Leaving computers on all the time

September 2008 - by Felicia King - Quality Plus Consulting

Turn off, or not?

I was recently asked the following question.

I say that leaving my computer on overnight does not expose it to hacking, but some disagree with me. (You advised me to leave it on as a way to help minimize other possible problems). Please settle this difference of opinion for us.

Is there really a security risk?

The question asked was all about minimizing exposure to security risks.

Secure computers have hardware firewalls, software firewalls, OS-level security, antivirus, antimalware software, and password security, among other layers of security.

Do you seriously think the hackers wait until you are off of your computer to hack it? Not hardly. If it's turned on and not secured, it doesn't matter whether you are sitting in front of it or not. You're still going to get hacked. It's not an IF, only a question of WHEN.

It's true that a computer that is powered off is difficult (not impossible) to hack. However, an unsecured computer turning on for 5 minutes has MORE exposure risk than a secured computer being left on for a full year.

The case for maintenance

Computers need to be on overnight in order to do maintenance. Disk maintenance, patches, updates, imaging, backups, etc. Do you really want to do these processes manually? Do you even know how?

The vast majority of businesses leave their computers on all the time so that they can do patches and maintenance. Obviously, they feel it’s secure enough. They realize that if you don’t have enough security in place to protect the computers all the time, then you don’t have enough.

If you don't have a UPS (battery backup) for your computer, you do accept some risk of a hard down if there is a power outage. This is easy enough to avoid by simply powering off the computer during a lightning storm. However, you may leave in the morning and come back some time in the evening, and there was thunderstorm while you were gone. So investing in a UPS is a great idea. It is a lot less expensive than a fried computer or lost data.

The final answer

So powering off computers overnight does only two things.

·         Prevents the needed computer maintenance functions from working. (bad)

·         Prevents additional electrical usage.

This is why I say to people to turn them off if they are going away for a day or two or more. Otherwise, leave the computer on so that it can do its maintenance. Most computers don't really use much electricity. It's probably costing you a couple dollars per month in electricity to run your computer.

Understanding Netflix

May 2008 - by Felicia King - Quality Plus Consulting

What is Netflix

Netflix is a company that has found a new way of doing movie rentals. They are incredibly successful in this venture.

The old way

You've probably used Block Buster or your local movie rental store at least once in the last decade. You would drive to the store and rent the DVD or VHS movie(s) of your choice. The movie rental store gave you a period of time in which you had to return the movie or you would be charged late penalties.

One of the major problems people ran into with renting DVDs from local stores was the ongoing problem with reliability. Imagine you go to the store and rent a DVD. You get it home and try it out, but it won't play in your DVD player. You drive back to the store and complain. They give you a different one. You try that one and it doesn't work either. So you go back to the store for the third time, and they don't have any more DVDs of the movie you wanted to rent. Thus you have to choose a different movie.

You can imagine the frustration level of these reliability problems. Netflix realized the problems with the old way rentals were working.

·         Short time to return without penalty

·         DVDs that did not consistently work in set-top players

·         Travel time and wasted gas to go to the rental store

·         Supply problems with a particular movie of choice

The new way

Netflix recognized the problems of the old way the movie rental industry was working and decided to do it differently.

·         Unlimited time movie rentals with no penalty

·         Movies returned and delivered by USPS

·         Huge regional DVD distribution centers to eliminate supply problems

·         Quality control point after every movie return (The DVD is checked for function.)

·         Movies on demand

Netflix has a number of plans to allow you to choose a plan that matches your needs. You can change your plan as much or as often as you want to without any contract penalty. There are no contracts. Additionally, their website is very easy to use and functional.

Netflix instant movies

With all of the movie rental plans, you have access to instant movies through their website. This is the coolest part of Netflix.

Internet bandwidth

You have to have a normal high-speed Internet connection in order to make use of this feature. People on very slow satellite connections should not use this. Dial-up connections will not work. The movies are streamed to your PC in a reasonable resolution.

Image quality

You have to realize that instant movies will never look as good as a video that you are seeing on a DVD. Commercially produced DVD movies can contain more than 5 GB of data. It is impossible to push all of that data over the Internet to the majority of American households. If we all had fiber connections to our houses, the story would be different.

In order for this technology to work, pixels must be removed from the overall picture quality. When people talk about high definition TVs or DVDs, these things are really just ways in which you get MORE pixels. The theory is that more pixels are better. In reality, after a certain point, the human eye just can't detect any more pixels. So I'm not an advocate of HD or Blu‑Ray.

The instant movie feature is great for all the old movies we love to watch. Anything made before 1970 doesn't have the greatest picture quality anyhow. I've watched a bunch of WWII films using the instant movie feature. When I evaluate the ability to watch the movie instantly without waiting for a DVD to arrive in the mail compared with video quality differences, I'll take the instant movie any day. I still use the regular DVD via mail feature, but I use it for movies I know are really good and where I want to see really good picture quality.

Instant movies gotchas

·         You must back up and be prepared to restore the registry key on each PC where you enable instant movie watching. Export the following registry key to a reg file or use regdmp.exe in a script.
HKCU\Software\Netflix
This registry key must be restored via regini or regedit if you have to rebuild your computer or it crashes and you have to restore it to a time before the key was there.

·         Be choosy about which PCs you register the instant movies on as you are limited to four.
The counter on this resets every January.

·         The video driver in your computer must be able to support DRM (digital rights management).
Additionally, your video card must be able to handle that as well.
In practice, I've had the best of luck with a computer built in 2005. I've had more problems with new computers as there seems to be DRM compatibility bugs in their video drivers that the software developers have not yet fixed.

·         Netflix instant movie player is run‑time version of Windows Media Player.
Only video drivers that can handle DRM can play the Media Player DRM add‑on.

·         Remember to use the Back to Browsing button to navigate away from a movie when you are done watching it.
This essentially sends a kill bit to the movie streamer server to tell the server to stop sending the video to your machine.

Instant movie tips

You can tweak the compatibility with Windows Media Player by right-clicking on Now Playing, then click More Options. On the Performance tab, click Advanced. Uncheck the box for Use Video Mixing Renderer. Perhaps if you update your video driver, you may then be able to set this check box back to the default.

Summary

Netflix is awesome and better than the other video rental companies even if you never use the instant movie feature.

Battery life

April 2008 - by Felicia King - Quality Plus Consulting

Batteries in our daily life

There are three types of batteries in your technology-related life.

·         Cell phone

·         Laptop

·         UPS (uninterruptable power supply)

It is important that you understand some things about the batteries in your daily life so you can get the most use out of them.

Factors that affect battery life

Laptops

There are two factors to consider with laptop batteries.

·         Duration of supply

·         Length of service

Duration of supply refers to how many hours you can utilize the laptop while on battery. This varies greatly with power consumption settings, processors, and laptop manufacturer. However, there is one big factor you can directly control. When you purchase a laptop, opt for the battery with the most cells. E.g., a nine cell battery will deliver longer supply to the laptop than a six or four cell battery. And the price difference may only be $20.

Length of service refers to how many years the battery will provide usable supply. Laptop batteries that are overcharged regularly will have a significantly shorter length of service than a battery that was never overcharged. So what is overcharging?

Overcharging occurs when a laptop is powered off and the battery is fully charged, yet AC power is still supplied to the laptop. How can this be avoided? Simply remove the AC power cord from your laptop when it is not powered on. If you have a laptop that goes into standby regularly, I recommend you disable the automatic standby. Not only will it cause overcharging of the battery, but it will likely corrupt the hard drive in a couple of years. It is perfectly fine to leave your laptop plugged into AC power all the time as long as the laptop is powered up and running (not in standby or hibernation).

Cell phones

If you use your cell phone a lot, I recommend charging it throughout the day instead of just at the end of the day. It is much better to charge it only when it needs it and not leave it on the charger over night.

For example, you use the cell phone in the morning and then it has 90% life. Charge it. However, remove the charger after it indicates that the battery is fully charged. If you leave your cell phone charging overnight, every night, the battery will have a shorter life than if you did not OVERCHARGE it regularly.

Lithium ion vs. lead acid

Ni-Cad batteries have mostly gone by the wayside. This is good because cadmium is VERY bad in the water supply and people still throw away batteries with their regular refuse instead of recycling them properly.

Most cell phones use Li-ion (lithium ion) batteries these days. These batteries have much less battery memory than other types used in the past. Some folks will even argue that Li-ion batteries have no memory. My opinion is that if they are kept charged regularly and fully, they will provided many years of use.

Lead acid batteries in UPSs are meant to last 3 to 5 years. If you have a UPS that is more than 3 years old, you can test the battery's function by unplugging the UPS from AC power and finding out if it keeps your systems online. APC is the world's largest manufacturer of UPSs. They have an upgrade and recycling program available on their website. You can also get replacement batteries there. In many cases, it is less expensive to buy a new battery than to replace the whole unit.

Disposal

All batteries must be properly recycled when a device comes to the end of its useful life. Many places like Batteries Plus and Home Depot have battery recycling centers. You can take your old laptop battery or cell phone battery into those places to get the battery recycled properly. The only cost to you is to physically go there and drop it off.

Lead acid batteries in UPSs must also be recycled. These also can be recycled at Batteries Plus or any metal recycling center. The metal recycling centers will even give you money for your recycled battery.

Please do your part to keep these items out of landfills and out of our water supply.

I often get questions about which antivirus tool is the best. There are a number of factors that affect that answer. I aim to explain all those factors to you so that you can make an educated decision for yourself. Let's start with some general understandings.

General understandings

·         Antivirus/antispyware is a required tool to protect any computer regardless of platform or operating system.

·         There can only be one king in the castle.
If you have multiple antispyware tools, they generally will eat on each other. The same is true with multiple toolbars in Internet Explorer and multiple antivirus or firewall tools.
It's amazing how many times I've seen problems with PCs exist purely because someone installed too much conflicting software on their computer.

·         Internet security suites are usually not a good idea.
They generally have some sort of parental controls or Internet content filtering that suck up a huge amount of your computer's horsepower. They also have firewall products that are not controllable.

·         McAfee requires separate renewals so it's more expensive.
Their firewall and antivirus products have to be renewed separately where Norton and Trend have it all in the antivirus/antispyware tool annual renewal (~$40/yr).
It should also be noted that most users find the McAfee interface confusing.

·         Trend is the only company that gives free tech support.

·         Norton and Trend AV/AS products have a controllable and effective firewall built-in.

·         Parental controls have been known to be so demanding on the horsepower of your computer that the network connection cannot startup.

·         Everyone's situation is different.
The answer to which tool is best for you and your computer right now has to do with a number of factors.

Brief history

It's useful to understand some history. Back in the day, you used to have a firewall product and an antivirus/antispyware tool separate. This was actually very handy because if something did compromise one tool, it didn't turn off all of your protection. However, there are some advantages to having security software that comes ready to rock and roll out of the box. Norton Antivirus/Antispyware and Trend Micro Antivirus/Antispyware don't require any configuration out of the box. They don't prompt you like tools that need to learn, so they are best for people who don't know how to answer the prompts correctly. This also means you only have one piece of antivirus/antispyware/firewall to take care of. People who are still using AdAware and Spybot are delusional about their effectiveness.

ZoneAlarm used to be a good firewall product, but they started adding email plug-ins and a built-in antivirus tool. This was very bad because their integrated security suite product didn't perform as good as the standalone firewall. Additionally, it liked to take over your email and make your computer crash. This is a good example of one tool trying to do everything and doing absolutely nothing well.

Why is this all important to understand?

The world changes. Not only do security risks and attack vectors change regularly, but the horsepower requirements change with each product. Additionally, as these software vendors change their products, they may add or remove features. The trending has been towards adding features. As you have already seen, in the case of ZoneAlarm, that addition of features ruined their product.

How do I stay on top of all this?

Frankly, I don't think the typical computer user has any ability to keep up on all of this. Only people who deal with these issues on a variety of computers over a long period of time have any comparative perspective. Use your experts where appropriate.

One of the most successful strategies I can recommend is where you send an email to your tech support person annually at renewal time. Depending upon your situation, your tech person may simply reply telling you to go forth and renew your existing product. How much did that email cost you? Probably nothing. But if you make the wrong decision regarding what to do with your antivirus/antispyware tool, you may end up with a dead computer.

My sister recently called me telling me that she was just about to upgrade to Norton Internet Security because it was only $5 more than her existing subscription renewal. I stressed to her that was a bad idea on many fronts. For her, that software would have crippled her laptop. Yet Norton's antivirus/antispyware tool has kept her computer safe.

Your number one role in all of this is to make sure that you involve your expert when needed.

Decision factors

Here are the primary decision factors for your antivirus/antispyware/antimalware solution.

1.    Support
Who will support your computer? Do you have a regular tech? If you are going to self-support, you really need to use Trend or Norton so that you can call their tech support.

2.    Computer horsepower
Ancient computers (5 years old or more) can't run today's antivirus/antispyware security tools. And a lot of computers can't handle running internet security suites plus iTunes, and all the other junk people typically load on their computers. If your computer has any less than 768 MB of RAM, you better upgrade your RAM.

3.    Cost
Don't get sucked into thinking that the free tools are good enough. I describe later the one circumstance where a free tool is appropriate. You get what you pay for.

4.    What security tools do you already have installed?
If what you have now is working, then simply renew it. Don't worry about upgrading to the new software every year. Contact your tech person each year just to verify.

Which tool?

My first choice is Trend Antivirus/Antispyware. This tool has proven very effective and is #1 rated. Their support is very effective as well.

For computers that you don't use very often and that you don't feel you want to spend the $40/year to protect, it is best that you use Comodo Antivirus. This tool is free and works based off of whitelist technology. Detection is doomed, so whitelist technology is really where it's at. I explain this more in next month's article. Comodo also has a free firewall product. Note that you should NOT have multiple firewall products installed and activated simultaneously.

One of my client's spends 5 months out of the year in Mexico. For her laptop in Mexico, it makes the most sense to use a non-expiring tool like Comodo. However, we have done training sessions so she knows how to program the software effectively. More about this next month.

Another good example is that spare computer that you use when your primary is down. Go ahead and use Comodo on that. Well I hope this clears it up for you. Be sure to read next month's article on why detection is doomed.

Smartphones are the combination of a cell phone and a PDA. Most people in business use some sort of personal data assistant, whether it's a Palm, Windows Mobile device, or paper and pencil. The paper and pencil strategy doesn't allow for easy backup copies or collaboration. Thus, business went to electronic calendar, contacts and tasks years ago.

Historically, Palm devices have had integration difficulties with email clients like Outlook. Outlook is the business standard email client and personal data manager. It's an application that allows you to centralize your email, calendar, contacts, and tasks all in one place. This is powerful because if you have a device that connects to this mailbox and its contents, you can have as much or as little of that content on the road with you all the time.

It's not practical to tote a laptop around. Boot time for laptops, even coming out of standby is much longer than simply turning on a PDA or smartphone. So, for many people in business, they have been using PDAs for years. The only drawback is that you had to carry the PDA and your phone. And your PDA data didn't update dynamically all the time. Enter the smartphone. It is an integrated device. If you purchase the unlimited data plan with your smartphone, your phone will download your email, contacts, calendar tasks, all the time.

The capabilities of the sync have as much to do with the device as the mailbox you connect it to. So if you have a POP3 email system, you have no server-based contacts, calendar, tasks. And you have no historical email. Most people want to maintain only ONE copy of these items. So you need to have a mailbox that has all these things on a server system rather than your data sitting on your PC at the office and you wonder how in the world is this going to get to your smartphone. It won't.

However, if you are using an email service like most of the business world (Exchange-based email), all of this works easily and reliably. Windows Mobile has ActiveSync built-in and when connected to an Exchange mailbox, you get as much or as little of your mailbox contents as you want.

Now what device should you buy? They seem to come in all shapes and sizes. My recommendation is to get one that has the biggest screen and biggest keyboard you can find. Touch screens are more useful than non-touch screens. The screen and keyboard are the primary interfaces of the device, so they should be user-friendly to you. You need to go to the store and touch the device long enough to decide whether you like it or not. Truly you won't be able to fully demo the device unless you purchase one. This is where your technology person comes in very handy. They usually have tried many of these devices, either because they have them or they have clients that have them.

Did you know that you don't have to buy the smartphone from your cellular provider? That's true if your cell provider uses SIM cards. Any phone that takes a SIM card is compatible with your existing SIM card. Thus you can look at products on http://www.mobileplanet.com.

I'm currently using Ostia (GPS software that integrates with Outlook contacts) with a bluetooth Pharos GPS. This is great because you don't have to have a separate GPS that your program with routes or destinations. You simply tell your cellphone to go to one of your contact's work or home address.

My personal favorite at this time is any Windows Mobile 6 device. WM6 has enhanced security, email, calendar, and contact functions over all previous versions of Windows Mobile. Specifically, I'm using the Verizon XV6800. I really like the device. There's almost nothing that I don't like about the device. I wondered when the day would come that I would find a device to replace my wonderful Dell Axim X50v. It took three years, but a worthy smartphone is finally available.

HTC.com makes very good smartphones. In fact, the Verizon XV6800 is an HTC device. One of my clients got an HTC smartphone with TomTom GPS integrated. The GPS antenna itself is inside the phone. This is very convenient. Location services from your cell provider that cost $10/month are completely different than true GPS. Cell providers offer fee-based triangulation services. If you buy a smartphone and use true GPS software with it (internal or external GPS makes no difference), you pay only one time for your software and device rather than $10/month for the cellphone triangulation service.

In summary, you may want a smartphone even if you don't have Exchange-based email. You can still sync the phone with your PC directly into your Outlook. Just that you won't get your email and other updates on-the-fly. If you do sync it directly with your PC, there is no need to pay for the unlimited data plan. So you save $45/month on your phone bill.