Welcome to PC Tech for Hire, Montgomery Alabama's dedicated residential and small business computer repair and service provider. There has been a lot in the news lately about major corporations being hacked and consumers information becoming compromised. The Home Depot is the most recent one. Target is another example of a major corporation with compromised consumer data. The Home Depot has been hit twice in the last year alone! Millions of people use these companies, and the damage can be devastating for the consumer and the business. I, personally, have had my debit card disabled twice because of these two companies. I didn't lose any money. But it was a huge inconvenience. What can you, the consumer, do when your information has been compromised by a business you use? (From Privacyrights.org) First, a security breach doesn't necessarily mean you'll be a victim of identity theft. Your first step is to figure out what type of breach has occurred. That will help you determine the action that you need to take. The four major types of breaches are:
Click on the link above to see what action you should take to protect yourself in each of these situations. What can you do to help minimize the impact a breach has on your information? When the breach involves your credit or debit card, there isn't much you can do ahead of time to help lower the impact. You can swipe your card as a credit transaction instead of a debit transaction to help reduce the chance of your PIN being compromised. Or, you can just use cash everywhere you shop. And when your account information is involved, there are three things you can do. First is, don't use the same password more than once. Second, never use the same password more than once. And lastly, don't ever use the same password more than once! If you have a standard password that you use at every site you create an account on, you are asking for trouble if one of those sites is ever compromised and your password is leaked. One of my recommendations is a program called LastPass. LastPass is a highly secure password manager. With it, you can generate a completely random password for each site you create an account on. It will securely remember the password, and you never even need to know what it is. It can be used on your PC, tablet, or phone, and it's compatible with just about every available browser. If a site is ever compromised, the hackers will not be able to use the information they have on you at other sites. There is also a site called Have I been Pwned. The site will check your email address to see if you've been "Pwned", (a techy way of saying that you've been "owned" and that it's time to change your password). If it finds your email address, it will give you more information about what was compromised, and where and when it happened. It's a very handy site. The site also has the ability to notify you if your email address is involved in any future breaches. Most of all, don't panic. Generally, if you notice fraud, you're going to be protected. Just report it immediately. You may be inconvenienced, like I was with the two debit cards that were disabled automatically as a result of breaches, but in the end, your only loss will be time.
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Welcome to PC Tech for Hire, Montgomery Alabama's trusted residential and small business computer repair and service provider. Slow System? “Why is my computer SO slow to start up?” It happens to most of us--you go to start work on an urgent email, or finish that document you really need to print, or finally edit that photo of the kids--and five minutes later after you started your system, the computer STILL isn’t ready! It’s extremely frustrating, but there are things that can help. The first culprit that I usually see impeding startup time is malware infection. These insidious bits of software do everything they can to take over processing priority, and you’ll especially notice the performance hit at startup. Another common culprit is simply too many (legitimate) programs stampeding to load at startup, unbeknownst to you. These are the programs that load in the system tray by default, and 90% of them--especially non-Microsoft processes--don’t really need to load at startup, though they set themselves to do that. Finally, one of the more common culprits is low RAM. Many computers ship with the bare minimum needed to run Windows (this keeps the price enticingly low at the store), but does not exactly make them perform well on a daily basis in practice. It is fairly inexpensive to upgrade the RAM in your system. That said, if you REALLY want to speed things up, you can choose to switch out your hard drive for the newest variety, an SSD hard drive. These hard drives have no moving parts and are super-fast. I have these installed in almost all our computers at home. On my big rig this change alone changed my boot time from almost seven minutes to less than 30 seconds. They are smaller and somewhat more expensive than traditional drives, but if these trade-offs are worth it to you, the speed you will enjoy is quite nice. So if your computer is slower than molasses on a cold day, I can fix this! Just let me know. New services, now available from PC Tech for Hire! Welcome to PC Tech for Hire, Montgomery Alabama's affordable residential and small business computer repair and service provider. PC Tech for Hire is pleased to announce a new service called ProActive Care. Most of the services I provide are reactive. When something breaks, you call me. My new ProActive Care service is proactive at taking care of issues before it becomes problematic. Do you realize that you are about to run out of hard drive space? ProActive Care can monitor that. Do you know when your computer's CPU is being maxed out? Do you know why it is being maxed out? ProActive Care will monitor that, and in some cases, eliminate the issue. ProActive Care will also send alerts for serious issues. And, everything ProActive Care does is recorded and reported to you once a month. ProActive Care is being introduced at the low rate of $5.00 per month. Be sure to click here for more information, and to order when you're ready. Be sure to try it out with our exclusive 30 day free trial! PC Tech for Hire is also pleased to announce the addition of ProActive Care - Antivirus. Most of the free antivirus products available will protect you from viruses, malware and spyware fairly well. But they are not as good as or as feature rich as some of the paid versions. ProActive Care - Antivirus will give you business class protection at an affordable price, just $5.00 a month. Be sure to click here for more information. And yes, PC Tech for Hire also provides a 30 day free trial of ProActive Care - Antivirus! Do you have important data that you simply can not lose? PC Tech for Hire is also announcing the availability of ProActive Care - Backup! This service provides a secure and highly reliable backup. And it includes versioning control. Is the current version of a document wrong? Versioning control allows you to step back in time and retrieve a copy of that document before it became corrupted. Most other backup solutions will write over the good copy with the bad copy. ProActive Care - Backup only costs $9.00 a month for 10 GB file space. Click here for more information. A 30 day 1 GB free trial is available so that you can see for yourself how easy the service is. The most important advantage of all the ProActive Care services is that PC Tech for Hire is monitoring all aspects of the services. If you want a PC Tech watching over your computer, making sure everything is running well, then this service is for you. Contact PC Tech for Hire today for a custom quote! Stay tuned for more! PC Tech for Hire is working on additional features and enhancements in the ProActive Care line of services. More announcements coming soon! PC Tech for HireWelcome to PC Tech for Hire, Montgomery Alabama's premier residential and small business computer repair and service provider. Welcome to the first edition of my blog. With this blog, I will be bringing you important information about the latest computer issues or trends. I may talk about the latest computer security news, or I may provide helpful information about a product that could help you get the most out of your computer. There won't be a set schedule, but I plan on posting at least once a week. Every once in a while, I may post a special deal that will only be available to my blog and newsletter readers. So, check back often, or connect your favorite RSS news reader to my site for automatic notifications of new posts. Feel free to post a comment letting me know what you would like to see. Ultimately, everything I do is to help you get the best experience possible with your computer. Let me know what you want to see or learn, and I'll include it in a future post. |
Ronnie MorganHi! I'm Ronnie, your PC Tech for Hire for the Montgomery, AL area! Let me know if you need my 25+ years of experience to help you with your computer needs. Archives
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