I’ve spent the past month building a new desktop computer.

It is something I’ve meant to do for the past year and half and just hadn’t had the time or patience to dedicate to it. I had built my previous machine, a Pentium 4 2.6GHz on a ASUS P4C800E Deluxe board in December 2003. It was my first real build and was a good machine however with advances and demands on resources with Photoshop etc it was becoming a bit frustrating to work with on a daily basis. Right after Thanksgiving NewEgg had a great deal the on the case I had been eyeing so I bought that (Antec Nine Hundred) and an Antec PSU and the end of December I started putting together the rest of the parts list…

I ended up with:

ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 Board
i7 Core 920
EVGA 980GTX Video Card
Corsair Dominator 8GB DDR3
WD 150 VelociRaptor for the OS
WD 750 Caviar Black for data
Rosewill 3.5 Floppy and Card Reader
Sony Optiarc Black DVD/RW
An additional 120mm fan to put on the side door..
Windows 7 64bit for the Operating System

I messed up on the memory as it is a Quad kit and the board is triple channel… didn’t realized that until after the face and everything still works so I’m not going about changing it.

Parts arrived on January 12th. The build went smoothly and spent a day crunching on the MS extended memory tests with no errors. The only surprises were the new ‘triple channel’ thing on the memory and the fact that my 2001 HP scanner (5300C) is not supported in anyway by Windows 7 or HP. HP’s site pretty much says the scanner is too old buy a new one… so I did… I bought a Canan LiDE 700F which I’m quite happy with.
(more…)

I’m severely delinquent in keeping up with the blog. While I’ve taken photos too many other things have been taking up my time for me to post them or even download them from my camera. Between visiting family, 2 cords of wood being delivered (luckily my father-in-law stacked most of it), working on a new design for the Submarine Museum, and keeping up with a myriad of other things.

I’ve been inundated by malware/email scam emails the past two days and that has sparked me to actual write about it hoping that it might prevent people from falling for the scam whatever it may contain…

Yesterday it was mostly a “New Settings File email scam” saying it is from your email servers technical support. There was an attached zip which they wanted you to run.

The text of several of them was: “We are informing you that because of the security upgrade of the mailing service your mailbox “email address here” settings were changed. In order to apply the new set of settings open zip attached file.” OR alternately, follow a link to apply settings – See the sample below:

This morning I’ve had a lot of “Microsoft Outlook Notification” emails telling me to re-configure outlook by running an attached file. Sample Below:

Please note the attached zip file/links in these emails will contain malware. Perhaps a trojan or a worm, or it may simply ask you to fill details into a form to get identity information – whatever it does, don’t open that zip!  Just delete the whole email and move on with your life!

General Computer Safety:

1. Never follow a link in an email to ‘log-in’ to anything! This applies to facebook too! Many malware creators as well as identity thefts use what is called a phishing scheme sending a link to a site that looks like but isn’t the real thing. Once you put in your username and password they use it to find out more about you. If you use the same password for facebook as you do for financial organizations (many people do!) – guess what, they now have it!
2. Never open a zip or exe file sent to you in an email unless you know the person sending it to you and you are expecting that zip or exe.

 
Ok… off my soap box…

Connie

For the past several days I’ve noticed that Windows Security Center wasn’t happy with my ZoneAlarm Extreme Firewall/Anti-virus/Anti-spyware on my Vista Laptop. It kept trying to tell me that I didn’t have a Firewall running and to turn on Window’s Firewall – blahk! Typically the fix for this is to just turn off and re-turn on ZoneAlarm. So last night I gave that a try and found it didn’t work.. Looking deeper I also found “ZoneAlarm Extreme Anti-virus is on, but is reporting its status to Windows Security in a format that is no longer supported. Use the program’s automatic updating feature, or contact the program manufacturer for an updated version”.

I tried doing an update within ZoneAlarm and it told me my version was current and that no update was available… ok… did a search on the net for the issue and while I found a couple people having the same problem I found no solution.

Next I decided to go directly to ZoneAlarm.com to see if there was an update. Sure enough the current version of ZoneAlarm Extreme Security is 9.0.083.xxx. I was running 8.0.298.xxx. Apparently, ZoneAlarm can not find this update within the program itself via either automatic update or manual update (Open ZoneAlarm > On the bottom ‘Quick Tasks’ > Check for updates) You can however download it directly from ZoneAlarm.com by mousing over (do not click) “Download & Buy” > select “Free Downloads” > download the appropriate trial version.

I have rarely had success with upgrading ZA over the previous ZA settings so I uninstalled my old version and installed the new and re-set up my programs etc and now Windows Security Center is happy again… Even with uninstalling, the lience key did not need to be reinstalled, it transferred just fine.

I’ve been a user of Extensis’ Suitcase software to manage my fonts for many years and was a bit disappointed when I upgraded to Adobe CS4 and the auto activate plug in for Illustrator and InDesign was not upgraded in Suitcase 11.

Yesterday’s Layers Tip of the Day mentioned that Suitcase Fusion 2 has a new auto-active plug ins for CS4 and was very pleased to find that it is available for Windows users too! (Extensis Website)

Suitcase Fusion 2 requires that you uninstall Suitcase 11 before installing. It also does not automatically retrieve the Suitcase 11 database.. You can load the Suitcase 11 database by going to Tools > Import Suitcase for Windows Data

Note: Fusion 2′s default settings move all added fonts to a "font vault" within Local, Application Data of your C:/ drive. If you are like me with a lot of fonts, duplicating all of those somewhere else on your system is a bit crazy – I have all of mine stored in F:/fonts/ the items in the F drive do not change very often so it doesn’t have to backed up as frequently – rather convenient for my work flow. To change this setting go to: Edit > Preferences and under Font Vault Options change to "Add fonts leaving them in place." I also changed the Activations Options adding a check into "Notify if a conflict occurs."

That said – it seems that if you ‘Import Suitcase for Windows Data’ it goes to the vault vice leaving them so I ended up creating new sets. Something new and coinvent with Fusion 2 is you can "export sets" which are mini database files… to save sets/back them up.

You can also have multiple libraries… I now have a library for my standard fonts and another for various free fonts…

Other cool features include the ability to create popup boxes of fonts you are considering and being able to move fonts to sets from the preview window..

All in all a great upgrade… that took too long in the making!

I wanted to spread some awareness on a new email going around. This morning I got the lovely email from a ‘malware provider’ claiming to be MS. Basically saying, “Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express. This update is critical and provides you with the latest version of the Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express and offers the highest levels of stability and security.” First message I got had the ‘fix’ attached the other two have links… If you get one, don’t open it. Despite the fact that they do look real they are not – MS will never send you a link or the actual fix in an email, they will push it via Microsoft Updates. You can read more about it on SophosLabs Blog  but main point is to be aware of it and don’t open it or any others that look like it.

Off of the email topic and on to snail mail topic… really snail mail… you see back in January of 2007 I ordered a drying rack to dry hand washable etc. I watch the tracking progress and was puzzled when it said ‘delivered’ and I never got it! So I called the company and they did a search on it and couldn’t find it either so they sent me a 2nd one. Well today our mail lady showed up and mentioned she had a big package for me. I was really shocked because I haven’t ordered anything big. She opened up the back of the truck and when I saw it I started wondering if it was the long lost drying rack. Sure enough, I opened up the packing slip and it was shipped January 30, 2007. It arrived today, 2.5 years later… apparently it was sitting in a back storage room at the post office and the postmaster had someone clean it out this week.