You might think the title is an attempt at humor or irony, but in fact, it’s true. Remember back when the Soviet Union came undone? Well, when it did, all those spy shops the Soviets had doing cyber-work in Eastern Europe suddenly had a raft of world-class hackers who went to the highest bidder. In today’s internet-driven world, that was spyware and adware scammers.  The people who write this stuff are experts.

Truthfully, we hate doing anti-virus work these days.  Just HATE it. We’d rather help you not get infected in the first place, because that way you don’t lose your machine and your data.

Here’s the problem: if it’s not one of the ordinary run of the mill infections, or if your machine was infected and open to the world long enough to get noticed by the snoops, it could have one, two or a hundred of the exotic, nasty ones on it.  These are the ones that run the bot-nets, which have enlisted tens of millions of ordinary people’s personal computers into networks for spamming or wholesale corporate theft (as in the case of the Chinese hackers vs Google et. al.)

These botnets protect themselves like military software.  You might find that all of your browser attempts to get to an anti-virus site, any anti-virus site, result in misdirects to phony virus removers, or worse still, to a page that looks EXACTLY like the Norton Security “Renew Your Subscription” page, where you’ll be invited to renew so they can remove the virus, but once you enter your credit card info, it just fails with no message, because it was never Symantec’s site in the first place. These guys got what they wanted already.

So yes, we hate it.  We expect to find twists like files that keep changing their names, or folders that even the admin can’t get into or popups that come so fast by the time you’re getting anywhere that you have no CPU left to even open a browser.  Some of them even break their code into little pieces and hide it in those 10 zillion cryptically-named Windows text files, and build the virus from them in memory, on-the-fly.

In other words, if you want antivirus work done, we can tell you in an hour if your machine is salvageable, or discuss why it’s not, but if we tell you it’s not worth it and you have reasons to try and save it anyway, expect to be billed for every minute it takes (remember the part where we hate it?) regardless of however little or much can be salvaged.  We can usually get all of your data back from the drives for you, but removing an entrenched virus can blow holes in so many of your executable files that you might not find all the damaged programs in a year, until the next time you actually try to use the graphing function in Excel or whatever.  The operating system usually has so many damaged networking files because of the nature of the malware that it has to be reinstalled anyway.

We’d much rather help you make sure you’re protected than to pick up the pieces when you weren’t, but we understand: if you’re running Windows, it’s almost impossible not to get infected at some point or another.  Even pros have those moments where, just a nanosecond after automatically clicking on one of those truly annoying little “Are you sure?” messages, the realization hits that this one was a bit different; and then the screen flashes and you think “Oh, [whatever epithet you use]!!!”

In a perfect world, your next action would be to turn the machine off, with the switch, then scan it with a rescue disk, or at least restart it in Safe Mode and scan it. In real life, we usually think “It was probably nothing” and just get on with it.

If you think you’re infected by a virus, adware or spyware, there are things you can do yourself to check, or possibly to fix it.  We cover some of those in:

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

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.  Here is a list of resources we’ve used at various times.

Scanning

Many anti-malware companies have online scanners that you can use if you can still get online.  With spyware, adware and botware, this should be a given, since they need you to be online to do their business, but that doesn’t mean they are going to just stand back and let you remove them.  Some of them have built-in lists of all of the security companies’ URLs, so if you try to go to the Symantec or McAfee site, for instance, your browser will refuse to load them, or even crash.   Assuming you can get to them, here are links to sites with online scanners starting with the lesser known ones, which are less likely to be blocked.

• HouseCall Free Online Virus Scan - Trend Micro USA
• F-Secure – Free Online Scanner
• Kaspersky Lab – Free Virus Scan
• Panda Activescan – Online Antivirus
• Norton Security Scan – Free Virus Scan
• McAfee Security Scan – Free Virus Scan

They all require Windows to run, but then, if you’re not running Windows you probably don’t need it.

Browser Hijacks and Toolbars

Sophisticated malware intercepts all internet traffic and routes it through its own internal server for total control, but the most common adware and spyware system entry points are through browser hijacks or “feature” toolbars, so the first step is to try an uncompromised browser.

Micro$oft Internet Explorer seems to be the most easily compromised, but a simple browser hijack affects whatever the browser you were using, and often only that one, so here are download links for the others:

• Firefox
• Chrome
• Opera

Chrome would be our first recommendation unless you’re already using it, because its internal compartmentalization seems exceptionally good.

Anti-Malware Utilities

Usually, when you see that your anti-virus has been uninstalled, or you find that you can’t access it however you try, your AV software itself has been infected and is often working against you.  Since AV software is one of the first things loaded by the operating system, infecting it gives the malware all of the system privileges it needs, because your “anti-spyware” watchdog says it’s OK.

Usually, the first thing they do is remove all of the tools you need to try to remove them, such as the command prompt, the task manager, the add/remove programs app, and the network manager.  One way to get beyond that is with an external tools disc.

• Ultimate Boot CD - This is a DOS based, bootable CD with some serious tech tools on it, including a distribution called Parted Magic which is a full, mini-Linux which you can use to mount and recover a Windows NTFS partition, like your Windows C: drive.  This will let you recover your data to a flash or USB drive.
• Hiren’s Bootcd 14.0 –  Basically the same as the above, except that it contains both mini-Windows 98 and mini-Windows XP installations, so you can recover your files in the “comfort” of a Windows environment.  Because these distributions are not freeware, you’ll have to find the Hiren’s disk yourself if you want it.  The link just takes you to his site so you can see what’s on it.
• BootDisk.com - Just what it says.  Straight-ahead boot disks for all Microsoft systems, in case yours crashed and you never made a startup disk.
• Ubuntu Linux – One of the easiest ways to recover your data files from a crashed Windows system is to boot to a live CD of Linux, which can read Windows files and folders, even if Windows doesn’t return the favor.    In fact, on any new computer, we instantly install an Ubuntu partition, so when (not if) Windows gets compromised, you can still boot into Linux and do virtually everything you could before, including accessing your files, which Windows will no longer do.
• System Rescue CD - If you know Linux (or any *nix system) this CD is much smaller, and contains a fully functional Linux distro you can use to recover your files, but you do have to understand enough linux to manually mount a drive as a recovery location.

Those are some of the tools we use.  If you have even basic skills on the computer, we can talk you through most of this process on the phone at a reduced service rate.  We’re not in it to break you, just get you up and running again as quickly as possible.  That’s what works best for us, too.

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.

OpenOffice.org –  This was Sun’s answer to the Microsoft Office Suite, with which it is fully compatible (within reason).  It’s free, and runs on Java, so there are versions for PC, Mac and Linux, as long as the computer has the latest version of Java installed.  Open Source purists–who were uncomfortable with the ties when Oracle, a major corporation, acquired Sun–took the open-source code for Open Office and forked it into LibreOffice. So far they are pretty close together, but forks always diverge.  LibreOffice is now the default in Ubuntu Linux.

VirtualBox – Also an open-source legacy from Sun–also now owned by Oracle, but still free and as mind-boggling cool as ever–VirtualBox is a platform for virtual machines. With it, you can create a virtual machine, say a Windows XP machine, that runs in a window on your Linux (or Mac, or Windows 7) machine, and in fact, if you have VirtualBox on all of them, the same Windows XP virtual machine will run in a window on any of these operating systems.  Again:  You can run a virtual WinXP machine, loaded with your complete complement of software, in a window on your Linux box.  Ours all have Windows partitions, which we open once in a blue moon to download all the new security patches.  The virtual XP desktop restores into its window in about 10 seconds.

Irfanview – A free image viewer, organizer, editor with years of support behind it.  It has expanded into a photo/audio/video viewer with an assortment of plugins.  Perfect to use as the viewer when you double-click an image file, and as an image editor to rotate a photo, adjust the color, rescale to create a smaller file for email.  In spite of its editing capabilities, it’s mainly a viewer, organizer and slideshow creator.  For Photoshop-level image editing, use:

GIMP: the GNU Image Manipulation Program - This application continues to grow with every upgrade, and it’s long been a viable Photoshop replacement for Linux, where it was developed.  It’s free, open-source and cross-platform, with various *nix versions as well as Mac and Windows.  It’s not as polished as Photoshop (though that grows as well), but it is constantly having new functionality built-in without a $600 upgrade, and once you’ve learned the differences in the menus and the tools, you can download GIMP onto a new computer, whatever the platform, and be working in minutes, with barely a thought of Photoshop.

VLC – Video LAN Client - It’s not only a media player, it can play and record video streams and also stream your own media out of your computer to any other machine on your network.  Professional grade software, used in media studios to shunt media streams around the network.  For best results, also get the:

K-Lite Codec Pack – This is a free, open-source package with virtually every Windows codec for either audio or video that you are likely to need.  It’s constantly updated with new codecs.  It also includes the Media Player Classic, which froze time with Windows Media Player 6.5, before it decided to be an iTunes clone, but including the new codecs.

Audacity – This software combines so many of our favorite words: excellent, small, free, cross-platform;  it’s a multi-track audio editing program, with complete plugin extensibility, including VST plugins, and is available in versions for Windows, Mac and Linux.  This can be used (and is in small radio stations all over the world) for professional-grade audio editing and filtering, mixes and voice-overs with a small learning curve and big functionality.

mp3directcut – A very small mp3 player/editor, with a really good hook:   it edits and normalizes MP3s without decoding.  Since MP3 is a lossy format (how much you compress the music in the MP3 is determined by how much audio detail you’re OK with losing) you want to avoid extra decode/re-encode steps, which are like photocopies of a photocopy.  This editor edits MP3s without decoding, thus leaving the original quality of the MP3 intact.

1by1 – A tiny directory player that lets you go through a folder of MP3s and either play the folder, quickly audition the tracks or stack and play a playlist.

audiograbber – This is a free ripper to rip CDs into MP3s at whatever level of quality you choose.  It can read the CDDB database to enter MP3 tag information and name the tracks automatically if it recognizes the CD.

DVD Shrink - DVDShrink is software to back up DVD discs.  It will also shrink a Dual-Layer DVD (8.8GB) down to a single layer (4.4GB).  To do this it includes decryption algorithms to remove the copy protection so you can make another copy of your DVD for backup.  It includes no burning function unless you have Nero–with which it interfaces–but you can write the backup to an ISO image on your hard disk and burn it with:

ImgBurn - a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application.  It can both read discs into image files (e.g. ISO, but a variety of formats) and extract disk images onto other media, like a hard disk or flash drive or burn them to CD/DVD etc.

7-zip – Everyone on virtually every computer platform knows what ZIP files are:  compressed archives.  This is a small, free archive manager, which will read and write not only ZIP files, but it will also unpack ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, VHD, WIM, XAR and Z files.

Notepad++ - this is an excellent source-code editor, in fact, an excellent little text editor to replace Windows’ Notepad with something less lame.  Syntax-highlighting, macros, regular expression search-and-replace and plugins so you can add new functionality… this replaced about a dozen other text editors we’ve tried.

Angelwriter - In case you need more than a text editor (like fonts, text colors and other word-processing functions) but don’t need a full-bore system like OpenOffice, this is a small, fast, free Rich Text editor similar enough to MS Word that the learning curve is almost non-existent.

Winamp – What started as a small but very capable MP3 player has over the years morphed into a somewhat bloated iTunes wannabe, but for a free replacement for iTunes it’s not bad, and is unencumbered by iTunes proprietary madness.  If you want iTunes-style music library management without iTunes, Winamp can handle it for you.  Another (better) alternative is:

MediaMonkey – Blows Winamp and iTunes both away.  Even if you don’t know Winamp, you know iTunes unless you missed the 21st Century.  This does everything iTunes does, and does it better and faster.  It will manage an iPod out of the box… and run circles around iTunes doing it.  MediaMonkey calls itself “the music organizer for the serious collector.” That’s an accurate description.  Want a cute MediaMonkey trick?  Try this with iTunes (as an example):  You ripped a CD a year ago but got lazy and didn’t name the tracks.  Now you have a folder called Unknown Artist full of files named Track 1, Track 2 etc.  Point MediaMonkey at it, and it will compare track numbers and lengths online, go find the album that matches, and fill them in for you.

Floola – There is probably no iTunes formatted media player that does not deserve to have all of the cross-platform versions of this program in its root directory.  As long as the iPod has been set up to manage the music library manually, rather than with automatic syncs, and told not to open iTunes automatically when you insert the player, you can place the Windows, Mac and Linux versions of the executable–which is self-contained and needs no installation–on the iPod.  When you plug it in and it mounts as a hard drive, you can open it and run whichever version matches the OS you’re using at the moment.  For less than 80MB of your iPod’s space (the equivalent of 10-20 songs), you can plug it into virtually any computer you sit down at and play your music and add to or reorganize your iPod.

Chrome – Google’s browser.  You can find the others online (Firefox, Opera, Safari), but if you only have one, this would be our current choice.  The Browser Wars are always a back and forth battle, but currently Chrome holds speed, sandbox isolation, and multimedia reliability crowns.  The Linux version was the last to be developed, and as such is the sketchiest, and it’s still our Linux browser of choice.

ZoneAlarm - ZoneAlarm makes a variety of retail packages to offer various levels of security, but for a free, mostly-intuitive firewall that works with minimal (and self-explanatory) intrusion into your work, you can’t really beat the free version of ZoneAlarm.  W7 finally gave Windows a decent firewall, but if you’ve ever tried to configure its intricacies, you know what a non-intuitive firewall looks like.  If you know a bit about firewalls and ports and want more control of the basic firewall functions, another good, free firewall is:

Sygate – This is such a straightforward yet competent firewall that Symantec bought the company, but with the proviso that they would still keep the free firewall available. Small, simple but complete.  This is our choice to use in virtual machines because of its size and system usage.

Avira – There are several good, free antivirus programs out there. This is one we’re using now because its intrusiveness and upsell pitches are less, well, intrusive.  Our other current fave, especially for virtual machines is Panda Cloud AV, which is on the Cloud Computing page.

Malwarebytes – If (when) your computer catches something, this is a go-to app.  Have it on your machine, even if uninstalled, so if you lose connectivity from a virus, you can still scan your machine.  Pro-level stuff here.

PortableApps.com – If you run Windows and you move from machine to machine, this can be an indispensable site.  PortableApps puts together a suite of open source apps (many of the ones above included) which you can load onto a USB drive and plug into any PC, and not only are all of your apps there, but so is all of your data, bookmarks and settings. Now, consider the possibilities with your digitally-enabled phone.

uTorrent -  A tiny, free BitTorrent client.   BitTorrent is a distributed sharing protocol.  It should perhaps go in the cloud computing area, but it’s different in that it makes your computer part of the cloud, along with all others uploading/downloading/sharing a file. It works like this:  Someone creates a torrent file, which is just a small pointer to the file on the uploader’s server.  Someone decides to download it and they are redirected by the torrent pointer to the IP of the sharer where it starts downloading packets of the file.  Once the downloader has any packets, they become available, so you now have two choices of where to download that packet.  So the more people who are sharing and downloading, the faster the download is done, and the more servers it is taken from in the process.  As a fast and reliable file-sharing protocol, it has earned the ire of the RIAA and the MPAA, but its legitimate uses make it indispensable.  For instance, when you download Ubuntu Linux using BitTorrent, there may be 14,000 machines to choose from for each packet, some much closer hop-wise on the net than others, so the speed of your download becomes limited only by the speed of your internet connection and router.

Which brings us to:

Ubuntu Linux – A free, robust, user-friendly distribution of Linux, complete with a useful set of software and repositories for tens of thousands of other free, open-source programs.  But we have a whole section for Linux.

Your computer is a machine.  It has a central processing unit (CPU), the processor, which runs instructions, it has random access memory (RAM), which is where the instructions are run, the workspace, if you will.  It  has a hard drive (and CD and DVD and USB and Flash), which is just fast, quickly searchable permanent storage, though with different degrees of speed and permanence.

The machine itself can run one program, called the BIOS.  It lives on a small chip on the computer board (powered by a watch battery so it doesn’t lose its program) which stores the data needed to tell the machine how to go to your hard disk and find an operating system so it can run instructions that do something besides turn itself on.

Everything on that hard disk is your data.  Some of it is programs which create the documents that we generally call data, but if you just back up those documents, and not your programs and settings and upgrades etc, a virus attack can still leave you with hours or weeks of work to do to recover, even if you saved all of your documents.

By now, disks are so large that to back one up, you ultimately need to have another the same size just for backup.  Which is exactly what you should do.  At first you can back up several smaller drives and your mostly unused large drives onto one 1TB or 2TB drive, but you know how disk space is:  it fills up, however much of it there is.  So sooner or later that other 1TB drive is going to take a 1TB drive for its backup alone.

We can help you recover your data from anything but a disk crash where the disk or control circuit board is damaged, but we’d rather you take an hour of your time so we can show you how to back up your data so that it never comes to that.

Remember:  EVERY hard drive ends its life in one way, with a fatal hard disk crash that can cost you over $1,000 to get back most of your data, or some of your data, or none of your data, depending on how spectacularly your hard disk crashed.

So really, we can’t stress enough:
Back up your data.  Back up your data.  Back up your data.

Since the Operating System (OS) is one of the less understood concepts for personal computer users, let’s look at that before getting to Linux itself.

The Operating System (OS)

A computer is just a machine;  a very complicated, mostly electronic machine.  Turn it on and it does nothing.  The fans whirl, the hard drive spins, the monitor turns on it beeps and then it sits there blinking at you, if that.  In order for it to do anything else, there has to be a brain to run the machine.  On an electronic machine, that brain is electronic:  the Operating System.  It loads everything else we think of as the OS when we load Windows or MacOS or Linux.

In terms of what we see and hear on the computer, the OS describes it all: what pushing a key or moving a mouse does; what it means; what a picture “looks” like; what a sound “sounds” like; how to find its data; what to do with it. And when it’s ready for output, the OS sends a description of the sound and image to the drivers, which tell the audio and video cards how to turn it into sound and video or printed pages.

So far, these services are basically the same whatever OS you are using. In fact, since Windows and Mac machines are all running on Intel architecture now, the core necessities of the operating systems are virtually identical. You can take the right Intel-based computer, and install it with all three operating systems, Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. They all tell the drivers the same thing, even if  they get to that point differently.

Beyond that, the interface you see when you turn on the machine, how it arranges its screen space, menus and the like—what we think of as the OS—is largely irrelevant. Elegant, eye-catching, perhaps even fun, but everything the computer does could be done in a hundred different ways, still calling the same drivers for their output.  And yet, this interface is the most relevant part of the computer to our experience of it.

Everyone knows Windows and Mac, but less so, Linux.  What has become so appealing about it since it’s come of age is:

• it’s free, as are tens of thousands of software applications for it
• you can download it and try it out as a live CD to see what it’s like
• it’s unbelievably easier on your machine’s resources.  You know that slow Windows Vista machine?  It will scream under Linux.
• It doesn’t get viruses easily, a trait it shares with the Mac (also Unix-based)

So having said that, here’s the story of Linux (briefly) and then we’ll get to the good part.

Linux

The name “Linux” comes from the Linux kernel, originally written in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, but that’s jumping in at the middle of the story.

Back in the late 1960s, AT&T’s Bell Laboratories developed a new operating system they called Unix.  Remember, this is over a decade before PCs, Apple, Windows or even DOS. Before the Web even existed, Unix was in use in universities and businesses that needed to keep and manage large amounts of data.  From Wikipedia:

With a legal glitch forcing AT&T to license the operating system’s source code to anyone who asked, Unix quickly grew and became widely adopted by academic institutions and businesses.  In 1984, AT&T divested itself of Bell Labs. Free of the legal glitch requiring free licensing, Bell Labs began selling Unix as a proprietary product.

The GNU Project, started in 1983 by Richard Stallman, had the goal of creating a “complete Unix-compatible software system” composed entirely of free software. Work began in 1984.

The first products of the GNU project were for educational use only.   Torvalds envisioned a free, open source operating system based on the Unix code but without limitations on its use.  In 1991 he began work on what eventually became the Linux kernel.  Once it was done and available for commercial use the free, reliable and open source nature of Linux made it a favorite for web sites and developers, but it took a decade and the development of a solid user interface and update mechanism for it to achieve critical mass.  Over the past 5 years, interface development has been serious, and effective.

The open source code of the operating system means that development can come from an astounding number of sources.  There are specialized versions of Linux for a wide variety of purposes, as well as the general purpose desktop flavor.  These variants are packaged as what are called “distributions”.  Wikipedia has a list of some of the various Linux Distributions. You’ll notice Debian distributions in the list.  These tend toward free software.

The only reason to mention this is if you decide to try Linux.  It helps to have something more specific.  Our current choice, hands down, for most users is Ubuntu Linux, which is Debian-based.  We’ll use that for our look at Linux.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu takes its name from a South African word from the Bantu language whose classic meaning is: ”I am what I am because of who we all are.”  That’s pretty apt for a collaboratively built and maintained operating system.  In fact, it defines the development of the Ubuntu OS.  A great many programmers, from a great many countries, each with their own interests and passions, add their expertise to Ubuntu, one adding a set of video drivers, another a new addition to the Evolution Mail system, while elsewhere a team is working up a new desktop interface.  Most of these developers are doing so because they are users of Linux who want to help improve it, which makes Linux the only user-developed operating system among the three we’ve mentioned.

By definition, Ubuntu is Open Source, meaning that the source code for any software you use is freely available.  A competent programmer can take it, modify it to write in his own functionality, and then use it himself (or even release it if it meets a real need).

At that point, the programming code in those revisions becomes freely available as well, to be used by other programmers in their applications.  This lets good ideas be used instantly by other programmers in their own code.

It also allows for specialized distributions for specific uses:  Ubuntu for education (Edubuntu), or recording studios (Ubuntu Studio) or Home Media Center (MythTV), for example.  The Linux Distribution List linked above gives an idea of the diversity.

This diversity in the designers leaves open the possibility of game-changing improvements coming from the segments  of the user base that are actually using the applications, rather than a corporate headquarters in Redmond or Cupertino.  It also means that a newly discovered security flaw doesn’t go into a year-long wait queue before it’s addressed; someone, usually several people, start work on a fix immediately.  It often becomes a race to be the first to fix it.

For reasons like that, Linux has always been a geek favorite.  It’s largely been a “roll-your-own” operating system, but over the past few years, Ubuntu has finally achieved the stability as a graphical desktop operating system to let it be a valid replacement for Windows (or Mac) and at no cost. Always.

You can take a bare computer, with neither Windows nor Mac on it, and a freely downloadable Ubuntu CD, and in an hour have a working system with most of the software tools you need already installed, and thousands more available in minutes.

(Since Ubuntu is free, hyping it a bit because we like it so much isn’t really a sales pitch; it’s simply information.)

We’ll show you around in : Ubuntu Linux, Fully-Fledged and Ready for Prime Time.

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.

GoogleDocs took it one step further.  There you have actual cloud computing, rather than simply cloud storage.  You can log in to your Gmail account, open GoogleDocs and have a fully functional office suite that runs on their big beefy machines, not yours.  You can create and edit documents on a machine you couldn’t even load MS Office onto.

By now there are online transcoders that do the brute force work of editing and manipulating video, audio and image files, or collaborating on music projects, all running in the cloud.

Virtual networking has come so far it’s possible to open a virtual Windows machine on a server elsewhere, and just use the internet to send the mouse, keyboard and video back and forth so you’re running a desktop that isn’t even on your own machine.

Just to give you an example of what’s available, here are a few cloud-based sites:

• Aviary – This is a particularly good place to start, as Aviary covers a lot of ground.  The site is billed as an “Online Photo Editor” but the tools it includes are deeper than that. Included are image editor, effects editor, screen capture, vector editor, image markup, color editor, audio editor and music creator.
• PhotoShop Express - A cloud-based photo editor from Adobe.  It’s more like PhotoShop Elements, a simplified photo editor, but it lets you edit large online photos in the cloud, rather than downloading them, editing them, and re-uploading them.  This application is new enough it is constantly being improved.
• Panda Cloud AntiVirus – Most of what you are protecting your computer from catching comes to you from the internet, so cloud-based antivirus makes perfect sense:  everything is scanned before it even comes down to your machine; not only does the infected file get scanned by big, online servers so the constant scanning doesn’t eat up your machine’s resources, if  a virus is found, it never makes it onto your machine even for an instant.  Cloud scanning has a much lighter footprint, both in memory and computer resources, so it leaves more of your computer for you.
• WordPress – Blogging is, by nature, done online, so a cloud platform is a given.  Even if you install the software on your own web-server, you’re still using the cloud:  now you’ve just included your machine in it.  WordPress provides not only the software, but also their servers for WordPress blogs, so you don’t need to know how to set up the blog server and the PHP/mySQL  database and all.  Not only do they provide a space for your blog, but by being hooked into the WordPress site, you get cross-linking, tracking and page-rank bumps that you don’t get if you host your blog on your own server.
• Mint - This is a free, cloud-based personal finance manager from Intuit, the makers of Quicken.  It uses the banking download infrastructure that Intuit has developed over decades to connect with virtually any financial institution in the US, so it can keep track of all of your accounts in one place, online, where you can access them from any computer including your net-connected cell phone.  A solid product with over 5 million users.
• Screenr – This program is usefulness only to some users, but what it does is brilliant.  It’s a cloud-based computer-capture recorder designed for creating screencasts, like software tours, training and how-to videos.  Just hook up your microphone and headphones, fire up Screenr on your browser, and it will capture the sound and video from your entire session and save it to their server on the web where it can either be accessed through the Screenr website, or you can grab the embed code and paste it into your blog, web page, or social site.
• On-line File Converter – This is just what it says, an online converter for video, audio, image,  document, ebook, and archive formats.  Just tell it what to convert to, point it at the file, and the conversion is done online.  The cloud-based conversions mean you can convert video formats you might not even be able to load on whatever old, slow machine you might be using at the time.
• DropBox – If you work from more than one location (and these days, who doesn’t) this application is invaluable.  You create a Dropbox folder on your desktop (for example) and load the data files you’re working with at the time (documents, web pages, spreadsheets, whatever) and then when you log in from your work machine or laptop, they are right there in the DropBox folder on that machine as well, or you can access them in your browser from any machine, whether it has DropBox installed or not.  You can even share (or serve web pages) from the Public folder under your Dropbox.  The upsides are obvious.  The only real downside is that you give up 2 gigabytes of drive space on every machine you use it on to keep copies of the same files.  Even this downside has an upside:  it means your most important data files are always backed up on more than one machine, including in the cloud, where you can go back and recover them (even previous versions of a file you’ve changed).
• TeamViewer – This application is a gem.  It’s a cloud-based computer remote control platform.  It takes the desktop of your computer and shares it via an RSA-encrypted IP address switchboard it keeps and distributes through a coded database.  Huh?  OK, like this:  I’m working at my desktop, but my computer at work has programs and files I don’t have here at home.  Since I left my work computer running TeamViewer, I can log into it and take control of the mouse and keyboard to work remotely on the machine there, or transfer files, or run a screencast presentation in view-only mode.  Or I can log in to a client’s machine for remote control tech work.  Yes there are a hundred ways to do this using RDP or SSH tunnels and VNC viewers, but this is an approach anyone can use. Setup is simple, use is simple, and the security looks good.
• GoogleDocs – If you have a gmail account, this is a biggie.  Google Docs is a cloud-based office suite based on the OpenOffice.org suite.  It includes word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing packages which can read, edit and write the equivalent Micro$oft Office application formats.  And since it’s online and cloud-based, your documents are anywhere you can open gmail.

And finally, a few cloud desktops.  Granted, this seems an odd concept at first:  you log in from a computer (which we assume has a desktop and applications on it), and then load an online desktop into a browser. Why bother? Truth be told, cloud desktops are still searching out their place in the online world, but we’ll start with a sort of bridge platform:

• CloudMe – At its heart, this is your own cloud storage, 3 gigs of free online storage.  You can log into the website and use their file manager for storage, or you can link it live to folders on your own machine, like DropBox (above), OR you can hook it up via WebDAV so it creates a link on your desktop to your CloudMe drive so that you can use it just like a USB or flash drive.  In other words, this platform makes it easy to have 3GB that doesn’t go down in a crash, for backups or extra storage, or for files you don’t want on your own machine.  Oh, it also provides you with a desktop onto which you can install apps like music players (to play the MP3s you’re storing there) and widgets (like one for Twitter for instance) so you can have a specialized desktop that is just for online purposes.  Whatever you do with it, it’s worth it for the 3GB of free online storage alone.  Time will tell if it’s good for more than that.
• Glide - Glide OS provides a free suite of rights-based productivity and collaboration applications with 30 GB of storage. It has three tabbed views: Desktop, GlideHD and Portal, which you can set up as you like for a web entry portal.  You can also setup and administer up to six family member accounts including child accounts from the settings panel. The Glide OS provides file and application compatibility across devices and operating systems.
• EyeOS - A quick online desktop that seems to be most useful as a collaborative workspace, though without a whiteboard as yet.  You can set up links to People and Groups which let you simply drop items onto desktop icons to drop them onto the other group members desktops.  These are levels of functionality that users of *nix systems are used to, but this automates the process in a very functional manner.  Again, time will tell if it grows into more usability, but what it is now is a sort of multi-user DropBox with an extensible Desktop.
• Cloudo – They warn you that it’s not ready for prime time, and the site is listed as a beta, but it looks slick.  It’s set up to make group collaboration easy, again with drag and drop sharing with other group members.  One particularly interesting twist we noticed right off:  one of the included features is a full application-development platform, and since Cloudo is all OpenSource, many of the provided apps have on their menu a button that lets you view the source code, which you can then edit and recompile so you can learn more about how application development is done.  If it turns out that your changes (or any apps you develop) are worthwhile, the Cloudo system is based around a revenue-sharing concept that could let you earn some money for your creations.  It’s still in beta, so details of how much storage you get and the like are still being formalized.
• iSpaces – This one is unique.  It’s like a persistent web space where you can open and arrange specific desktop spaces, with all the right browser tabs saved, and all the right web apps open to the pages just where you left them.  You can have one iSpace with all of your social platforms open, and one for your financials, with stock reports and financial sites arranged in place.  Check it and close it.  Open it tomorrow and it’s all still there in place.  Non-Stop Web means when you close your session, the browser and apps you have open stay open.  We still have to play with this feature to see its potential.

Want to learn to use it all?  We can help.

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.

An international award-winning radio producer, I began exploring computer digital audio as soon as the technology would support it.  I’ve been doing computer-based audio since 1986.  Originally it was mostly narration and production for Web-Based Training. My radio experience gives me the relaxed delivery and ability to make adjustments on the fly that are the hallmarks of my narration.

My portfolio leans heavily toward software tutorials, but my years in radio have had me doing voice-overs in divergent styles ranging from advertising to fantasy, from clarity to SFX,  from corporate to casual.

Over the past decade, as audio and video have merged with written content to create richly-layered content on web sites—and new directions in collaborative news and information—I’ve become adept at video work as well.

Computer Valet can help you with whatever multimedia projects you have, from kiosk slide-shows to online training, from video format transcoding to YouTube video.

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

Phone: (720) 352-2113