Help Me Dave in Bankstown, New South Wales | Computer repair service

Help Me Dave

Locality: Bankstown, New South Wales

Phone: +61 416 954 593

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• Computer repair service

25.01.2022 Well I have a very thankful client, they were hit with the locky virus today, and thankfully I have a recent image of their drive after a hard drive upgrade, looks like they are going to get back 9 years worth of documents and pictures minus the last month or so. they were not backing up their machine! Basically having a good backup system, rotating drives and doing it often, and not leaving the backup drive plugged in as locky and its variants do encrypt backup files and an...y drive attached to the system including USB hard drive, Thumb-drive, mapped network drives even Drop Box and Onedrive as these files are cached on your local machine and automatically start uploading when changes are detected. I cannot stress enough, keep backups of all your files, on external hard drive, on a NAS or even on the cloud. Most of all, be very careful opening up emails with .zip, .xls ,doc, and .pdf. Please be safe and avoid the stress with having a good backup system!

24.01.2022 Hi folks, Ive been asked a few times where windows 10 users stand if they have to reinstall their PC after the free upgrade ends on July 29th. Microsoft dont provide you with a product key, Dont stress, this doesnt mean you have to run out and purchase a windows 10 licence if disaster occurs. You can install windows 10 from scratch back on to the PC as long as it is the same PC with minimal hardware change, EG Hard drive or graphics card. The first option is the windows s...erver will detect the previous activation, all you need to do is to select I do not have a product key, and youll be activated automatically after completion of installation, easy! Quote from Microsoft: "If youve already successful activated Windows 10 on this PC, including if you upgraded by taking advantage of the free upgrade offer, you wont need to enter a Windows 10 product key. You can skip the product key page by selecting the Skip button. Your PC will automatically activate later." The second is when win 10 has completed the install and wont activate, its time to contact support, hit the windows button, all apps and launch Contact Support, this is where you live text chat with a support agent and explain to them that you have reinstalled your PC and they can activate it over the web, if you are using a Microsoft account to log in to windows all your devices are listed and have a serial number and the version of windows 10 either professional home or core. This will make it even easier for the Microsoft support agent to activate your copy of Windows 10. Either way, you will have an activated copy of windows 10. To do a fresh install of Win 10, you will need the media creation tool, you can obtain this from the following link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/software-download/windows10 Click the download button for the Media Creation Tool and run, this will auto detect the version of windows for your PC, but it will give you option to create media for other PCs too. You will also be given a choice to create either a USB thumb drive or a DVD ISO install image. The Thumb drive option is quite handy and all you need is a thumb drive 8gb in size and they are quite cheap these days and a very fast way to do your reinstall. If you choose an ISO image you will need software to burn the bootable image to a blank DVD. Either way follow the instructions and this will step you though the creation of the windows 10 media, in the meantime, make sure you do a regular backup, keep windows up to date and happy browsing! Dave

24.01.2022 Time to give a 2010 iMac a new lease on life for a client by popping in a Solid State Drive, the load time is now seconds instead of minutes, dont have to cook a three course meal waiting for it to boot! who said you cant teach an old dog new tricks :-)

24.01.2022 Be very careful with fake Netflix emails, as you can see in the attached image that the email address is not Netflix, if you do click on the link and use your Netflix login they will have your account, and then try and get all info you have. in most cases though your account details will be sold as a cheap product on eBay by scammers. just be very careful, I have also attached a screen shot of the fake Netflix site, as you can see from the address bar that is not the Netflix website at all. be safe out there, and watch out for the scammers :-)

21.01.2022 Hi folks, just watch some of the latest scams doing the rounds, my spam folder is starting to fill up with many fake emails pretending to be Amazon.com orders, and also cancellations, dont open them and dont click on any links, they will take you to a fake amazon site and try to obtain your personal and financial info, seems to be at least half a dozen of these per day turning up. As you can see in the second snip the links dont even point to an amazon site, dont be fooled, just delete :-)

21.01.2022 That magic time of the year, post tax time, and the scammers are on the loose, not only calling your phone saying you may get arrested for tax fraud, but now sending emails saying you are eligible for a refund, the picture attached shows one of the variants of the fake email, pleas dont click the link, that takes you straight into a well set up fake site, note the domain at the top, that certainly isnt the ATO website, its a site for collecting your myGov login details so they can steal your identity, please be careful, and remember the ATO would only send you a notification to read messages available on your myGov account and they dont include any links in the email!

21.01.2022 Use to using dual screens at the office or home, hate going back to a single screen laptop? well here is your road warrior dual screen fix :-) just plug the AOC e1659Fwu USB Powered Monitor in and you have that extra desktop space, and youre not limited to just one, you can even go three screens and above if you have the available USB ports, just be aware that youre laptop battery may drain a little faster as usual, its a small price to pay to get an extra 15.6 inch screen and it even comes with its own carry pouch, nice :-) they retail around the $120 - $140 depending on the retailer, pretty handy if you ask me :-)

21.01.2022 If you know someone that falls for the Indian virus scam, you know, those nice guys that try and rip you off by pretending theyre from Microsoft and assure you that you are sending nasty things all over the web and making you feel so guilty, well not so long ago I replaced the "syskey.exe" command on a few clients machines as they were previously stung, and it worked like a treat!!!!! What the scammer does is runs the syskey command and pops a password on, in some cases the ...only way to get your data back is to pull the drive out, back up the data as syskey encrypts your registry files leaving the machine pretty much useless, but your photos and documents are still there. then you need reinstall windows restore your data, but you need to reinstall all your programs. (If you dont have a full image backup!) Well, this time around the scammers would gain access to the PC and go through their little script eventually getting to the syskey command where they then try and get money out of you to unlock the system :-) This is where this little fake syskey program comes in, they run the command, go to pop in a password, but this time it displays the password, thinking they still have you they hit ok and then instead of encrypting the registry, they get a nice little pop up box saying Nice Try Scammer!!!!" What a classic!!! Oh by the way, if you are running the latest version of Windows 10 (1709) the syskey command has been removed, so its always worth keeping up to date :-) Nice Try Scammers, oh that cracks me up lol

19.01.2022 Hi folks, just a reminder, dont always trust google searches as in some cases there are adds at the top of the list that are malicious sites. Here is a perfect example, when setting up office 365 personal, many people are not typeing the "office.com/setup" address into the address bar of their browsers, but are typing it directly into google search, then clicking the first link blindly as they assume that that is the top hit so it should be the genuine Microsoft site, not th...e case as there are adds usually in the first three or so search results. The attached snapshot shows the three to avoid and the fourth is the correct site to install office 365 personal. Now if you were to click the other links, they would ask for your 25 digit code from the scratch off panel on the card you purchased, then it would go into a speel of how they cannot install office as there are errors on your PC. Here comes the fun part, a toll free phone number is displayed, and you guessed it, it connects you to a fake Microsoft Indian call center wanting to gain remote access to your machine, then showing you how badly your machine has been hacked, and as usual demanding money to so call fix a problem that doesnt exist!!! Rule of thumb: When given a web address, type it into the address bar at the top of your browser, not into a google search box. Think of Forrest Gump, Life is like a google search box, You never know what youre gonna get!!!

18.01.2022 It amazes me just how many different angles scammers will attempt to get your personal log in details, 1. if my account was suspended I wouldnt be here typing this post out here right now ;-) 2. I love the double negative, their system detected that my account was disabled so they have suspended my account lol my eight year old son could write a better email than this lol 3. you cant hide the real email address youre sending from. Please carefully read through these sorts of emails before going into panic that your account is "suspended" check the senders address and the most obvious if you happen to be using facebook at the time its pretty much a given that its not legit :-)

18.01.2022 Looks like the scammers are at it again trying to take your hard earned cash this festive season, they are certainly becoming very creative and pretending to look very official. if you do receive one of these emails, do not open the attachment document, the state or federal government would not be sending you a word document. Stay safe folks and have a very merry Christmas.

18.01.2022 Fake FEDEX emails now taking it to the next lever from the scammer!!! Please be careful opening these emails, if the attachment is opened it will encrypt all documents, photos, videos, email PST files and MYOB files on your PC, but it comes with an extra bite!! The newer variants will also search local shared folders on devices EG NAS drives, Servers and these folders dont have to be mapped. I have recently had a client that opened this virus and it searching across the net...work and encrypted folders that were open access but not mapped, so not only the mapped folders data was encrypted but the backup folders (File History) and windows backup folders were encrypted, this would also work across other PCs with shared folders open to the network too. This will basically mean that all network folders will need to be password protected at all times, I know this is going to be a pain but it seems that the scammers are taking it up a notch to get into shared folders across a network, the other way to protect yourself is to have an external drive that is attached to the PC periodically and rotated with a second drive, Im not aware that this affects cloud backup yet but it wouldnt surprise me if it has managed to affect that too. personally I have an automated system at home where the backup drive will auto power up, backup all systems then power off for 24 hours. The best defence for this is to delete all emails that you are not sure of, when in doubt delete or phone the sender of the email. any Aust post, Fedex or UPS emails just make sure you have an account with those transport suppliers, the same goes for service providers, the ATO or State Debt Recovery office. On another note, if you are caught out by the scammers and your files have been encrypted, dont bother paying the ransom, they will take your money and you wont see anything in return for that payment, and those payments are impossible to trace. The easy way out, Dont Open Those Emails!!!!! Keep safe and dont fall for the scammers emails!!!

18.01.2022 3 Un-Locky Strikes this week #VirusAlert Weve had 3 more clients hit with Locky just this week - this is a copy of the email weve sent to all of our clients to try to keep them safe - feel free to share it with any of your friends who might be at risk. Hi all,... This is a special warning to all of our clients this week we are under heavy attack from the Locky virus with 3 clients hit just this week, and many more over the past few weeks. This is one of the nasty viruses where you lose all of your files. If your backup is plugged in to your network it will also take out the backup. This virus is turning up in a lot of different formats, so even people who are normally careful could be at risk. These guys send out millions of emails and eventually just by pure chance they will hit on something that looks legitimate to you when it comes in. Eg one client came back from holidays to see an overdue AGL energy bill. Shed been away for a while and was busy catching up so she worried that shed forgotten to pay it. Eg another client arranged for a photo to be sent to him, the email came in shortly after the phone call and it said Here is your photo Before opening any emails : Stop and check Is this my gas company, Is that my friends email address , Did I use this email address for my parcel etc Double check before opening any attachments. Do not open .zip files, do not Enable Macros and be very careful even with .xls, .doc and .pdf files as the virus is coming in these formats too. If the email asks you to click on any links you can hover your mouse over the link to see the real address often this will show you that the website is taking you to the virus website rather than the company they are pretending to be. Make sure your antivirus is up to date! Sometimes the antivirus will catch it, or at least stop it part way through the decryption. One client only lost files up to the letter D before the virus got stopped by his antivirus. Make sure you have a backup that is not connected to your network eg a rotating backup, an offline backup, a thumb drive that is not plugged in If you arent sure about your backup or antivirus give Dave a call 0416 954 593 Make sure all staff members are aware of the current attack, and feel free to pass this email along to any of your friends or family who might be at risk. We always post about current viruses (and other handy computer tips) on our FaceBook page, and wed love you to follow the page and stay up to date. https://www.facebook.com/HelpMeDave Thanks all and we hope you all stay safe! Dave and Jen

18.01.2022 A good reason to keep your backup up to date is when a hard drive does fail. pop in a new 540GB SSD boot up and restore from that backup and youre off again working nice and smooth. both OS X and Windows have built in recovery and backup solutions, there is no excuse for not backing up your data, what would you do if your internal hard disk failed now? do you have a recent backup?

17.01.2022 If you have a cracked screen and need to get it repaired, please take it either to the OEM company or a reputable repairer, after spending over $200 to repair this Iphone with a cracked inner and outer screen, a friend received his iphone 7 back, with a new less cracked outer screen and a home button that was dead, just unbelievable!!!! turns out the home button socket was damaged on the NEW fitted precracked screen!!!!! So I take it to my go to Iphone and Ipad guy and for $150 the screen is replaced and the home button socket re-seated correctly and luckily the home button was fine. Now this is high end Iphone 7 and is quite expensive, was nearly reduced to a throw away item, so the lesson is, take your gadgets to someone trustworthy and qualified, and sometimes something that sounds cheap doesnt turn out that way.

17.01.2022 Here is another scam doing the rounds, sometimes websites can be hijacked, first you would receive a popup (see attached images as examples) and that popup will not go away, or let you close down your browser, so you think its for real and then call the toll free number, and guess whos on the other end, yep you guessed it, yet another Indian call center saying they are from either norton, microsoft, apple tech support (you know where this is going dont you) First off they g...ain remote access to your pc, then demonstrate via event viewer just how bad you are by letting hacking take control of your machine and then open up notepad and write down a detailed plan usually ending in different level costs of their fake service, if you dont jump on that fast enough or you tell them what slime they are and what you would like to do with them if they were stood in front of you they quickly run the "syskey" command and lock you out of your machine and demand you pay to gain access, (See my previous post on the syskey replacement app, its a cracker!) you can get out of the pop up and thats by going into task manager and hitting "End Task" just be sure to run malwarebytes over the machine just in case it has done a what we call "drive by download", better to be safe! If you have let the scammer onto your pc, shut it down quick, tell him what you think of him and how his mother must be so very disappointed on how he has turned out and go out get a real honest job :-) PS. I really think Google should pull their socks up and filter these scammers out! Ive reported a number of sites that are so obvious they are scam sites that even my dog can see it, yet they still preside at the top of search results as adds, so I guess the money is good regardless of where its coming from!

16.01.2022 Please read through, the locky virus can pretty much leave you with no files, photos the lot!!!! BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP!!!

15.01.2022 Watch out!!! If you get an email similar to the attached picture, dont click the link, first port of call is the email address at the top, notice its not an apple email address, if you by chance click the link in the email, it will take you to a site that looks like the itunes login screen, it will ask for your apple ID and password, as soon as you do that, the scammers have your details and can retrieve any credit or use the cards listed, and also lock you out of your account, please be careful with these emails :-) Have a great weekend all! Dave.

14.01.2022 Resurecting a throw away machine is always a bit of fun, six year old HP Probook 4720s I3 was overheating, dead HDD and pretty much scrap, re did the thermal paste, general clean up, popped in an SSD did the free upgrade from windows 7 to 10 Pro, popped in a new long life battery, repaired ribbon cable to finger print reader and its a fairly quick 17 inch laptop now, minimal spend and an old laptop can be given a new lease on life ;)

13.01.2022 Just received this is my inbox on my Optus account, I dont have a mobile with Optus so I knew it was a scam email from the start, if you do receive a similar email dont blindly hit the pay this account button, it will take you to a fake Optus page asking for your credit card details, and we all know where your hard earned cash will be going. Be careful with these scammers, very sneaky!

13.01.2022 Here is a bit of an eye opener of how call scammers work and what information they do have, thanks to Jim for all his hard work in getting access to the scammers machine and getting this information out. stop the scammers!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx-s2o1yWxk

12.01.2022 Here comes the weekend, time to site back and enjoy a coffee and a bit of old school tech :-)

11.01.2022 Seems the scammers are at it again, this time attempting to cause panic that your domain is being used by scammers to send out emails (Scammers warning you of fake scammers) If you receive anything with contents similar to the attached picture, delete it, dont click on the links, there will be some nasty little virus waiting for you. be safe and dont let the scammers catch you out :-)

11.01.2022 Spending my Sunday night reinstalling windows 10 on a clients PC after receiving a call from a scammer, this call was from a fake Microsoft Indian call centre alleging that my client had a virus on their PC, during the call they gained access to my clients PC and went through all the fakery to try and get them to pay for a support service they didnt need, when my client declined and refused to pay they set a SYSKEY password and also removed any backup registry and restore ...points making it virtually impossible to repair the windows 10 installation, I have managed to back up all data and PST files, so the only this needed now is to reinstall windows and all apps and restore the backed up data. If you receive a call from someone pertaining to be from Microsoft, hang up, Microsoft will not call you, they will not tel you you have a virus infection, for that matter nobody will tell you you have a virus, your security software will tell you that, if in doubt, download the free version of malwarebytes and do a scan for yourself, dont allow anyone remote access to your machine. this is an expensive lesson to learn and honestly its easily avoidable. Please take care with answering your phone, the scammers will get you if you dont watch out!

10.01.2022 If retro computing is your thing, well its something Ive been into for a long time, oh back in the days of the C64, Im still into repairing and refurbishing the old machines, brings back so many memories, Ive decided to start utilizing my YouTube channel, its a bit on the amateurish side at the moment, but Im hoping to start getting my editing sills up to date (Might get my daughter to help me in that department) so if you want a walk down memory lane, join me on my channel as it evolves into hopefully pretty cool :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kejFytakXVI

09.01.2022 Sometimes its nice to work on All In One pcs, 2.5 inch hard drive replacing with a 2.5 inch SSD and I cant get over there is a laptop motherboard, classic!

07.01.2022 SSD upgrade in a Toshiba U920T Ultra Book :-)

05.01.2022 Here we go again with scammers, this was doing the rounds last year in New Zealand and it seems to have now his Australia, if you receive an SMS pertaining to be from Uber and a four digit pin, do not reply to the message, youll be charged an arm and a leg for sending that message, just block and delete the message to be safe!

05.01.2022 Jim Browning has gone a level above and all his hard work has taken looking into the world of the scammer to the next level :-) Jim has had the BBCs Panorama program showing all the hard work hes done over the years this time showing footage from the scammers own CCTV cameras around the office :-) How damn cool is this :-) well done Jim! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rmvhwwiQAY&t=2s

04.01.2022 Great keyboard the Logitech K750, great functionality and ease of use, solar charged, but came across a little issue, 1.5 years after purchase the keyboard stopped holding charge, contacted logitech support as a bit of a joke knowing what the answer would be, and thats the keyboard has pretty much gone past its used by date now lol Now I did notice there was a little removable panel at the back of the keyboard when I initially unboxed the keyboard, so I popped that off last... week to see what was in there hoping there was a little rechargeable battery and viola, there was a ML2032 rechargeable button battery, grabbed a replacement and popped it in, now charging like a trooper, so heres to another 1.5 years or use from a great keyboard :-) there is always a way to squeeze more life out of something, and saved me spending another $120 on a new K750 :-) PS that little hatch on the back was a real pain to get off thus the slight damage :-(

04.01.2022 One small step for an upgrade, one huge step of a learning curve on its way for a client, moving all data from an old windows XP machine to a new Dell windows 10 workstation. Dont leave it too late to get to the latest software, support for windows XP is long over and windows 7 support ends in 2020, not updating also affects your security, when microsoft support stops for an OS so do the security updates and virus software coverage. Stay safe and keep up to date :-)... Have a great week ahead. Dave.

04.01.2022 Please be very careful when receiving emails like these, scammers are always after you login info and this is exactly what they are after in this case, looks authentic but if you check the email address its from it certainly isnt from Netflix, watch out for them! sneaky, very sneaky!

03.01.2022 Wrong kind of eye-pad this weekend :( Our little lady managed to injure her eye on Friday night so after spending most of the night with the fantastic nurses at Bankstown hospital we now have a pirate kid for the week. Her eye seems to be healing up well now, and shes been very brave - she even managed to fall asleep with the drip irrigating her eye at the hospital and she doesnt mind the eye-pad at all :)

03.01.2022 Going back a couple years ago, remember how sites like Linkedin were compromised and login details were stolen, we were all advised to change our passwords which Im hoping we all did, well nearly 4 years later and I receive the attached email (screenshot) and yes that had my old linkedin password, I have changed it a number of times after that, so that was a big giveaway that this so called hacker was full of bull with the trojan scare tactics :-) so if you do receive an ema...il like the screen shot DONT PANIC! There is no trojan, hes not watching what youre doing, and no he doesnt have any naughty photos of you watching naughty vids, the list of stolen information has recently gone on sale on the dark web and scammers are attempting to cash in on the panic factor, Yes that is one of your old passwords but they dont say where from as they are hoping you panic seeing that, hopefully you did reset your password. If yu do receive an email like this pop over too https://haveibeenpwned.com/ pop in that email address and as I found out it was from the Linkedin hack four years ago. again dont panic as Im sure you took the advice back then and reset your password. Never panic when receiving emails like this, sit back have a coffee and do a little research, look at the password they state and check is it a password you have used recently, or is it an old password, oh I knew it was my old password and I knew exactly what site it was from :-) Stay vigilant out there and safe and dont let the scammer panic you.

02.01.2022 This is one of the pitfalls of social media, and thats misinformation and scamming, like farming is becoming a nasty trend and scammers like to tug at the heart strings, below is a recent addition to he ever growing attempts at like farming, on the left is the pretty obviously photo-shopped picture and on the right the original, now Ive personally seen the fake on the left doing the rounds for the last week or so, what the scammers want you to do is like the photo like their page/profile and eventually the page/profile gets renamed and then spams all those on involved with likes and comments, please dont fall into their trap! dont hit like, dont comment, block and report! keep safe folks and have an excellent weekend!

02.01.2022 If your kids are playing Roblox, please monitor the PM feature as there are scams doing the rounds pertaining to give users the ability to get an extra 250,000 robux, the site they are spreading at the moment is basically a way to steal any legitimately purchased robux, they also try to get you to do this via mobile device so Im guessing its also a way to get spyware onto the devices, I visited the site on my laptop which is fairly heavily protected and alarm bells went off all over the place. please be careful out there!!

01.01.2022 Looks like the scammers are willing to try just about anything to scare you in to doing as they wish :-) I like the line "You were invited to the court of law by the judge because of offense against the law", sounds legit to me :-)