises, etc. He was about to give up, then remembered an old trick. took out stuff and put it all back together and is now looking at my stuff in safe mode. So I did not loose anything. If you pm me, I will give you his number. Your wife should probably talk to him if she is the pc expert in your house?? John

PS: no way am I clicking on that vol 5 link again!

We have the free AVG virus protection running on our computer. When I clicked on the link to that original video post a red window came up that said something like it had just detected and blocked a threat to my computer.

We are running the free AVG as it was recommended a while back by our local computer shop guy after it coust us $80 to have him clean our computer after we caught a virus while running Norton that we were paying a bundle for.

Hey, don't trash all those computers just yet.

If you have a little USB memory stick lying around, you can make a bootable Linux / Ubuntu drive from it. It will start your computer and give you access to your hard drive, assuming your file system is still intact (if it isn't, it's all so much toast anyway). You can then copy your important data to a backup drive such as a portable USB 2.0 drive connected to the same computer. Check your backup on a known good computer and then you can safely run the install CD of your XP or Win7 and chose to format the disk in the process to obliterate the virus.

Go here and follow the instructions for the bootable stick. It's free and easy... http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/linux/create-a-bootable-ubuntu-usb-flash-drive-the-easy-way/

If Ubuntu sez it can't mount your drive, go here and follow the instructions from the point where Ubuntu is loaded: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/use-ubuntu-live-cd-to-backup-files-from-your-dead-windows-computer/

You have nothing to lose and none of the investigation part will change anything on your hard drive. (If your laptop is REALLY old, it might not support booting from USB, in which case, YES, you should go buy a new one. )

YB

Emory, here is what my Linux friend suggested.

There is an online version of turbo tax which runs under firefox. But you have to run firefox under wine to get it to work. And then there is:
www.taxact.com
which is similar to turbotax, and runs under linux with firefox.
Using the online version of turbotax requires firefox for windows and Flash 9 or 10 (download off the internet and install under wine.) These tasks only take a few minutes when you know what you are doing.

If your friend's laptop if old, he might want to choose xfce, because it is smaller and takes less resources to run. If his laptop does not have a dvd rom/player, he would have to install from a thumbdrive. That's how I installed sabayon on your netbook.

180Marty wrote:Emory, here is what my Linux friend suggested.

There is an online version of turbo tax which runs under firefox. But you have to run firefox under wine to get it to work. And then there is:
http://www.taxact.com
which is similar to turbotax, and runs under linux with firefox.
Using the online version of turbotax requires firefox for windows and Flash 9 or 10 (download off the internet and install under wine.) These tasks only take a few minutes when you know what you are doing.

If your friend's laptop if old, he might want to choose xfce, because it is smaller and takes less resources to run. If his laptop does not have a dvd rom/player, he would have to install from a thumbdrive. That's how I installed sabayon on your netbook.

Greek. It's a great language and it helped unify the ancient world.

Thanks Marty. This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to keep one windows machine and strip everything off it that I don't need and just put Win7 on it and the couple two or three programs I need to save until I wear out the Macbook and go back to a PC format. Mac is great, don't get me wrong, but when you lock up the software like Apple did you don't get the software variety you need. I can also just run the partition and keep a windows version on my current machine.
Thanks for the effort, I owe you a cup of coffee.

Hi guys, I'm a little late coming to this conversation but wanted to touch base. Im really sorry to hear you guys
had some computer problems sometime during your web browing and video watching, but wanted to share
that the crazedpilot.com links (all of them) are scanned regularly with 3rd party scanner tools to verify they're clean.
Our website gets thousands of hits a month (even that rocks video page has over 500 hits alone and growing) so we would
have received direct notice by now if there was a documentable issue with one of the pages from either our scan tools or
users - which we'd of course resolve immediately.

To be super confident, we hired a third party team of security specialists out of the bay area last week to manually inspect
our files and they reporting nothing was visible to them which would cause infectious popups on workstations.
Zane did the right thing by pulling the link from my initial post to protect all users against a potential concern the
minute a question was raised. It's important to me that my friends here know that you're all too important to not address
the issue and triple-check our side of things and report back.

As a followup to the actual PC repair discussions here, I would like to mention the importance of keeping not just virus protection
but software updates regularly installed including current web browser updates (Internet Eplorer is up to Version 9 now) along
with Windows operating system patches, updates, let alone upgrades to more modern (and thus secure to current vulnerability
attacks) operating systems on the market. We have dealt with may of these headaches for customers in the past as before
selling aviation products I was in the outsourced IT consulting industry - best advice is to do those updates regularly as 3/4ths
of the time those updates were released by Microsoft et.al to fix their OWN security holes so take them serious.

Thanks,
~Brendan
http://www.CRAZEDpilot.com

IPad cannot run Flash based website applications. I did not know this until I got it. There is a lot of Flash out there. Even AK Dept of Fish and Game website uses it. Apparently Apple is in a pissing contest with Adobe over it.

I would rethink this had I known and go with Android.

Yep, gb, My son went to college with a bunch of engineer and computer guys and I called him for advice since I know next to nothing about computers. His advice was to get the Samsung Galaxy over the Apple Ipad due to the OS. I took his advice and am trying to learn this new toy. So far I like it.
Keith

Fuck me. That Security Shield virus was a nasty SOB.

Of course I called McAfee which is already up and running on my PC, and they said for an additional $110 a year, and $89 right now, they could remotely fix the problem and prevent future attack.

"So," says I, "if your anti-virus program is already running on my machine, why did this fucking virus get on there in the first place, and why do I have to pay more for what your software should be doing in the first place." I couldn't really understand his English when he tried to explain, but I think he understood me quite well when I told him, and McAfee, to take their anti-virus software and shove it up their asses.

Gonna buy a Mac.

Oh yeah... I booted up on Safe Mode and did a system restore to two weeks ago, and it seems to have stopped the problem.

Gump

That fake "security scan" software is indeed nasty. I manage a computer repair department for a living and my guys have wasted so many hours trying to clean infected systems that I finally told them to just blow away the hard disk and put a fresh image on the disk. That's standard practice now.

I even caught the dang virus from my church's website. We took it down and scrubbed it, had the provider scan their servers and everything came up clean. We put the website back up and bam, I caught the same virus from the same portion of the website. These Nigerians just get more clever and get more help from the Russians and the Chinese.

Of course I called McAfee which is already up and running on my PC, and they said for an additional $110 a year, and $89 right now, they could remotely fix the problem and prevent future attack.

"So," says I, "if your anti-virus program is already running on my machine, why did this fucking virus get on there in the first place, and why do I have to pay more for what your software should be doing in the first place." I couldn't really understand his English when he tried to explain, but I think he understood me quite well when I told him, and McAfee, to take their anti-virus software and shove it up their asses.

Gonna buy a Mac.

You guys are sure hard heads. Why do you want to pay for operating systems when you can have Linux for free. It is better and if you aren't smart enough to install it on your hard drive find somebody that is. Even I have done it before and I have never had any anti virus protection except for the free 1 year McAfee that came with my first computer about 8 years ago. I'm using Linux to post this.