After the recent storm activity at the end of November it is a good time for a reminder of how easy it is for your valuable electronic equipment to be damaged beyond repair by lightning strikes.

The series of storms which hit overnigt at the end of November destroyed many people's computers, modems and other electronic equipment. In most cases, none of the equipment was disconnected from wall sockets, including phone lines to ADSL modems.

The simple act of unplugging from both power and phone sockets likely would have saved this growing list of lost hardware, and it was good to see that in most cases, computers were disconnected from power sockets. Modem's however suffered a higer loss, and mostly due to their connection to the telephone wall socket rather than power.

So it's always a good idea to unplug your modem's connection at the wall socket (or at the back of the modem). Also, while your at the task as a storm approaches, remember your television as well, both power and antenna.

While your equipment might be covered by contents insurance, its as much the inconvenience as the expense of replacing your electronic equipment.

Just a quick note to inform everyone that Jason's PC Services will be on vacation from Saturday the 13th of August until Tuesday the 23rd of August.

Messages and email will be answered on the afternoon of Monday the 22nd of August with appointments scheduled begining Tuesday the 23rd of August.

Last December I warned of an increase in scam telephone calls, these calls have been continuing throughout the ensuing months, in many cases the scammers have been successful and talked users into allowing remote access to their computers, and in some cases, charging for services or software provided during the scam.

Many of these scam callers pretend to be calling from, or on behalf of well known companies such as Microsoft, and attempt to play into fears of virus and spyware infections to convince their victim that they are legitimate so that they can gain access to their system and begin the process of scamming money through offers of services or software to deal with the supposed infection.

As always you need to keep firmly in mind that legitimate companies such as Microsoft will never call you unsolicited about infections or problems with your computer, not only because of internal policy, but also because they cannot know if your system is infected or suffering problems if you don't first contact them about it.

If it's too late and you've received one of these calls and allowed access to your system there's some things you should immediately do.

• If you have entered credit card details online, or provided details to the scammer, then immediately call your bank and cancel your cards.
• Turn your computer off, or disconnect from the Internet.
• Contact Jason's PC Services, or your regular support technician and have your system checked for viruses, spyware, and remote connection software.
• Once your system is clean of infection immediately change passwords/access details for services like Internet banking, Paypal, Ebay, Amazon and the like.

If you have provided details of credit card/s to the scammer, be sure to check your credit card statements for charges that should not be there and initiate a chargeback with your bank.

The past week has shown a heightened level of virus infections across the shire.

The infections have all involved what are known as fraudulant malware, a variety of malware which mimics legitimate anti-virus or anti-malware products and produces incessant reports of serious and expansive infections in an attempt to scare a user into believing the softare and following the prompts which invariably lead to "purchasing" the fraudulant program.

It is important to be very aware of exactly what security software you currently use, be it a subscription based product, or one of the free products. You should take note of what it is, what it looks like, and what its alerting systems look like. Until you make yourself recognise these things you risk accepting fake alerts while browsing the internet and clicking on them, effectivly giving your permission for these fraudulant programs to install themselves on your system.

It is also important to realise that there is no such thing as a one product fixes or catches all, these malicious programs are so prevelant because there is an immense ammount of money to be gained by the people behind these malware programs, and simple changes they can make readily and rapidly can change their malicious software enough to bypass security software once more.

I'm often asked by people who suffer an infection, especially multiple ongoing infections, which is the best security software to use. The answer is always the same, there is no such thing as best if a proactive approach is taken along with a security package. User involvement, in great part by simple awareness of what you have and how it looks is one of the most important factors in keeping your system free of infection.

Just a quick note to inform everyone that Jason's PC Services will be unavailable for the week starting Monday 28th March.

Business will resume on Monday the 4th of April.

The following image is an excerpt from the June 2010 to November 2010 Roy Morgan Internet Satisfaction Report.

This image depicts the results of a customer satisfaction survey on Internet providers for the June to November 2010 period. These results (in red) can be compared to the previous results from the September 2009 to February 2010 survey (in grey).

Internode not only held their top position but increased their result by 2% from the previous survey. TPG, BigPond and AAPT also improved on their previous results.

You can view the full excerpt on roymorgon.com by clicking the image.

Jason's PC Services is now offering the option of remote support via the Internet.

Remote service allows for quicker scheduling for small jobs which can be completed over a remote control session when broadband Internet access is available.

Contact Jason's PC Services now to find out if your problems can be resolved quicker and cheaper by remote control of your computer.

I'd like to wish all of my customers a Merry Christmas and a Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year!

The past week has provided a stark reminder to some about the importance of backing up your data.

Along side the need to backup your data, you also need to make sure that backups are regular, and actually happening correctly if they are automated.

A single hard drive can fail at any moment, age only increases the chances. So if all your data is on one drive, it is a matter of when, not if it will fail and all data will be inaccessible.