Seasons Greetings, Norton Antivirus and important Links

Hello and Merry Christmas to all,

I trust you are getting through the shopping season ok. I have been swamped with inquiries in to certain Antivirus problems whereas you are unable to send and/or receive email as a direct result from Symantec Antivirus. I have responded to this in my website blog (http://tpsconsulting.com/blog.htm) whereas it has been detected as a problem with one of the LIVE UPDATES that was released by Norton/Symantec just over a week ago. This problem has been rectified by downloading a specific ".dll" file and extracting it in to norton, however it will also be incorporated in to a LIVE UPDATE which should have corrected the problem . If you are still having troubles with this, please be sure you have run the LIVE UPDATE for norton systemworks. Do this by either clicking on the LIVE UPDATE icon which should be on your desktop but if it is not, then run NORTON SYSTEMWORKS and click on LIVE UPDATE from the available icon in the program. Remember to run this until you read "all of your files are up to date" is displayed. If you find that it does download something and then displays the 'close' icon, you should re-run the live update again. As well, you may be prompted to restart your computer. if you are, then you should once again run LIVE UPDATE until you see the words that you have everything up to date. If you are still having troubles with this and you are still able to connect to the internet and surf the web, then this means I should be able to connect through PC ANYWHERE. Just email me your ip address and I can take a look at this problem for you. In the meantime, if you haven't been already, you can still send and receive email (always) through the webmail from your internet provider. If you are on Shaw for example, you would go to http://webmail.shaw.ca
If you are on Telus, you would go to http://webmail.telus.net If you are with some other internet provider, you should visit their homepage and look for the "webmail" link. This is a very good way to check mail and delete any junk that you want, including cleaning out all email that may be on the server.

Please note that my web blog site is and will always be where you will find the most up to date information that I am trying to get out to the masses. For more information on this or any other problem, please always remember that I am a key click away. Simply remember to include your ip address of pc anywhere along with your problem and I can respond more quickly by possibly connecting and repairing the problem and then responding in an email as such. One last thing.. note that ANTIVIRUS should NEVER be disabled (even if determining if this is the problem why your email is not getting through). Disabling your antivirus while you are connected to the internet is almost a sure thing that you WILL BE INFECTED (read my blogs about this if you don't believe me).

Instructions on how to get your pcanywhere ip address are below:

The pc anywhere icon should be running on the system tray (next to the clock) and if you have an arrow that is hiding some of the icons, it is probably there. If you point at it, it will pop up a window stating "pc anywhere waiting". If you don't see this then for whatever reason, it is not running and it should be on start up, however if it is not there, you start it by going to start menu/all programs and then clicking on SYMANTEC PCANYWHERE. Once you have done that, click on HOST if it is not already selected, and the double click on NETWORK, CABLE,DSL icon. This should now launch the host and you should now have the icon on the system tray. Double click on the icon and it will open a window displaying the current ip address (number) that your computer is waiting on. That is the number you should send me. Note that this number does change randomly for security reasons from Shaw. Note: Once you have the window open, MINIMIZE it and do not click on the X to close that window becuase that closes the connection. Minimizing it will remove it from the task tray but it should remain in the system tray (near the clock).

Once again, important links would be to my tips (http://tpsconsulting.com/tips.htm)
and to my webblog (http://tpsconsulting.com/blog.htm)


I hope all your dreams and wishes come true at this magical time of year.

All the best in 2005.

New employee taking a break-email missing?

I've been away for a little over a week and my new employee (MS Small Business Server) has been up to no good.. it appears that it has kept me from retrieving all of my email and as a result I have remotely turned it off until I return home! This means that for about 6 days (last week) I have not received all of my email so if you were one of the unfortunate ones that has emailed me and has not received a response, this would be the reason and if you happen to be reading this blog, then you might want to resend your email. I promise I will respond however I don't know what it is I would be responding to at this time as the exchange server has swallowed it up for now. Sorry for any troubles this might have caused however I am pretty sure if it was that important you would have called me directly. The official count is now 7 days of shopping left!

Christmas is coming and so is the new year.. what can you look forward to?

One of my regular morning reads is the latest news from lockergnome (using RSS of course). Interesting being the time of year, and with the new year approaching a somewhat annual report on the year and what we can look forward to has now been released with some very interesting comments on security that everyone should be aware of. I should also note that most of what is being said is already being done and for that reason, you should make sure you are protected and know what it is you are protecting. A little common sense, once you know what you are looking for, goes a long ways. Read this article and stay sharp. Most of all, enjoy this time of year when planning on the purchase of your new computer or upgrades of your existing computer.

Problems sending or receiving email?

It appears Symantec (Norton Antivirus) has done a little number on itself as of late. I have recently learned that the latest send/recieve problems that some of my clients have been having are due to a corrupted .dll file within one of the latest updates. This little corrupted file has made it so that the email proxy that is, re-directed scanned mail, is not allowing the mail to get through. Thanks to a client that spent well over an hour on the phone with Symantec. It seems there is a fix for it available from the Symantec website, however I am suggesting you simply wait for the latest LIVE UPDATE to fix this problem. As you should be doing, the LIVE UPDATE each and every day anyway, this problem should fix itself. What to do in the meantime? You probably are already using the WEBMAIL from your internet provider but if you haven't been, or you simply want to go back to using outlook/outlook express, then you should go to Norton's website and download the latest patch. This method will work however if you are not that computer literate, you might want to just hold off and let things work themselves out as it should when symantec incorporates this in to the LIVE UPDATE. Using the webmail feature has its benefits... the first being the fact you can select all the mail you DO NOT want to read, that is either spam or simply junk mail, and can send it to trash, leaving you with only the good mail, which you can either leave on the server or download to outlook/outlook express eventually when it starts working again. Personally, I always suggest using webmail when travelling or if you are on a dial up service, as this will allow you to only download the mail you want, cutting the time greatly when it comes to downloading over a dialup connection.

Reformatting your hard drive is the only way to be sure it is clean

A recent entry in a lockergnome blog caught my eye as I deal with this similar problem almost on a daily basis.

Personally I have found that if I am spending more then 2 hours on a problem such as this, I will do the reformat routine as well. Thing is I don't just reformat, I go through the process of creating a backup "image" usually on a seperate partition of your hard drive if the drive size it large enough. Otherwise, I'll create this image to a network drive that I use for backups and then once the reformat/partition is done and windows has been reinstalled, I will restore the DATA ONLY which includes such things like "my documents" your email (identities), your address book and any other "obvious" program data files I can find. Usually this is enough as my client will then simply reinstall whatever programs/games they have that they want to use.

One good thing about this method is that it is like doing a spring cleaning on your computer.. getting rid of the stuff you no longer use which is key when dealing with computers that have children using it with all the learning games which are now out of date as the kid is a teenager. The teenager is usually in to downloading music and chatting on as many messenger programs they can find. As well, usually KAZAA is installed which is pretty much a guarantee that I will be finding viruses.. Word of advise DON'T INSTALL KAZAA!