Once, girls were girls and men were men; you knew who you were then. And you knew who the bad guys and the good guys were; the viruses the former, and the virus-fighting programs the latter. No more, though. Nowadays, the very programs you were counting on to fight viruses might be nothing more than viruses themselves!
Time to learn a new word. You’ve heard of malware, spyware, and virusware? Now welcome to the world of “scareware,” the fastest-growing segment of the rogue software population out there. Disguising itself as a …

Click. Whirr. Click again. Uh-oh. That’s one too many clicks. Sounds like you’ve just heard the “Click of Death.” Hope you backed everything up!
You’d be surprised how many people don’t, unfortunately. But sudden disk drive death syndrome (SDDDS, an acronym I just made up) is an unfortunate fact of life. Would you believe that in the U.S., over 170,000 hard drives are “lost” every year? Of course, it’s not the disk we’re worried about – it’s the data on the disk, consisting of vital and probably almost irreplaceable information.
Data backups …

Being a newzgeek can be rough; everybody thinks I know everything there is to know about what is wrong with their PC. Well, they’re right: I DO know everything there is to know about the subject. The problem is trying to figure out exactly what needs fizing. If I had a shekel for every phone call I get, where somebody tells me “I have this thing on my screen – how do I get rid of it?” What thing? Where on the screen? Which program are they using? It takes …

You never know loss until you experience it. Data loss, that is. While certainly not as traumatic as other kinds of loss, you feel as if a part of you has disappeared when your hard disk or your computer gives up the ghost. It’s about more than just having to make up work you lost, or pulling things back onto the disk from the backup (you did make one, didn’t you?); it’s like a piece of you – your personality, your very being – disappeared along with your desktop wallpaper. …

Today’s beef: Printing, and the apparent collusion between Web sites and e-mail programs to make you waste paper and ink. How many times have you printed out an article on your favorite Web site (Jpost.com, of course!) and gotten the dreaded “almost blank page?” This, of course, is the last page of the document with the address of the Web site, or the copyright notice, or some other useless piece of data completely irrelevant to the article in question. Ditto for e-mail messages: There’s always a “hanging chad,” a little …