We now offer our customers the ability to build their own website for free. Take a look at some of the templates you can choose from below.

More information is available here.

What is it? Phishing is the act of sending a fraudulent mail to someone under the disguise of a legitimate name or organisation. The intention is to dupe the recipient of the mail into believing they are accessing a bonifide website when they are in fact unintentionally handing over private and confidential information to cyber criminals.

What does it look like? Most current phishing mails are designed to take you to a fake copy of a well established business. They achieve this by asking you to reset your password or to inform you of new banking services. In other cases, they use their own form of irony; “We suspect someone may have tried to illegally access your online banking account in the past 24 hours. Was this you? Please check your account now. Visit http://www.yourbank.ie and reset your password to protect your account”.  

After clicking on the link, the user is taken to an exact copy of their bank where they begin to enter their online passwords. After a few unsuccessful attempts, the criminals will now have enough information to access your real online bank account. Chances are, they’ll have emptied the real account while you’re still wondering why after 10 years of using the same online password, it has now suddenly decided to not work!

To avoid becoming a victim, only visit a website where you have to enter your login details by typing the address manually.

You can view the February Newsletter here.

In recent weeks, various customers have reported issues with their broadband connections where it can disconnect intermittingly throughout the day. The problem may only even manifest itself on certain days creating huge difficulties in narrowing down its cause. Obviously this creates a huge strain on the working day and we’ve only recently managed to find the cause. We found that peer-to-peer software such as uTorrent, Bitcomet, Bearshare and Limewire have been the primary source of the problem. In all cases, the software was not even in use. This means that simply by having the software on the pc can impact the stability of your network.

There are also different symptoms of having this software installed such as fluctuations in the actual speed of your internet access. Again, this can all occur without even using the software.  The fact that it’s running in the background chewing up bandwidth is one thing but the number of ‘open connections’ it creates are ultimately being persecuted by the Internet Service Provider. For each of the symptoms there are varying fixes, such as patches to the software, tweaks to its configuration and modifications to the port settings on the router. None of which will be suggested here.. The only fix on offer here is to remove the software from your pc.  

Once removed, your network stability will return to normal. For more information regarding this topic, we have posted the solution to I Found A Fix.

I hope you too have Found A Fix.

By donating your used printer cartridges, iPods, digital cameras and mobile phones you can help raise valuable funds for Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital in Crumlin. Your generous donations will help raise much needed funds for the Children’s Medical and Research Foundation at Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital in Crumlin

What Next? Contact the Appeal online, by phone or by email.

Online: Visit www.recyclingappeal.ie/chatterbox . Enter what you have to be collected, fill in your details and submit.  One of their customer care team will be in touch to arrange a collection.

Phone: Call 1800 933 616 and a member of their team will arrange a collection.

A full list of the items that they can recycle are listed their price list which can be found at www.recyclingappeal.ie.

Email: Contact them at info@recyclingappeal.ie

2010 got off to a flying start when I discovered yet another scam in the post. This time, I was introduced to the little brother of The European City Guide Scammers. Actually, more like, his twin brother called Internet Register Ireland.

It’s basically the same scam by a different name. You can see the letter I received here. Since it’s the same scam, I’ll give the same advice; Bin the form and send back the envelope.

 Postage is on them

 PS – Test your creativity by exploring what you might incude with the prepaid envelope.

Last year I suggested in this article that the over use of social networking for business was a bad idea. I still stand by my assertion that its “all a bit much” and have previously stuck to my own advice insofar as not to embrace every possible social networking trend just because everyone else is… Also, I have categorically stated (mainly offline) on several occasions that I wouldn’t even discuss Twitter for PCtechnix. This may turn out to be one of those “practice what you preach” moments but this morning I signed up to a Twitter account against my better judgement. My main objective here was to protect the account so that someone else could not register it or as it is now known to “twitterjack” the account. The first tweet even reads “Our first ever tweet! Promised we wouldn’t join another social media thingy but protection is better than cure ”. For now, I plan on using it for educational purposes only (I swear!). Truth be told, there isn’t much choice. With a current growth rate of over 1350%, Twitters’ popularity is showing no signs of slipping. I’ve decided for now to use it in very basic mode until we at least pickup a few followers. To start, I’ve integrated our twitter account with this blog so that with every new blog post created, the site will automatically tweet a link back to the post. What appeals to me here is that, we can advertise our tweetcred to our customers while still remaining fairly hands off in its use as a tool for business. That said, if we manage to get a few followers it’s possible the temptation to tweet might be just too twempting .

Twittonary: Some useful Twitter phrases..

Twitter: A social networking and mico-blogging service.
Twiitterer: A user of Twitter. Also known as a Tweeter.
Tweet: A message sent on Twitter.
Dweet: Alcohol induced tweets. Can’t be good!
Mistweet: A tweet of regret. See above!
TweetIn: When a group of Twitterers agree to get together at a set time to twitter.
Tweetup: When a group of Twitterers agree to get together for a meeting.
Twitterati: Twitter users of celebrity status. Us lesser people are known as Tweeple.

Wishing everyone the very best for 2010!

The scams section of the blog is growing fast! Here’s another spam, scam or as I call it ‘mailware’ to add to the list. You’ll most likely see variations of the mail I received (see below).  

See scam mail below dotted line.

—————————————————————————————————————————-

Did you receive the e-mail which I sent to you recently (copied here-below)?
Please confirm since I have had problems lately with emails intercepted by spam-filters set too high.

Cordially,

Marc Shneider, Ph.D.
marcshneider@mplw.net 
I am Dr. Marc Schneider and I work for Multilingual Search Engine Optimization Inc. in Washington DC ( Tel: 1 202 250-3645) – I would like to speak with the person in charge of your international clientele. Who is my contact? Who should I speak to??

In fact, after visiting http://www.pctechnix.ie . , I have noticed that your website cannot be found on foreign search engines (I tested it on Hispanic search engines, German search engines, Asian search engines, etc.) Our company is specialized in multilingual search engine promotions in 28 languages . From the Japanese Google to the German Yahoo, from the AOL in Spanish to the MSN in Chinese, we can show you how to develop a true international online presence by promoting your website on foreign search engines.
Read the rest of this entry »

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a successful 2010! This year we will again be skipping the Chrimstas Cards and will instead be making a small donation to the Temple Street Children’s hostpital. Wishing you all continued success for 2010…