Over the past few years I’ve had a number of clients who have been hit with ‘fake’ Virus alerts/warnings that are intended to alarm the user into scanning their system and eventually paying to have the fake virus removed. I…
Category: Computers
Rogue Anti-Virus Removal
Posted in Computers Tagged with: Anti-Malware, Booting, f8, Malwarebytes, Malwarebytes AntiMalware, Microsoft Windows, Normal mode, quick scan, removal, Rogue security software, safe mode, virus, Windows
How to switch to Microsoft Security Essentials Anti-Virus
Most of my clients and friends want an Anti-Virus solution that’s simple and cheap, and I have found myself installing Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) on more and more Windows systems. It has a small footprint, doesn’t drain a lot of resources,…
Posted in Computers Tagged with: Anti-Malware, install, Malwarebytes, Microsoft Security Essentials, MSE, update, valid, virus
Seagate ST35000620AS Failure
I received a call from someone with a two year-old Hewlett Packard Pavilion Slimline who told me the system would no longer boot. I started talking him through some troubleshooting procedures so I could get a better handle on what was going…
Please avoid Symantec/Norton
In the late 90’s I started questioning the quality of Symantec/Norton products as they started showing a large amount of support time (while IT Director at a Video Game Company supporting over 200 workstations)… Norton support was lacking, and we…
Make ColorZilla work in Ubuntu – Firefox
ColorZilla has the ability to work with Ubuntu, but not the way it is packaged. If you install the regular ColorZilla_1.x.xpi the library that does not work with Ubuntu gets installed and you get the ‘mode not supported on your…
Cleaning up WordPress database after UTW
After upgrading to WordPress 2.3 and trying to re-evaluate tag usage, I decided to re-visit an old pet-peeve of mine: The relatively massive (read: gi-normous) size of my wp_postmeta table. It was always the biggest table in my database (thanks…
Recent site and forum issues
Between the theme change, settling into 2.3 final and trying to bring some style continuity from the new theme into my forums, there have been some short periods of down-time. Last night and this AM were more significant however, so…
Recent changes here at samdevol.com
I have been meaning to post a note about some of the recent changes here, but have been busier then a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs (been dying to use that phrase for some time ;’)……
6 Simple Steps to Hardening WordPress
There are some basic steps you can take to help limit your exposure to malicious behavior directed at your WordPress install. My intention with this article is not to make your website bullet-proof (if such a thing exists) but to…
Posted in Computers, Things, WordPress Tagged with: akismet, change permissions, directory permissions, htaccess, install, malicious behavior, permissions, server, spam, WordPress, wordpress blog
Display posts ticker-style in WordPress with Zazz
I was thinking about a way to showcase older posts and happened across the Zazz Post Tickerplugin by Stew Houston. I thought “Here we go, another chance for me to totally bork my blog with some unknown piece of code…”…
