In this scenario, novice user Joe has a new computer running Windows 7 Professional. A dialog box appears informing Joe that he must contact an administrator in order to install antivirus software on his computer.

Instead of calling the Helpdesk, Joe decides to use Remote Assistance. Here’s the steps he needs to take:

1. Open Remote Assistance by clicking the Start button . In the search box, type Remote Assistance, and then, in the list of results, click Windows Remote Assistance.
2. Click Invite someone you trust to help you.
3. Click Use e‑mail to send an invitation.
4. Follow the instructions.

Joe will now see a windows which contains a “connection password” and a new email message (in his email client such as Outlook) which is written out with the subject “You have received a Remote Assistance invitation” and a file attached called “Invitation.msrcincident”.

Joe sends the “connection password” and the invitation to the Helpdesk.

The Helpdesk can now remotely connect to Joe’s computer. When the Remote Assistance screen opens showing Joe’s desktop. With Joe’s consent, Helpdesk can now control Joe’s computer to diagnose his problem of not being able to install antivirus software.

• eluxurybagsale.com

I immediately did a whois lookup and gave them a copy of the address on the record, which of course, was an address in China.

There was a high probability that any purchases from that website would result in receiving fake goods or no goods at all, especially since in 2009 the BBC covered how companies in China are selling fake goods into the UK.

You’d hope this would be enough to discourage someone from purchasing from a website without thinking twice…

Fast-forward a few months and we’re here again, only this time the purchase has gone through.

Granted, from a different website this time:

• franklinandmarshallsale.co.uk

But at least it is a uk domain which makes things a little easier to deal with.

Identify it’s a dodgy website

The first thing to do (again) is to do a whois lookup (this time we can go directly to the UK domain registry, Nominet).

Without even visiting the website we can tell it’s obviously a fake as it’s again got an address based in China.

To concrete my suspicions I decided to check it against another couple of sites…

• WebOfTrust - “Counterfeit goods scam from China selling copyright infringing items. Either you get some low quality junk, or they just steal your money. “
• McAfee SiteAdvisor - We’ve tested millions of websites, but we haven’t tested this one yet.
• Norton SafeWeb - This site has not been tested yet.

The general consensus appears to be that it’s either bad or not popular enough to have been tested yet. It doesn’t seem good.

Visiting the website for the first time I’m immediately struck by some oddities:

• “franklinandmarshalls@gmail.com” – their email address appears halfway down is hosted by gmail, rather than via their own domain. Why?
• “www.franklinandmarshallsale.co.uk LTD” – at the bottom, they have put their domain name followed by “LTD”, suggesting they are a “limited company”, which they are not.
• “fake medals and badges” – at the bottom they have a number of badges and medals which are clearly fake. One of them says “click to verify” but then has no link.

Without visiting any other pages, we can tell instantly that something’s not right. Combined with the above information I think it’s pretty safe to say that this site is “dodgy”.

How to avoid dodgy websites

If you have purchased anything from a site like this, my advice is that you report it to your bank or credit card company and cancel the order with the website asap.

Remember, as Martin Lewis always says: any purchases over £100 should be made on a credit card, otherwise you won’t be protected under section 75.

To avoid this in future, my advice is to use the safe browsing tool that proved itself above: WebOfTrust. Download and install their free browser add-on.

Reporting dodgy websites

Aside from the obvious strategy of reporting to your bank or credit card company, there are some other places you can or should report dodgy websites to.

• Nominet
• If it is a UK domain name (eg: example.co.uk) and the address on the whois record is hidden, incorrect or incomplete you can contact them to make them aware of this.
• Unfortunately Nominet don’t offer any advice on “counterfeit goods” but do take scams very seriously.
• Report the host
• The best way to do this is to find where it’s hosted by getting the IP address of the domain name.
• Do a whois lookup on the IP address and find the “abuse contact”. Drop them an email.
• Unfortunately, there’s no easy set method to achieve this, but anyone with technical knowledge should be able to get this information for you.
• Report them to Consumer Direct
• Ask your local Trading Standards office for advice
• Contact ActionFraud
• Only contact ActionFraud if you’ve received goods that were actually passed off as originals.

That’s usually enough to get an investigation started and the website taken down to help prevent others from getting scammed. You should probably not bother the police with cases like this unless you’re instructed to by one of the above.

We’ve come a long way since then, with the commercialisation of the Internet and the introduction of massive scale services such as facebook and twitter there has been an increase in demand for “cloud computing”.

Cloud computing is essentially computing as a service, provided on-demand as you need it across the Internet.

Once you begin to understand the technology that is now available to us, the concept of a paperless office is now a reality.

I’ve recently been asked how much I print in the past month.

I rarely need to print anything for home use, but I used to print quite a bit for business use.

I had a fairly old reliable mono laser printer that I used for everything, from invoices to records of postage to records of bills paid.

The reason I’ve never updated it is because it keeps on going, but from time to time it does have a hiccup, which in any business is not ideal.

I had to do something about it.

A new printer?

I came up with a couple of options to replace the printer, such as buying a new laser or an all-in-one inkjet printer. I couldn’t work out what I would get the most use out of and I don’t have the space for both, nor can I justify the cost of purchasing both.

My biggest issue is the cost of ink: the most expensive liquid on the planet (if you purchase your ink from the manufacturer). Laser toner, although cheaper isn’t an ideal on-going cost either, plus the cost of paper.

I’m not just talking about the financial cost of paper either, I’m talking about environmental. Every mistake made, every bad print, every piece of paper that ends up in the bin is a waste.

I parked the idea for a while until I could make a decision.

Paper office

A little time later a client was explaining to me about their situation in their office. Their office had become over-run with paper and they began to question the need for all of it.

The client concluded that there wasn’t a need, they realised they could email their invoices, save bank transfer statements and store any other documents on their computer. Not only that but they knew that with the help of cloud storage based services such as Dropbox, all their documents would be backed up online too, so no need for a paper copy.

I didn’t need to even prompt them, they had come to this conclusion themselves. Their only issue was that they still had and received paper that they needed to digitalise to completely rid their office of paper.

They needed a scanner, I needed a scanner.

Going paperless

At this point I’d decided that it wasn’t a new printer that I needed, what I needed was to print less (if at all) and scan more.

In my humble opinion, there’s very little excuse for printing.

• Need to print and send an invoice? Save and email it.
• Can’t save, but can print? Install CutePDF and print it to your computer as a PDF file.
• Need a permanent copy in case of system failure? Cloud storage (such as Dropbox or Google Docs).
• Need to take it out of the office? The cloud again, a memory stick or send it to your destination.
• Need to reference to it on the go? Put it on your phone, tablet or laptop.

Once you change the way you think about printing and paper you begin to realise that you don’t need to print anything really.

There are (of course) always exceptions. A recent one was I had to go to an event which required me to print their tickets.

But then surely as long as the gate operator can scan a bar code, it doesn’t matter whether it’s on paper or perhaps your mobile phone. Perhaps this can be tried and tested.

Either way, it’s hard to justify the cost of a new printer for edge cases like this.

A scanner however is essential not in a paperless office, but in a paper world. How do we expect to go paperless if you’re still handling paper from third parties?

Buying a scanner

I had a scanner years ago, it was an old LPT flatbed scanner, when that finally gave up the ghost for the odd time I used it, I opted for a USB flatbed scanner. In my experience they were terribly cumbersome to use.

It wasn’t just the scanner either, it was the awful software.

I was really reluctant with the “scanner” solution to the paperless office, since that is accepting that the paper exists in the first place to scan, but after reading numerous articles about the so called “paperless office”, I agreed that it was the only logical way.

The downside to this was that the I was reading articles that were written last year and some even older. Technology and scanners had moved on even in that short time.

Finding a “good scanner” to go paperless is a challenge in itself.

I went ahead and took a look at the scanner reviews on the PC Pro magazine website.

The most recent review was for the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1100, which I was pretty much sold on as soon as I read that it could “scan directly to the cloud” combined with the 5 out of 6 stars and compared to the Plustek MobileOffice S400 the ScanSnap was the obvious choice.

I cross referenced the review with some of the comments on Amazon for the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1100 before making the decision.

However, it wasn’t until I watched their introduction video that I was truly sold on the device…

Introducing the ScanSnap S1100

After watching the video I promptly ordered the ScanSnap S1100 from dabs and patiently waiting for it’s arrival.

For £160 it arrived in a box that was smaller than I had imagined, but still so long as it lived up to the exceptions in the video I was happy. It did!

The future is here

This scanner is brilliant, I take it everywhere with me along side by netbook it’s brilliant for scanning documents anywhere and it’s really easy to manage them in the organiser.

There’s a few neat ways you can use the organiser to ensure your documents are safely stored in the cloud, the primary choice is probably Google Docs, all you need for that is an account with Google and away you go.

Personally, not only do I use Google Docs but I also set my “My ScanSnap” folder to be in my “Dropbox” directory so that everything in there is stored with Dropbox too.

A third option is to use Evernote which I remember looking promising when I signed up to their beta, but having used it a couple of times I was fairly disappointed with it’s interface and have never really used it since.

However, one of the cool things about Evernote is that it is cross platform compatible, so although you can scan your documents on your PC, if you have Evernote installed of your mobile, you can access them there too.

Do a little and do it often

If you’ve managed to get this far, there’s not much else to say really, apart from share some wise words that apply to any paperwork and record keeping processing:

“Do a little and do it often”

Don’t try and tackle a huge mountain of paper in one go as you’ll burn out before the motors in the scanner does. Instead, be sensible about it.

I went ahead and only started scanning new stuff as it came in, while sometimes I would scan other stuff as I needed it. But if you need to backdate, try and do a reasonable date range at a time.

That’s not all though, Microsoft has some tips to help you achieve a paperless office.

Now what?

You’re on your own for now.

All that remains is to get others to “buy in” to the concept which in turn will reduce the amount of paper you receive.

Just remember to ask: Can you scan this? Do you need to print that?

Good luck!

Anyway.

Who remembers that issue when you open “Add/Remove Programs” from an oddly positioned control panel only to be greeted by an odd jumble of strings:

“Change or Remove ProgramsAdd New ProgramsAdd/Remove Windows ComponentsSet Program Access and Defaults”

This message is followed by a blank change or remove programs window.

Do you remember it now?

The question is, how do you fix it? Here’s what I came across:

• Add/Remove Programs Tool Does Not Open (Tried)
• Add\Remove Programs Tool May Not Work After Installing Internet Explorer 5.5 or Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 2000 (Tried)
• Add/Remove Programs dialog box does not appear or is corrupted (Tried)
• A new window opened in Internet Explorer displays a blank white page (Tried)

None of this worked for me, but it did indicate that the problem was related to Internet Explorer. Since the Windows Update page wouldn’t load in Internet Explorer either, this was enough to convince me there was a problem there.

I tried reinstalling it using the “C:\WINNT\inf\ie.inf” file, but this didn’t work.

I downloaded ie6setup.exe (IE6 SP1 installer) and ran it normally.

My tip though before you do this… Install Avast! antivirus and do a boot-time scan to ensure the computer has nothing bad on it that will prevent this from going through.

I followed the Internet Explorer 6 setup wizard and rebooted.

Everything now works as expected!

The unfortunate downside to this is that certain legacy plugins they are using for FileMaker only support Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007 and not the latest Office 2010.

This means that any new systems need to purchase legacy versions of Microsoft Office, which seems to be almost impossible apart from purchasing old stock.

I managed to find that a reputable retailer (eBuyer) had some suitable licenses in stock:

• Microsoft Office Small Business 2007 – W/ MS Office Professional 2007 (Trial) – licence – 1 PC – OEM, MLK – Win

As you can see, this is for Microsoft Office Small Business 2007, this include Outlook (unlike the Home and Student version) and Publisher (Unlike the Standard version or below). This license is suitable for their needs.

One major downside to this is that “MLK” means “Medialess License Kit”, which means they do not supply a CD or DVD with this purchase, just the license key.

Perfect, well almost:

Where the heck do you get the media from?

I don’t have a copy of Microsoft Office Small Business 2007.

Nobody I know has a copy of Microsoft Office Small Business 2007.

Even the largest bit torrent website on the planet doesn’t have Microsoft Office Small Business 2007.

You can’t purchase a CD or DVD if you tried, they simply aren’t on sale.

With a little searching I managed to find official Microsoft Office 2007 Direct Download Links:

• Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007
• http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msoffice/pub/X12-30307/X12-30307.exe
• Microsoft Office Professional 2007
• http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msoffice/pub/X12-30196/X12-30196.exe
• Microsoft Office Small Business 2007
• http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msoffice/pub/X12-30283/X12-30283.exe
• Microsoft Office Standard 2007
• http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msoffice/pub/X12-30263/X12-30263.exe
• Microsoft Office Home & Student 2007
• http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msoffice/pub/X12-30107/X12-30107.exe

Above you’ll find the original direct download links via Microsoft’s content delivery partner Digital River and in case Microsoft decide to remove them, mirrors are provided via the MultiUpload.com site.

Sorry, there’s no License Key here, just downloads, please don’t ask me for a license key as they aren’t available to me.

I checked other computers on the network and they didn’t report this and were able to print to that printer without error.

I checked with Microsoft’s knowledge base to see if this was a common problem. There was a possible solution, which involved changing the value of the “PrinterOnLine” registry key from 0 to 1, but that value was already set. No fix.

I tried reinstalling drivers from scratch. No fix.

I investigated further…

I approached the printer which stated on the display: “Maintenance Required Code: DC”. This meant nothing to me, but a quick Google proposed that a replacement drum was in order. Finally some answers.

This didn’t however explain to me why some computers were able to print while others would not.

I discovered that the issue was that the printer was using the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to signal to the printer driver that the printer is offline, presumably because of the required maintenance.

As it turns out, this is down to a poor user experience meaning that you never see a real error on the computer and you’re left second guessing why it may not be printing.

The real problem is that the drum needs replacing (as per the code on the display).

The work around is to disable SNMP printing, as follows:

Go into the print driver and to the “ports” tab. Highlight the port you are printing to. Click “configure port”. Go to the bottom and un-check “SNMP printing”.

This will allow you to continue printing regardless of the error on the display, however you should always take action if the machine reports that maintenance is required.

Are your passwords secure?

In cases where security has been breached and your password has been extracted from a database, the answer is no, your password is not secure any more.

Since the attacks, a number of sites have popped up, which help people to find out whether their password has been breached or not. This should help you make an informed decision as to whether you need to change your passwords or not.

• Did I get Gawkered?
• Should I change my password?
• Has Lulzsec leaked your personal details?
• Find Out if Your Passwords Were Leaked by LulzSec

Security breaches aside, to answer the question, you need a way to measure security.

Take the password strength grower Naked Password (Safe for Work), it has a tiny pixelated woman, which tastefully removes her clothing as type your password. This works by providing a point for each level of security, there are 5 levels:

1. if password bigger than 5 give 1 point
2. if password has both lower and uppercase characters give 1 point
3. if password has at least one number and at least 1 other character give 1 point
4. if password has a combination of other characters and special characters give 1 point
5. if password bigger than 12 give another 1 point

Each “point” means that Sally removes another piece of clothing.

Meanwhile Microsoft takes a similar, approach with 6 levels to creating a strong password:

1. Start with a sentence or two (about 10 words total).
   • Think of something meaningful to you.
   • eg: Long and complex passwords are safest.
2. Turn your sentences into a row of letters.
   1. Use the first letter of each word.
   2. eg: lacpasikms (10 characters)
3. Add complexity.
   • Make only the letters in the first half of the alphabet uppercase.
   • eg:lACpAsIKMs (10 characters)
4. Add length with numbers.
   • Put two numbers that are meaningful to you between the two sentences.
   • eg:lACpAs56IKMs (12 characters)
5. Add length with punctuation.
   • Put a punctuation mark at the beginning.
   • eg:?lACpAs56IKMs (13 characters)
6. Add length with symbols.
   • Put a symbol at the end.
   • eg:?lACpAs56IKMs” (14 characters)

You can even check your password with Microsoft to see if your password is strong enough for them.

The document did not load and instead there was just a grey page.

However, when they tried again they would receive this error:

There is a problem with Adobe Acrobat/Reader. If it is running, please exit and try again. (103:103)

The solution is as follows:

• Spring clean
  • Use CCleaner to remove temporary and unused files (advanced users only)
  • Use autoruns to turn off any programs that you don’t want to start up (advanced users only)
  • Use PC decrapifier which allows you to easily remove software you know you don’t need or want
  • Run Disk Cleanup
  • Run Disk Defragmentation
  • Removing and storing all your fonts using Font Frenzy will speed up your computer
• Get protected
  • Download, install and run Malwarebyte’s Anti-Malware to remove anything bad already in your system
  • Install Microsoft Security Essentials, it’s the only anti-virus you’ll ever need and best of all, it’s free!
  • Run Windows Update to update outdated Microsoft Windows software
  • Download and run Secunia PSI, which will check your software for security issues
  • Google Chrome is quicker and more secure than Internet Explorer
• More memory
  • Buy online by using the Crucial System Scanner to find the memory you need and give you the options
• Also consider
  • Free up space for your system files and program files by moving everything else to an external hard disk
  • Try following Microsoft’s 6 ways to speed up your PC
  • Try using Soluto to improved boot time and fix system slow downs
  • If you’re still using Windows XP, it’s time to consider buying a new computer

Got a way to speed up your computer? Leave a comment below!

What about Outlook Express? Outlook Express is as old as Internet Explorer 6 and has been included in Internet Explorer since version 4 until version 6.

If Microsoft are advising people to upgrade to a version of Internet Explorer that no longer includes Outlook Express, what are the alternative options?

• Microsoft Outlook (Yes, there is a difference)
  • Pro: Most people have Microsoft Outlook as part of Microsoft Office
  • Pro: Not just mail, it also includes a calendar, task manager, contact manager, note taking, a journal and web browsing
  • Pro: Supports importing messages from Outlook Express
  • Con: It is not free to download like Outlook Express
  • Con: You have to purchase updates by purchasing the latest version of Microsoft Office
  • Con: It’s broken (Uses Word rendering engine to display HTML emails)
  • Con: Microsoft Outlook cannot view newsgroups
• Windows Live Mail (Microsoft’s official replacement)
  • Pro: It’s free
  • Pro: It works!
• Mozilla Thunderbird (Open Source)
  • Pro: It’s free
  • Pro: It works!
  • Pro: Imports from Outlook Express
  • Con: May be confusing to novice users
• Gmail (Not really a client, but a reasonable option)
  • Pro: It’s free
  • Pro/Con: It’s online

There’s a whole bunch of other email clients and webmail providers, but these were chosen because they offer something for everyone considering moving away from Outlook Express.

If you’re still using Outlook Express, you’re using an outdated piece of software with no future.

What with the demise of Internet Explorer 6 and the uptake of new operating systems such as Windows 7, it’s time to replace Outlook Express.

What did you choose as your Outlook Express replacement?