I hope that you made the best of the bank holiday, I honestly cannot remember 3 days of solid rain for a long time.

This is a small petty notice, but one which at the same time is going to be fairly important in the long run. (more…)

Good news, as of this Friday, for those of you who wish to get broadband from £9.99 a month.

I have made friends with UKonline, who now offer great value broadband for both home, and now small business.

The price of their broadband has been difficult to match in the broadband market place for some while now.

Those of you who want to transfer your broadband to them can do so by clicking the link below. Alternatively ask thetechangel.com (previously known as theopenworldtechnician.com) how to do it on the next visit.

Link: Go get broadband from UKonline.

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Don’t forget if you already have broadband on your phoneline, that your existing service provider will need to be informed of the transfer, and that you need to ask them for a MAC number.**MAC: ‘Migration Authorisation Code’, a unique identifier used by broadband consumers when they wish to switch broadband service providers. It helps make the process easier for all parties involved, and gets you transfered a lot quicker.

21 reasons why you know you’re living in 2007 when…

1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave.

2. You haven’t played solitaire with real cards in years.

3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of 3. (more…)

I am pleased to announce this morning that a trial will begin with accepting credit card payments. The system I have chosen to use will be PayPal, as many of you are familiar with the system already, due to its integration with companies like eBay.

Payments should be sent to the usual business email address, or I can send an email request which will contain a link for the required amount.

If you want to send across payment on your own computer, please include on the payment details the reference number.

This is just a trail for the time being, but I hope to make it a full time service option.

This is really just a nagging thing that I think needs to be addressed.

If you do decide to phone me and I am not available to speak for one reason or another, please do leave a message. If you don’t, I won’t do a call back.

Why, you may ask? Because either I don’t always get a number to call you back on, i.e. my screen just says ‘private or withheld number called today at time X’ as some customers withhold their telephone number*, or I would consider the issue you were phoning about to have resolved itself.

I do return all messages left within 48 hours^, but it is very rare to have to wait that long for a response of some kind. Plus, a majority of calls are to book a time with me, which can be done online here and only takes a couple of minutes, which is very much encouraged.

Just wanted to clear the air as some people do grumble about this thing, but there is method in the madness!

*either the Telco does that or they just choose to be ex-directory. ^Excluding weekends and holidays. For example, you leave a message at midday or Friday, the latest call-back time would be midday Tuesday.

For those of you who have Windows Vista and an iPod, this is a fix your really should take-up.

Microsoft and Apple have clubbed together to release a fix for users worldwide and it works with the latest version of Apple’s iTunes software to correct an issue that caused some iPods to become corrupted when ejecting them using Windows Explorer or the “Safely Remove Hardware” function in the System Tray.

The fix can be found here. Of course only users with genuine installations of Vista can download it, and finally a mandatory restart after the install is required.

Microsoft has released a total of seven patches for Windows users this week, as part of it’s monthly patch Tuesday offerings.

The update involves two patches for Windows, at least one of which earns the critical rating and three patches for Microsoft Office, at least one of which is critical. The others are not so terrible, but are still in the ‘recommended’ category.

So go update now. Click here for details of how to, if your computer is not already requesting to install automatically.

The last couple of months has started to spell the end of an old media age in favour of new ones.

This week Curry’s Digital (or previously known a Dixons) has announced it will stop stocking audio tapes. Quite as to why this product was not abandoned sooner is strange. Ask yourself, when was the last time you bought an audio cassette? For me it was about 1998. Now ask your self when was the last time you saw music for sale on an audio cassette?

You see where this is going.

With a world were digital media is always the first choice for consumers, whether it be a DVD, CD or digital music downloads, I was surprised to learn that it has taken this long for tapes to leave our shop shelves.

Also back in April of this year, another old, but popular magnetic media was given the final whirring to goodbye  - the floppy disk.

This I really do find a little odd, as Mac’s stopped using floppy disks in 1998, and Windows PCs from a majority of manufactures stopped selling back in about 2003. Which does not seem so long ago for the consumer, but in the digital age is a very long time.

But still, as the floppy first appeared in the early 1970’s, to find it lasting much longer than the audio cassette, it has proven to be a worthy choice for many.

The Floppy Disk and Audio Cassette  - died together in 2007. Their passing will be noted by the arrival of their upgraded children, Bluray and HD-Media. No Flowers.

Those naughty people have created a strain of malware which uses memory sticks, also known as USB flash drives, as a vector for infection.

The boringly titled ‘SillyFD-AA’ worm spreads by duplicating itself from infected machines onto removable drives such as USB memory sticks before automatically running when the device is next connected to a computer.

The problem child is also capable of spreading through floppy discs (not that those are really around anymore, see article called ‘Farewell to the tape and floppy – the magnetic media end is Nye‘) creates a hidden file called autorun.inf that runs itself the next time infected media is plugged into a Windows PC.

The infected PCs are easy to spot. The title bar of Internet Explorer on infected Windows machines is changed to include the phrase “Hacked by 1BYTE”. In both its mode of infection and its lack of profit-driven motive, the SillyFD-AA worm is a throwback to the days when viruses were written for kudos rather than as part of some money-making scheme.

Usual procedures apply in this case, always keep your antivirus up to date and in addition, any storage device should be checked for viruses and other nasties before use. Just plug-in your USB flash drive, for example: go to my computer > the name or drive letter of your flash drive > and right click over it and choose scan with antivirus, or words to that effect. That should help keep the wolf from the door.