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.

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.