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!

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.

If you want more information, here it is.

We won a bid to install nine new LCD flat panel TVs in a patient waiting room at a local clinic. I had to pay for the TVs and most of the hardware from my own pocket, which was very expensive – almost enough to buy a two or three year old car (nice and good condition) in cash.

We must have done a great job (I know we did, but the client must think so too) because we were asked to look at another one of their sites to do the same thing for them! Solly and I went over there last Tuesday to check it out and it looks doable. We are just waiting to hear back from a couple of vendors to see if we can get a better deal this time.

Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida said that “his company had confidence in HD DVD as a technology and tried to assure the estimated 1 million people, including some 600,000 people in North America, who already bought HD DVD machines by promising that Toshiba will continue to provide product support for the technology.”

Both HD DVD and Blu-ray deliver super clear high-definition pictures and sound, which are more detailed and vivid than existing standard definition video technology. They are incompatible with each other, and neither plays on older DVD players. But both formats play on high-definition TVs.

There you have it.

For the majority of people, this won’t be a big deal. Sprint, Nextel, and T-Mobile’s networks are already all digital. When I say the majority of us, I mean all but the half-million, according to Ars Technica, people that haven’t upgraded yet.

This speaking of Analog networks got me thinking about the Analog TV cut-off next year and how many sales people are clueless about how it really will work.

February 19, 2009 is the last day that any analog television signal shall be broadcast over the air. Notice how I said “over the air”? That means that if you get your television signals over Cable or Satellite, you DO NOT have to upgrade your TV to be able to get signal. Unless the cable or satellite companies decide to discontinue standard definition programming, you do not have to worry.

Now, for those of us (yes, myself too) that don’t actually have cable or satellite television, we will either need to upgrade our TV to an HDTV or we can get a $40 coupon from the federal government to go towards a converter box that will take the digital signal and down-convert it to the analog signal that a standard TV can handle. I am not sure the actual cost of a converter box, but I think that it will be more than $40.

I had been looking into the PPC-6800, which will be coming out later this spring, but I found one that I like better. It’s the Samsung SCH-i760. I like that it has a regular phone keypad on the face, yet it still has a slide-out full keyboard. Unlike current phones that have a keypad and slide-out keyboard, the i760 runs Windows Mobile 6, which will allow me to run third part applications!

When the keyboard is open, the front keypad looks like it will work as a dedicated number pad.

CPU Clock: 400 MHz
ROM capacity: 128 MB
RAM type: SDRAM
RAM capacity: 64 MB, 54.5MB accessible
Display Color Depth: 16 bit/pixel (65536 scales)
Display Resolution: 320 x 240 (76800 pixel)
Display Diagonal: 2.8 ” (71 millimetres)
Viewable Area: 2.2″ x 1.7″ (56.8 x 42.6 millimetres)
Cellular Networks: CMDA 800MHz, CDMA 1900MHz
Cellular Data Standards: CDMA2000 1x, CDMA2000 1xEV-DO
Expansion Slots: SDIO, microSD, TransFlash
Bluetooth: Bluetooth 2.0
Main Camera: CMOS sensor, 1280×1024 (1.3 megapixel)