Making IT Work

We now have an items for sale section for second hand refurbished computers, laptops and peripherals.  Items available for delivery to UK mainland only.  See our Items for sale section under the Residential and Business menu's or here.

System Security is a fake alert pop up that tries to get you to buy an ineffective antivirus product.  You do not want to give these people your credit/debit card details.

System Security is easily removed by Malwarebytes anti-malware.  Malwarebytes classifies System Security as Rogue.systemsecurity, Trojan.FakeAlert, Rogue.AntivirusPlus.

The screen shots show how this piece of malware tries very hard to look as genuine as possible.

This looks suspiciouly similar to the genuine Windows Security centre.

It also puts a shield that looks like the Windows Update shield in the System Tray.

A reminder to run an update.  What will it download and install?  Only more trouble!

Oh look what I've found.  I've found a virus on your system.  You need to buy me to remove this infection!  It is right about one thing.  Your system is infected but not by what it claims. 

Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 (SBS 2008) implements user disk and mailbox quotas by default.  The quotas are limited to 2GB.  The same applies in Small Business Server 2003 but the administering and changing these defaults was a well worn path.  Until the same applies to SBS 2008 there are three places you need to visit to make the changes.

1. To make changes to disk quotas goto "Start", "Server Manager".  Expand "Roles", "File Server Resource Manager", "Quota Management" "Quotas".  Either change your quota policy or delete your quota policy. Show me.
2. You will need to remove or change any quotas under User Roles.  You get to User Roles Via the Windows SBS Console from the "Start" button.  Select the "Users and Groups" tab then open each of the Role names you want to change.  Select the "E-Mail" link and either uncheck the "Enforce the mailbox quotas" or change the "Maximum mailbox size (in GB):".  Show Me.

There have been quite a few instances of loss of internet following the batch of Windows updates on 7 July 2008.  The symptoms are that you cannot access web pages or retrieve email.  The routers appear to be connected and you can ping servers and get responses.  The initial diagnosis is that this has to be down to a firewall issue and its soon emerged that the combination of Windows Update known as KB951748 and ZoneAlarm resulted in loss of internet.  The initial cure is to either uninstall the update or reduce Zonealarm security settings to medium.  Unfortunately we saw loss of internet even where the security setting was medium.  The best solution is to uninstall Zonealarm, reboot, test you can now browse the internet and then download the current release of Zonealarm and install that.

If you know someone who has this problem then pass on this advice.