Computer Repair Hawaii (808) 676-1900

If you had any power outages and your computer went off suddenly or you had to intentionally shutdown your computer by holding in the power switch (for 4 sec) or pulling the plug, there is a good chance that you may have errors on your hard drive. Most people think that the only power problems they have to worry about are from power surges, but most problems I see are from unstable power when it is fluctuating or when it abruptly goes off. As for surges, most people have a Surge Protector, but if you want the very best power protection device, one that will protect you whether the power goes up or down, you need an Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS). A 350W UPS is usually enough to protect one computer and monitor and costs about $45 at Walmart.

If you listen to the radio at work or watch TV at night, you probably couldn’t avoid hearing the commercials about a computer software product from DoubleMySpeed.com. In fact, it goes by several names such as MyCleanPC.com, MaxMySpeed.com and it’s parent company’s name, CyberDefender.com. They all promote the same products under the CyberDefender name and “none” of them are worth your time. They aren’t fake products, but they aren’t exactly quality products either. Although they heavily rely on their commercial that tout their free online diagnosis, their products won’t fix a thing for you until you buy it first. Just know that there are many reputable alternatives that offer fully functional free trials of their security products, so there is no good reason to even try CyberDefender unless you somehow identified with the actor portrayals and believed their academy award performance, but don’t get your hopes up. Anyway, I made a quick DoubleMySpeed video review below which you can watch and decide for yourself.

It is not uncommon to have a keycap pop off on your laptop keyboard. If you are lucky enough to find the keycap and the plastic hinge is still in place, you can pretty much just snap it back on. But if the plastic hinge came apart and you can’t figure out how it goes [...]

Its getting more and more common to see broken LCD screens on laptops, usually with cracks and black liquid crystal oozing around the inside the screen. Common Causes for Broken LCD Screens I sat on it I stepped on it I dropped it I left a pen on my keyboard and then closed the lid [...]

What is Rogue Software? Rogue security software, also known as “scareware,” is software that appears to be beneficial from a security perspective but provides limited or no security, generates erroneous or misleading alerts, or attempts to lure users into participating in fraudulent transactions. How to Check for Rogue Software How to Defend Your Computer How [...]

Dropbox’s free online backup software allows you to sync your files online and across your computers automatically.You can get 2GB of online storage for free, with up to 100GB available to paying customers. With Dropbox, you can Sync files of any size or type with Windows, Mac and Linux computers. Dropbox automatically syncs when new files or changes are detected. You can work on files in your Dropbox even if you’re offline, your changes will sync once your computer has an internet connection again. Dropbox transfers will correctly resume where they left off if the connection drops. Dropbox doesn’t hog your internet connection and you can manually set bandwidth limits.

Ascentive in preying on unsuspecting customers again here in Hawaii with their FastAtLast radio and TV commercials. They move around from town to town and go by different names, the last of which was FinallyFast.com. Their snake-oil of choice is their product called “PC Speedscan Pro”. They actually have quite a few products, which I [...]

More on Logs and Other Things (Cont from Part 2) Other logs you should be monitoring are your security software logs such as for your Antivirus or Firewall programs. But aside from threats to your software, I want to recommend another program that can monitor the health of your Hard Drive where all your data [...]