Vicious W32/Virut Trojan

We are currently seeing an onslaught of computers infected with this trojan.  It is a deadly infection.  What it does is open up a door to the internet and communicate with other servers.  It downloads other infections onto your computers and also spreads, within hours, to every program file on your hard drive.  Once it’s on there, it’s near impossible to get rid of.  There are virtually no warning signs.  One day your computer will show your desktop wallpaper and nothing else, no icons or anything.

We are currently developing a strategy to effectively clean the Virut infection and it is proving to be a real challenge.  Not only does it infect, it brings in other infections and also creates devices that allow ongoing communications with the internet.

This infection has been rated as “severe” and needs to be dealt with immediately.  It is capable of infecting other computers around it.  If you suspect infection, unplug your computer from the network immediately.

We do advise that you bring your computer in to a professional for repair.  The standard tools will not, as of this writing, remove or in any way deal with the infection.

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A helpful tweak for Windows 7 and Vista

Do those annoying little popups (called “tooltips”) bother you when your mouse cursor hovers over things like the icons in Windows 7 or Vista?  This little tweak will allow you to increase or decrease the time you have before they show up:

1. Click Start > Run and type regedit and press enter
2. Browse to Hkey_Current_User > Control Panel > Mouse
3. Locate the MouseHoverTime key
4. Highlight it, right click it and select modify
5. Change that value from 400 to 1 and click ok
6. Close the Registry Editor and reboot the computer for the change to take affect

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One year at our new location!

Yes, it’s true!  It was February 1st, 2008 when we moved to our new location on Bayfield St.  It was a tough decision to make, moving from strictly onsite to a retail/office location, but the results and response has been tremendous.  This year has been one of amazing and unprecedented growth.

We’d like to thank all our clients for making that first year a huge success.  Word of mouth business now comprises 50% of all new business.  We appreciate your business and look forward to many more years to come.

Thanks again!

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Busy week!

A lot has been going on this week.  Despite being business as usual with the computer repairs, I’ve been working hard behind the scenes.

First, I’ve been looking hard at our computer sales, especially parts.  A lot of research went into it and I was able to bring the price down on several of our top end products.  As our sales volume increases, we’re passing the savings onto our clients.

Second is our payment options.  I’m pleased to announce that along with Paypal, we’ve also added Mastercard and Visa to the list.  This has been a long time in coming and I’m very pleased to finally have something in place.  Please note that minimum purchase amounts apply.

Third on the list is inventory.  I’ve been putting in some late hours building up our laptop parts inventory.  As many of you already know we’ve been focusing on positioning ourselves as one of, if not the, fastest turnarounds of any computer repair depot in Simcoe County.  We’re now actively targetting our laptop repair which comprises a huge portion of our drop-off business. 

To this end we’ve been bringing in laptop motherboards, adapters, power jacks, laptop screen replacements, hard drives (including the older IDE drives) and memory (RAM).  We’ve also started adding keyboards and batteries to the list.  Our commitment is to give our clients fast, simple efficient repair service.

We’ve also been actively collecting a mass of tools to make our jobs even more efficient in everything from data recovery to routine installs.

Fourth we’ve finally got caught up with our Quickbooks invoicing.  This should streamline our back-end processes and help us be even more effective at addressing your needs.

At Northern Protocol Inc. we are consistently looking at ways to improving our service to you.  If you have any suggestions please don’t hesitate to drop us an email.  We’d love to hear from you.

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