Tips Of The Day For February 1999

Tip Of The Day For February 1, 1999: I had a friend call me yesterday. An older machine of his had died, and I heard a very familiar plea: "We don't care about the machine, but we really need to get the data off the hard drive!" Of course, the data had not been backed up to floppy disk (nor anywhere else). Got Backups?

Tip Of The Day For February 10, 1999: Always keep the boxes and other packaging materials for at least 30 days when buying new hardware or so    ftware. Also, do not send the registration card in for 30 days as well. This gives you time to determine if the product is working properly and/or suits your needs. In most cases, reputable stores will allow items to be returned for exchange or credit within 30 days, but they almost always insist that you have all of the original packaging materials.

Tip Of The Day For February 15, 1999: IMPORTANT TIP! There is a new trojan horse making the rounds on the 'net called "HAPPY99.EXE". In a nutshell, this program is sent as an attachment by infected users under some circumstances. It shows up by itself in a second, blank message after a user sends a regular email to someone. (It can also cause duplicates to be posted to Usenet by infected PCs.) If you receive "HAPPY99.EXE" in your email and execute it, your system will also start sending duplicates of this program to others, without your knowledge. If someone sends you an email, and a second message shows up containing no text and only an attachment that may be called "Happy99.EXE", tell them their machine is infected. Your system will not be infected merely by reading the email that contains the attachment, but do not execute the attachment. Note that because this is a new trojan, many antivirus programs will not detect it unless they are updated with new virus definition files, or a special patch; see the web site of your antivirus software's manufacturer. (In general, it is good "digital hygiene" to never execute an attached program unless you are absolutely sure of what it is.

Tip Of The Day For February 25, 1999: Most PCs today use a standard, 15-pin VGA/SVGA video connector. This is not true of all machines, but it is true of so many that it can be fairly readily relied upon. If you need to transport a PC from one place to another, or take a PC to a friend's house for some reason, you can usually count on the friend's monitor working with your PC. However, you can sometimes still encounter problems if your friend's monitor cannot handle the resolution and refresh settings you have your video card set to. In this case, you may be able to temporarily reset those settings to VGA defaults by booting up the machine in "Safe Mode".

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