Leo Laporte
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Sunday, June 19, 2005

Show #154

I’ll be taking calls at 1–800–520–1534 from 2–4p today. Call in with your questions to help me tape the July 9 show ahead of time (so I can take a Geek Cruise June 29-July 10).

 toc | toc

Today’s news items

11a-Noon

Jim in Huntington Beach - does compuserve firewall?

AOL and CompuServe do some virus filtering, but I don’t think they block ports for you. The easy way to check is to use Steve Gibson’s free Shields Up firewall test. You want all green lights - that is, all ports stealthed. Steve explains what it all means very well on his site.

Jim also used PayPal’s free bill pay service. Now that it’s closing down he’s interested in using Lower My Bills free bill pay. Anyone have any experience with them? I use PayTrust from Intuit - it’s not free but I love it.

Kazeem in Encino - Pentium III doesn’t work with USB

Buy a PCI card

Jeff in Aliso Viejo - getting messenger spam

run Windows Update now. Service Pack 2 will fix this, as will any firewall.

Norm in Upland - Earthling DSL can’t get to web pages

He’s running Norton Internet Security. Uninstall that right away. Open the Internet Options control panel and make sure the security settings are on Medium. Check your Hosts file - there should only be one entry:

127.0.0.1 localhost

Noon-1p

Nate in Marlboro, CT - run PC faster

Pentium III runs XP slow
sfc /scannow

msconfig

Sharon in Huntington Beach - older computer keyboard won’t work

Adult school
Cerritos

Nicki in LA - DVD recorder

DVD-RAM?
Microsoft support responded via email and it worked

Scott in La Mirada - adding a DVD burner to his Mac

Pushing the eject button opens both drives, neither works. I think he needs to set the jumpers.

Jay in Santa Barbara - looking for system security checkup

Windows XP Home - SP1
Zone Alarm
McAfee AV
Spybot, Spyware Blaster,
Firefox

Mike in New York - VoIP sound quality

1–2p

Francis in Long Beach -

Sony Vaio laptop, screen bugs out after three hours of work

William in Gilbert AZ - VLC

VideoLAN Client, smart phones

Herb in No Hollywood - MyTob

Get the removal tool from Symantec and read the information on SARC.

Dave in Woodbury, MN adds: Imaging could easily fix the MyTob attack problem

MyTob is another example where an image on CDs or DVDs that was taken before the attack, could easily elminate the problem. If imaging software was not used on this computer, perhaps it could be installed after re-installing everything to reduce the work to repair the problem if the system is attacked again in the future. For those that have not been attacked yet, it isn’t too late to protect your system!