Computer Valet: Vallejo’s Mobile Tech

Posted on July 14, 2012 by jeremy

Computer Valet offers mobile, on-call technical services to the Vallejo/Benicia vicinity, including Solano and Napa, and for contract projects anywhere in the Bay Area.  Beyond that, think of CV as your on-call IT department and service bureau, whether you need help with data organization and backup, or computer and network maintenance/upgrades or with an array of  things from image cleanup to audio and video editing and format conversions.  In other words, Computer Valet offers help.

The world of tech can be bewilderingly complex.  Let CV simplify it.

Phone: (707) 774-2284

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Software Doesn’t Have to Cost to Be Good.

Posted on March 7, 2013 by jeremy

It may come as a surprise if you’ve never explored, but there are all kinds of free software programs that will do exactly what commercial programs do, though granted, with a little less polish in some cases. So how do you know which ones work?

Easy.  Here you go.  These are programs we’ve used to install a perfectly functional machine with free software, and the good part is that most of it is open source and well-supported, so it will continue being free even as it upgrades. Continue reading →

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So, you think you have a computer virus. What next?

Posted on February 24, 2013 by jeremy

If you’ve never had a computer virus, adware, spyware or any of the various social network beasties, you’re either very good, very lucky, you don’t get out much or you’re running Linux or a Mac.  If you have had any of the aforementioned nasties, and you tried to remove it yourself, you know how hard and how time-consuming it can be. On a machine with seriously entrenched spyware, it can easily take 6 or 7 hours to peel away the layers of pile-on infections to even reach the backdoor that let them all in.

Luckily, most of this is repetitive runs of removal software that take hours to do a scan, and then you do it again.  Since we hate to bill you for all that time just sitting around, here are some steps you may be able to take to get it out of the way up front.  It’s altogether possible they can fix your machine, as well.   Continue reading →

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CV Supports Open Source Software

Posted on February 23, 2013 by jeremy

For most of its existence, personal and small business computer software has been dominated by proprietary operating systems, Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s MacOS. Corporations with large data and networking needs settled instead on the many variants of Unix, though by now Microsoft has made Windows a major player in that game as well.

This proprietary dominance is wavering, though.  With the maturation of Linux, Linus Torvalds’ open source version of Unix—and even more, the adoption of an Open Source policy, where source code for everything used in Linux must be published and available for adaptation—more and more top-level developers began contributing free applications to the open source initiative.   Continue reading →

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Linux: Open Source, Free & Cooler All the Time

Posted on February 21, 2013 by jeremy

If you follow tech at all, or perhaps even if you don’t, Linux has been getting a lot of notice lately, all of it well-deserved.  It’s a computer operating system—like Windows or OSX, though it’s actually been around longer than either—based on open source (freely available) source code, as are all of its apps, of which there are tens of thousands. Continue reading →

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Cloud Computing Erases Network Boundaries

Posted on February 18, 2013 by jeremy

It’s always a surprise to hear people say they don’t understand cloud-computing.  We use it all the time.  We just don’t usually call it that. When you go on to any webmail system and read your mail, that’s cloud-computing:  They gave you a few gigabytes of storage space to store your mail, and any audio, video, documents, images or whatever it contains.  In other words, they gave you disk space in their cloud to use as your own. Continue reading →

Posted in Cloud Computing, Net and Internet, Open Source | Leave a comment

The Internet Demands Multimedia Content

Posted on February 18, 2013 by jeremy

Computer Valet has been producing and recording audio for web-based multimedia ever since there was such a thing. By now we have it down pat.  Jeremy McCaleb, CV’s multimedia producer, comes with 30 years of radio experience and decades working with media data in a variety of formats. Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, Multimedia | Leave a comment