Ok, so you’re catching up on the happenings on Facebook when you see a link that one of your friends has posted, along with a short message like “You just have to check out this video. It’s awesome!”

Well, it was posted by a friend, so you go ahead and click the link. Everything seems fine for a while, but then a box pops up telling you that “Win 7 Antivirus 2012″ has detected several viruses and trojans on your computer. Meanwhile, a “scan” is taking place inside the box listing one virus and trojan after another as if your PC has been inundated by malware.

But there is a problem…You are then notified that your subscription to “Win 7 Antivirus 2012″ has expired and you need to renew it so that the software can remove the viruses from your hard drive. Well folks, the truth of the matter is that you never had a subscription for Win 7 Antivirus 2012 in the first place. In fact, no legitimate product by that name even exists.

True, your computer IS now infected with an insidious virus, but the virus is actually the Win 7 Antivirus program itself! If you go ahead and “renew” the subscription, you have not only just put a decent chunk of change in a crook’s banks account, you have also just given him your credit card or  bank account information forgood measure!

How did you get this virus onto your PC? By clicking on that link that your “friend” had posted earlier. But your friend isn’t really the person who posted it. Hackers (crooks) worm their way in and take over legitimate Facebook accounts, then use those accounts to post links to their malware. And since it appears that the link was posted by one of your friends, it’s only natural to want to click on it and see that “awesome video”. This has happened to three members of my extended family within just the last week!

The bottom line here is that you need to be very careful about which links you click on Facebook and which ones to steer clear of. How can you tell? Here are a few things to consider:

1 – Do you recognize the URL as belonging to a trusted, well-established website? A link to a page on yahoo.com or youtube.com will most likely be fine, but if it will take you to a website that you have never heard of before you might want to think twice before clicking on it.

2 – Make sure you are running a legitimate anti-virus software program such as Norton, McAfee, AVG, Avast, Microsoft Security Essentials, etc. And be sure to keep it updated at all times. Running an anti-virus package with an outdated threat database is only a little better than not running one at all.

3 - Always keep in mind the name of the anti-virus software package that is actually running on your computer. If you ever receive any kind of notification from a virus scanner going by any other name, you’ll know right away that you’re dealing with a scammer!

4 - Make sure you have a set of “Restore DVD’s” for your computer. Most new computers don’t come with them included in the box any longer, so it’s up to you to make a set of your own using the utility provided by the manufacturer. Just follow the instructions  provided. These fake anti-virus programs typically render your Windows “Restore Points” useless, so depending on the System Restore utility to save the day is no longer a valid option in case of an infection. In all likelihood you’ll need to do a clean install of Windows in order to get your computer running properly again, and you won’t be able to do that without a set of Restore DVD’s.

These fake anti-virus programs come with various names, but the two big ones are “Win 7 Antivirus 2012″ and “Vista Antivirus 2012″. They are extremely hard to recover from, so the best policy is to try your best to avoid them in the first place. Whenever you see a link on Facebook, be extremely careful about clicking on it. If there is any doubt whatsoever about the integrity of the website the link will take you to, DON’T CLICK ON IT!

Modern technology has pushed what used to be one of the most frequently used items in any home - the telephone book  -  to the brink of extinction (well, at least to the brink of irrelevance.

Although most kids born in the last 10 years don’t realize it, much of our daily lives used to revolve around that raggedy old book with all the names and numbers in the front and those weird-looking “yellow pages” over in the back. If we needed to find an old friend’s phone number or “search” for a local plumber, we pulled out “the book” and let our fingers do the walking. And trust me, if they had a telephone, and back then some people didn’t, you were virtually guaranteed to find them listed.

But my, how things have changed. These days if you’re one of the few who still use the phone book, good luck finding someone’s name and number listed in it. Years of being interrupted by telemarketers at dinner time and the ever-present prank calls by the kids down the road led most folks to request unlisted numbers soon after those “features” became available. Of course all of those unlisted numbers made the printed phone book pretty much useless for its primary purpose, so fewer and fewer people kept using it. Today, most folks just keep one around to look up a business in the yellow pages on occasion.

But now even the yellow pages are becoming more irrelevant as each day passes by. Need to find a dentist in Macon, Georgia? Simply do a Google search for “Macon, Ga Dentists” (substitute your own town or city) and you’ll immediately be presented with a long list from which to choose, complete with phone numbers, addresses and even maps to their locations!

Want to find the phone number for a friend who lives in another state? Well, you can if their number is “listed”. Simply visit one of the many popular “Whitepages” websites, type in your friend’s name along with the city and state in which he/she lives, and you’re in business. Several “matches” might come up if your friend has a common name, but all you have to do is call everyone on the list until your friend answers the phone (you do have free long distance on your cell phone, right?).

Back when I was growing up it was a big deal when the new phone book showed up in the mail each year. Some folks would spend hours leafing through it just to find out which of their friends and neighbors had gotten a phone (remember, not every household had one back then) and to see if there were any new business listings in the yellow pages. Those days are now gone. Homes with land-line telephones are becoming fewer every day, and cell phone numbers aren’t listed in “the book” at all. And with fewer businesses all the time paying for an expensive ad in the increasingly irrelevant yellow pages, the reasons for keeping a phone book on the shelf at all have pretty much evaporated.

What got me thinking about all this was the shiny red phone book that arrived in the mail the other day. We haven’t had a land-line telephone for years so we haven’t been receiving phone books, but for some reason we got one the other day. I guess the phone company just wanted us to have one for old time’s sake. Thanks CenturyLink!!

I recently took the plunge and upgraded my PC from Windows XP to Windows 7, and over all I think it’s one of the best moves I’ve ever made. But there is one glaring annoyance that has me completely baffled. Why on earth did Microsoft decide to remove the Forward, Back and Pause buttons from the Windows 7 Slideshow app? Moving to the next photo in the slideshow is easy: Simply click on the picture or wait for the next image to cycle onto the screen. But to return to the previous photo or pause the slideshow altogether requires the user to right click on the photo, then click either Back or Pause.

The guys and gals up in Redmond are well known for making arbitrary and often senseless changes when “upgrading” their products, but this change takes the cake. What were they thinking?

Well, it was certainly a long time coming, but a decent “crop” of USB 3.0 capable devices are finally sitting on the shelves of technology stores such as Best Buy and hhgregg. Virtually all of the USB 3.0 gadgets that I have seen thus far have been hard drives, which makes sense because mass storage devices naturally benefit the most from USB 3.0′s lightning-fast speed. While I have yet to see even one PC for sale that came from the factory equipped with USB 3.0 ports, I expect that to change rather quickly now that the “dam” for the devices themselves has finally broken.

The devices to show up next supporting USB 3.0 are likely to be Cable and DSL modems, routers, switches, USB WiFi adapters, large capacity thumb drives and other devices that transfer and/or store lots of data. I took a walk through Office Depot this morning and noticed that ALL of their PCs had been deeply discounted, which leads me to believe that they are making room for the next generation of PC’s, all sporting USB 3.0 ports. Well, one can hope.

Note: This post details the procedure that I used to migrate my email accounts, settings and data from Outlook Express running under Windows XP to Thunderbird running under Windows 7. It should work for you as well, but if it doesn’t such is life. Use this procedure on your own PC at your own risk…

As I mentioned in this post yesterday evening, I finally got around to upgrading one of my PC’s from Windows XP to Windows 7. Since I knew before I began the upgrade that I would need to install Mozilla Thunderbird because Win 7 doesn’t come with an email client, I did a bit of research to try to determine the simplest upgrade path from Outlook Express to Thunderbird. Well, much to my surprise I discovered that Thunderbird can import all settings, emails, etc. directly from an existing installation of OE, but not from a file. This presented a problem because in order to upgrade from XP to Win 7 I would have to format the hard drive – which of course would wipe out the existing installation of OE. What to do???

Well, I thought the process through, and after a bit more research I developed a plan of action. This is what I did to transfer everything from OE under Windows XP to Thunderbird under Windows 7 (It’s a 2-step process but that’s just the way it goes):

1 – I downloaded and installed the latest version on Thunderbird from the Mozilla website.

2 – I then started up Thunderbird and clicked Tools > Import. On the next screen I selected Import Everything and clicked Next. After the import was complete I had everything working in Thunderbird pretty much as it worked in OE including all stored emails, all email account settings, address book entries, etc.

Next came the tricky part. Inexplicably, Thunderbird doesn’t offer an Export function that would make it quick and easy to save all the data mentioned above to a file that could be imported back into the new Thunderbird installation on the new Windows 7 platform. Who knows why such a critical feature was left out of the package, but it was. But I figured out a way to “export” the data manually. Here is how I did it:

After a bit more research I discovered that Thunderbird stores EVERYTHING in a singe file named xxxxxxxxx.default (the x’s are placeholders – the actual filename will vary from system to system). It was easy to find this file on the hard drive by using this process:

1 – In Thunderbird, click on Tools > Account Settings. At this point you will see a “Local Directory” path displayed in the right-hand pane. This path tell you where the xxxxxxxxx.default file is located on the hard drive.

2 – In Windows Explorer, navigate to the file by following the “Local Directory” path you found in the step above. Once you find it, right click on the xxxxxxxxx.default file and copy it either to a thumb drive or an external hard drive. In fact, to be safe you might want to copy it to both! You’ll NEED this file in order to restore your settings, emails, etc. after upgrading to Windows 7, and after the Win 7 installation program formats the hard drive you will have zero chance of recovering the file at that point.

After you have verified that you have a copy of xxxxxxxxx.default sitting on a thumb drive and/or external hard drive, you can then begin the Windows 7 upgrade process. Just insert the Win 7 upgrade disc into the drive and let the installer do its thing. After Windows 7 is installed and working, install an anti-virus program before you do anything else (this should always be the first thing you do after installing Windows). Then, download and install Thunderbird. Once Thunderbird is installed, follow this procedure to “import” the data saved from the Windows XP installation of Thunderbird:

1 – Load Thunderbird and enter the server information for one of your email accounts. If you have more than one email account it doesn’t matter which one you choose. This is just a temporary entry anyway. This will create a brand new xxxxxxxxx.default file for the new Thunderbird installation.

2 – Click Tools > Account Settings and look at the path listed under “Local Directory”. Somewhere in the path you will see the name of the xxxxxxxxx.default file you just created by entering an email address. Write down this EXACT filename. Now open up your thumb drive or external hard drive and rename the old xxxxxxxxx.default file to the EXACT name you just wrote down. The file MUST be renamed before moving on to step 3.

3 – Navigate to both of the following folders and copy the xxxxxxxxx.default from the thumb drive or external hard drive to BOTH of these folders (in other words replace the existing file with the one on the external drive):

c:UsersusernameAppDataRoamingThunderbirdProfiles
c:UsersusernameAppDataLocalThunderbirdProfiles

Note: username is a placeholder in the paths above. The actual username you will use in your path is the username you selected when you set up your user account during the Win 7 installation process.

After replacing the existing xxxxxxxxx.default file with the one from your thumb drive or external hard drive, restart your PC. After it boots back up, start up Thunderbird. If all went as expected you should see all of your old emails, account settings, address book entries, etc. in Thunderbird, ready for your immediate use.

Note: Again, this post details the procedure that I used migrate my email accounts, settings and data from Outlook Express running under Windows XP to Thunderbird running under Windows 7. It should work for you as well, but if it doesn’t such is life. Use this procedure on your own PC at your own risk…

Well, I’ve been running my trusty HP Pavilion a630n desktop PC for ages now, and Windows XP started acting up several weeks ago. Since an extensive diagnostic routine resulted in a clean bill of health for the hardware, I decided to make a fresh backup and re-install Windows from scratch. But before I got around to doing the re-install I happened upon a killer deal on a legal copy of Windows 7 Home Premium. I debated with myself about the logic of installing Win 7 on such an old PC, but figured what the heck so I bought it and took it home with me.

I got up bright and early and verified my backup, then inserted the Windows 7 installation DVD into the drive. Up popped the installer routine, and since there is no direct upgrade path from Win XP to 7 I clicked on “Custom Install” which began formatting the hard drive and installing the new OS.

In typical Microsoft fashion, the machine restarted a number of times during the install, but all went well and when the process was finished it booted right up into Windows without a hitch. Well, actually there was one little hitch: There were no sounds coming from the speakers.

After verifying that the speakers were in fact stll connected to the sound jacks correctly, I loaded the Device Manager and took a look. Sure enough, the Realtek audio circuitry was diabled. The reason given was that there weren’t enough available resources for the audio hardware to initialize. Of course I was skeptical because all of the hardware had worked just fine for years under Windows XP. I suspected that the old audio driver was incompatible with Windows 7. I paid a quick visit to the Realtek website where I downloaded the latest driver, and after installing it on the machine and rebooting the sound worked like a charm.

I had known all along that a couple of my older software packages would’t run under Win 7, but I was disappointed to discover that Photoshop Elements 4 would’t run after the upgrade either. But that’s ok. It IS version 4 after all and the current version is all the way up to 9! It’s time to upgrade my photo editing software too I suppose.

Oh, I should also mention that Windows 7 also comes without the Outlook Express email client which meant that I had to download and install Mozilla Thunderbird (which works great by the way).

All things considered, the upgrade from XP was extremely beneficial. The system is now rock solid, and the speed increase was dramatic. The XP installation required a full two and a half minutes to boot up into a usable state. The same PC under Windows 7 boots up in about 65 seconds. The machine also runs a lot faster in general, including surfing the Internet.

In a nutshell, the upgrade breathed new life into an old PC, and maybe I can squeeze another year or two of productive use out of it? I guess time will tell.

I love my new Samsung Moment smart phone, but there is one little annoyance with it that has been driving me crazy. When using the slideout keyboard, the backlighting on the keyboard goes out after about two seconds, which makes typing blog posts and text messages in low light quite aggravating.

After struggling with this problem for several weeks, I finally went to Google to see if there is a way to increase the length of the timeout setting. Well, there isn’t. But I did learn that there is a neat little app that keeps the keys lit up the entire time that the keyboard is extended. Simply open the “Market” and search for “Lit Keys”.

Lit Keys does exactly what the name inplies, and it does it extremely well. If you’re as frustrated as I was with the ridiculously short backlight timeout, download and install Lit Keys. Trust me, you’ll be thrilled with how well it works.

A while back I wrote about the wonderful Internet radio service Pandora, and after all this time I still love it. Even better, I’m now able to listen to my favorite Pandora radio stations on my Android based smart phone. I simply visited the “Market”, searched for “Pandora”, and boom, there was an excellent app just waiting for me to download and install it.

If your smart phone happens to be based on a different operating system, don’t despair because Pandora has created apps for virtually all of them. Simply visit the app store that serves your phone and you’re sure to find a Pandora app for your phone as well.

A few days ago I purchased a Samsung Moment smart phone to use to post to my WordPress blogs while away from my PC, and I love it. But early on I discovered that the WordPress “Add Post” screen was a nightmare to use on a small screen. Just when I had become almost frustrated enough to return the phone, I discovered a wonderful app called “WordPress for Android”. And let me tell you, it’s absolutely amazing!

In a nutshell, WordPress for Android reformats the WordPress “Add Post” page for display on mobile phone screens, and it does it to perfection. The fields for the title and post text are sized perfectly for the small screen, and several of the most useful posting and formating options are readily available as well.

I simply can’t recommend WordPress for Android strongly enough. If you use an Android based smart phone to post to a WordPress blog, visit the “Market” on your phone’s home screen and search for this wonderful app. Trust me, it’ll be one of the best moves you’ll ever make.

When it came time to replace my aging LG Rumor I decided to move up to a “smart phone” with a larger screen which would allow me to post to my WordPress blog while away from my PC. After doing a bit of shopping around I decided to give the Samsung Moment a try.

The Moment comes with a large 3″, high contrast LCD display, a very nice slide-out keyboard and support for both Sprint 3G and WI-FI Internet connections. A 2GB micro-SD flash memory card came pre-installed as well.

The Moment’s Google Android operating system took a bit of getting used to, but by and large the learning curve was short and painless thanks to the great series of icons and menus it offers. In no time at all I was surfing the web, texting and talking to my heart’s content.

The one problem I did run into was a big one however. Since my primary reason for buying the Moment was for posting on my WordPress blogs, I was quite disappointed to discover that the post creation page was almost impossible to use efficiently on even the larger 3″ screen due to the layout of the page. But a quick Google search led me to a wonderful free app entitled WordPress for Android. I downloaded and installed it, and let me tell you it is fantastic (I’ll be posting about the app later).

So far I’m delighted with my shiny new Samsung Moment, and after I’ve used it for a while I’ll post a follow-up review.