Citronix Tech Services – Houston Computer Repair

I keep half of my computer repair tools on a USB Flash Drive (the other half I keep on bootable CDs). I found myself often losing the flash drives or otherwise destroying them in my pockets. I came up with a great way to make a cheap (or free!) holder for these keys out of things you should have around the house anyways. You could even use it to hold other USB dongles you frequently work with, such as a USB bluetooth or wifi dongle.

Materials:

• Any USB cable with a female end on it. I just cut mine off the USB extender cable that came with my flash drive. Most flash drives come with these extender cables, so being a packrat, I naturally had dozens of them.
• Eyelet. I’m not even sure if this is the right term for this little screw. I got mine from a half-used picture frame hanging kit. You should be able to find them otherwise at any craft or hardware store.
• (Optional) Any strong glue like super glue or epoxy

Click the link below to catch the rest of the instructions after the fold!

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When one talks about antivirus definition updates, one usually speaks in terms of Manual and Automatic updates. A manual update is performed by going to the antivirus vendor’s website, downloading the definitions, and then either installing them by running a program or just placing them in your antivirus software’s definition directory. Antivirus software that automatically updates would download new definitions automatically on a set schedule, once a day or once a week, for example. Most antivirus software is pretty straightforward when it comes to Automatic updating. They will almost always come preconfigured for automatic updates, so they are mostly “set and forget” sort of solutions.

This is no way to make money, however. Due to the nature of ever-evolving virus threats, virus definitions are outdated within days of their release, necessitating some sort of a constantly updating definition system. The major antivirus companies have turned antivirus protection from a software to a service. They do this by selling you “subscriptions” or “licenses” to use the software. This means that when your subscription is finished, you will stop getting updates. That is why it is so important to stay on top of your subscriptions and make sure they don’t run out.

As sort of a follow-up to last week’s post, I went around and compiled links to all the antivirus products I could find. From this comprehensive set of links, you should be able to find the updates to the program you run on your computer. Some of the products can only be updated from within the program itself, meaning that you can’t download the definitions manually. I’ve made a note of those that are only updated manually.

If I missed on that you would like me to find the update link for, then please let me know.

Anti Virus Updates

You don’t know how sad it makes me to see things like this (click to enlarge):

This client’s copy of Norton Internet Security expired over a year ago, meaning that for a whole year it has been running with old virus definitions. Why are virus definitions important? Well, image that a virus definition is like a word definition in that it helps you identify the word/virus and what it does. Now imagine that you’re a foreign student traveling in America with a travel dictionary (our virus definitions) from the year 1654. Those word definitions (virus definitions) are terribly out of date, so there’s no chance that you’re going to be able to pick up new words (new viruses) like rollerblade and crunk. Granted, words like rollerblade and crunk may only hurt our feelings, but an undetected virus can do so much more damage!

Many modern PC makers will bundle trial versions of anti-virus products with a computer that will only last 90 days before expiring. This can be even worse than having no anti-virus at all because you might think that you are protected when you actually aren’t.

Please take a few minutes today to make sure that your anti-virus software is updated and running correctly.

I recently had a customer drop off a laptop that was having very odd issues on the screen. There were all sorts of artifacts scrolling up and down the screen, with an odd checkerboard pattern that changed randomly based on mouse movements or even touching the computer. Sometimes video corruption like this can be a driver issue that is usually resolved by getting the latest drivers for the video card. In this case, however, the corruption persisted even in the bios menu and a boot cd. This meant the issue was in the hardware and not software. Now, hardware video corruption issues are sometimes memory corruption or loose cables. If the cable that connects the laptop’s LCD to the motherboard becomes loose, but not completely disconnected, you can get random corruption on the screen.

I figured it was a cable problem and while I prepared to take the laptop apart I ran my Citronix Remote client from the laptop to diagnose the issues from my desktop when something odd happened. The video corruption persisted even in the VNC connection! Ever stranger was that the mouse cursor was unaffected by the corruption and that certain windows and pop ups would also come in clear.

This meant that it wasn’t a cable issue, but the corruption was occurring in the laptop’s video memory itself. Since the corruption was in memory, when the VNC server sent the contents of the video memory to my lab station, it also copied the artifacts. I turned it off and replaced the ram, but the corruption was still there. This was bad news for my client, as that meant that the laptop had dedicated video ram that is soldered to the laptop’s motherboard. I looked up the laptop model and sure enough, that model had separate dedicated video ram. This type of memory is not serviceable and required a motherboard replacement to fix the problem.

Update: I opened the laptop up to check for physical damage to the memory chip such as a faulty solder joint or the chip being physically compromised in some way. I found no such external damage, but I got a pretty good macro photo out of it