File Genie: Blog

Computer Surgery with File Genie & Barista Cafe

25/3/2014

Computer Surgery with File Genie & Barista Cafe On Thursday 27th March from 1.00pm File Genie will be holding a Computer Surgery at Barista Cafe in Peterborough city centre.

Barista is an independent cafe providing Peterborough with fresh coffee and some of the best handmade Pizzas money can buy. Barista is a spacious family friendly cafe welcoming professionals and shoppers alike.

File Genie will be offering a chance to meet and chat, whether you have a specific problem, need a little advice or you just need to know a trusty geek for the future. Come and grab yourself a coffee (coffee from £1.70) and enjoy the friendly atmosphere at Barista.

File Genie is established in the Peterborough area with many happy customers over the years. We can help you with all your PC and laptop repairs and upgrades, Smartphone and iPhone problems. We also help with home networks, training and advice.

You have got to try a Barista handmade Pizza! Pizza for under a fiver, yes 12" hand made on the premises by Mick freshly cooked to order. (no this is not a typo I checked 12", handmade, fresh, eat in, wide selection £4.95!)

File Genie - Computer Surgery
Thursday 27th March from 13:00 - 18:00
Barista
St. Peter Arcade
Bridge Street
Peterborough
PE1 1HJ

By Natwest bank get directions here >

What Will the End of Windows XP Mean for Me?

17/3/2014

Good news, your Windows XP computer will not stop working or explode!

Bad news it will become more vulnerable as from the 8th of April 2014, because Microsoft will no longer be issuing free updates or security patches for Windows XP.

Question: Yeah but it's fine now, why will that change after the 8th of April?
It has been very well publicised that support for XP will be ending, those wishing to target XP computers are well aware of this and among other way can reverse engineer the updates or security patches for current operating systems such as windows 7 and 8 to help them expose weaknesses in previous versions. And if you wanted to get a computer to do something that it shouldn't you would probably hang fire until it was no longer protected properly.

Question: What can I do?

BACK UP ALL YOUR FILES!!! There are many ways to back up, you could back up to the cloud, or by way of an external hard drive or if you have no other option burn to DVDs. This is generally considered to be good advice anyway, but at least you will know you have the files important to you.

Question: What else can I do? You could buy a new computer. Some good deals are available here: Ebuyer >

You may be able to upgrade your operating system, this will depend on the spec of your computer. Please see Windows tutorial for more info, or have a chat with File Genie >

Change over to a Linux operating system. Please see here for more info: Move from Windows to Linux >

Question: I have an antivirus, will that protect my PC? Most anti-virus software makers will support Windows XP for 12 months or more. As mentioned earlier, this is not the full story and some paid antivirus programs may be not too far away from the price of a full Windows upgrade.

After nearly 13 years of Windows XP, for me is it is a bit like saying good bye to a trusted friend. However despite the bad press of some of the latest Windows versions, they are really not that bad and in many ways much better. Happy computing!

Protecting Your Online World

10/3/2014

The only defence is a good offence when it comes to protecting your online world, it starts with you and the passwords you use.

“Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don’t let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months”, (Clifford Stoll).
Avoid common passwords There is software readily available with the sole purpose of accessing your stuff. This software will try thousands of common passwords such as 'password', 'password1', '123456' and 'qwerty'.

If it has no luck with those, it will move on to names… 'John', 'James', 'Julia' and to a character by character comparison 'AAAAAAAA', 'AAAAAAAB', 'AAAAAAAC', 'AAAAAAAD' ….and so on and so on.

So how do we get a good safe password?

Never write it down, so make it memorable.
Never use sequential numbers 12345678, or letters ABCDEFGH or keyboard sequences QWERTY, ZXCVBNM, or repeat digits AAAAAAAA, ££££££££, 33333333.
Avoid your name, your partners name, your dog's name, your date of birth, your address or your postcode.
A good password will be a minimum of eight characters long (most things won't let you use a password less than eight characters). Use upper and lowercase letters 'A - Z', 'a - z'. Use numbers '0 – 9' and special characters !"£$%^&*…etc. Please note a space is considered a special character.

So something like 'He42£u5&' (This is a good safe password that would take today's technology about five years to crack!

Job done? We have a very safe password. That we can't write down. And is so safe we can't remember what it is!

Retinal scanners are still way to expensive, so lets break it down a bit to see what do we can we do.

Using 'josh' - Simple to remember all lowercase. Would take today's technology less than 1 second to crack.
'Josh' - Still simple but with an uppercase letter, less than 1 second.
'Joshua1' - Slightly longer with a number and uppercase letter, 15 hours.
'Joshua 12' - With a space, uppercase letter and two numbers, 1 year to crack.

Pass Phrase Now we are getting somewhere, but we are moving more into the territory of the ‘pass phrase’. The pass phrase is easy to remember, easier to fill all the criteria of a good safe password and much more secure.

So what do we mean by a ‘pass phrase’? If we use - 'Joshua Jones 11-10-06' …covers all the bases, still easy to remember and this would take today's hacker about 3 septillion years (3 followed by 42 zeros or 3,000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years ) to crack!

If remembering dates is not your thing, Try... 'my 1st grandchild is called Joshua'. Rolls off the tongue, its safe, and would take 612 quattuordecillion years (812 followed by 84 zeros 612,000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years) to crack!

Using 'My Name Is Ben' would still fill all the criteria, but would not be the smartest of phrases to use as my name is Ben. But as you can see building a pass phrase unique to you without being too obvious could go a long way to protecting your online world.