Jonn Berg

I just thought I would put up a message about a virus I fixed last night. It is called “Clean This” and it is a variant of the “Think Point” virus. It appears to initially infect web servers, thereby infecting users as they visit an infected server. A realistic looking error (often trying to look like a Microsoft message) pops up telling the user that their computer is infected. By clicking any of the buttons, the malware is installed. Once installed, it tries to get you to pay for the “professional upgrade” in order to actually clean the infection. More than likely what really happens is that your credit card is now in the hands of fraudsters and you won’t get your computer back unless you have someone else clean it.

Your best bet is to not click anything and then to reboot your computer. This should make it so the virus does not get installed.

Over the past eighteen months, Tech Rescue has almost averaged at least one “fake antivirus” cleaning per week. One thing I noticed about this particular virus is that it is still active in Safe Mode. I had to take the client’s hard drive out of their laptop and hook it up to different machine. Even after disinfecting it in my machine, I still had to disinfect it again once I reinstalled the hard drive. It was definitely a nastier bug than previous versions.

Please continue to be wary!

Samsung, you are awesome again!

About two months ago my Samsung TV started going on the fritz. We turned it on one Monday morning and after a minute or two, we saw a picture. It wasn’t the picture that was expected, but instead it was a bunch of pink dots everywhere.

I turned off the TV then and went about my day not really thinking about it much until that evening. It turned on again, this time it took a few minutes, but it was the normal screen – no pink dots. It was a little weird, but since it worked, I didn’t think much more about it. The next morning it was all pink dots again, so we turned it off and left it for a week unplugged. I started looking around online and found many mentions of this same problem.

I also heard from an authorized service technician that apparently the 10 volt capacitors are water-soluble due to environmental rules. This causes them to be less-than-desirable (similar to non-lead solder with a PS3 or XBox heat problem) and they can break down much easier than previous models from before the environmental rules.

Well, I had it today and decided that I was going to purchase some new capacitors and remove the old ones and solder the new ones in myself. While looking for the correct model capacitors to get, I ran across someone who was talking about the same thing and noticed a comment that said that Samsung is now offering one free replacement per TV that has those problems.

I called Samsung and sure enough, I have someone coming out to my house on Monday to do the work for me, rather than me having to dig out my solder iron and do it myself.

If anyone else has this problem, the tech that I talked to expressed surprise when told Samsung that I saw pink dots because apparently Samsung doesn’t believe that is related to the capacitors. He suggested that if anyone else calls in to Samsung for a capacitor fix, that they don’t mention the pink dots or lines and only mention that the TV either won’t turn on, turns on after a set time or has fast clicking noises.

MPC, the computer division of Micron is closing its doors. That in itself is not all that interesting except that last year MPC bought what was left of Gateway (Formerly Gateway 2000, way back in the day). One of the original PC stalwarts from my college days is going to be officially dead…

If you want more information, here it is.

I just had a thought. As many of you know, I tend to see patterns in things around me. I read an article about Windows 7 and at one point in the article, it was just called “seven”. That made me think of Vista and I immediately saw it spelled in my head as VIsta… VI of course is 6 in Roman Numerals… Interesting.