Your Computer Friends wins Angie’s List Super Service Award 2011!

Wilmington Business Earns National Recognition For Excellence In Customer Service

Your Computer Friends receives the prestigious 2011 Angie’s List Super Service Award

Wilmington NC, February 14, 2012.   Wilmington-based Your Computer Friends,

a computer repair service, has earned the coveted 2011 Angie’s List Super Service Award.  Only 5% of all companies rated on the popular consumer review site meet the eligibility requirements necessary to be considered for the award, and even fewer actually receive it.

 

“It is really gratifying to have our service model validated.” said Your Computer Friends owner Susan Kadar.  “Our primary objective from the beginning has been take the best technical talent and marry that with the best customer service.  We took a look at the key issues facing most companies regarding computer use, maintenance and repair, and developed some very effective, process-oriented solutions.  Knowing you have a secure backup, a competent technical staff, and friendly customer support when you are ‘on the ledge’ are just some of the reasons our customers keep coming back year after year.  We answer our phones with dedicated staff, and are therefore available when our customers need us most.  And we have an internal testing process for technicians that guarantees the best, fastest service on-site or in the shop.”

Angie’s List Super Service Award winners have met strict eligibility requirements including earning a minimum number of reports, an exemplary rating from their customers and abiding by Angie’s List operational guidelines.

“We absolutely know that the technical quality of our work must meet our customer standards from our seniors to our HIPPA compliant practices.  I am proud to report that we have not once lost customer data since we opened our doors in April of 2006.  We have however, recovered quite a bit of data that our customers didn’t expect us to be able to, saving them thousands of dollars in rework time, and peace of mind in a theft case,” said Kadar. “We have operational policies and capabilities in place that our long-term customers appreciate, offering everything from basic computer training to encrypted cloud storage, Google Apps business email, web design and more.

If we don’t have what you need, we know who does.”

 

Your Computer Friends extends their philosophy of doing good work by consistently giving back to the community.  They hold computer recycling events 3 times a year, in January, April and September, and have recycled

over 8 tons of equipment over the past 6 years.   Your computer friends also repurposes computers for non-profits, and have donated equipment to Communities In Schools, More at Four, the Senior Center of Brunswick County, and the Cape Fear Literacy Council, on whose board of directors Kadar serves.

Your Computer Friends was founded by Susan Kadar after a career in high-level operations and project management positions with Fortune 50

communication companies, including AT & T and Verizon.   For more information on Your Computer Friends, please visit yourcomputerfriends.com.

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Filed under: All About Us, News, Small Business News, Best Buy, computer repair, mac repair, pc repair, screen repair, virus removal, Your Computer Friends

McAfee update causes XP Problems!

Oops, they did it again.

At 6AM yesterday, McAfee released an update to its antivirus definitions for corporate customers that had a slight problem. And by “slight problem,” I mean the kind that renders a PC useless until tech support shows up to repair the damage manually.

McAfee’s “DAT” file version 5958 is causing widespread problems with Windows XP SP3. The affected systems will enter a reboot loop and [lose] all network access. We have individual reports of other versions of Windows being affected as well. However, only particular configurations of these versions appear affected. The bad DAT file may infect individual workstations as well as workstations connected to a domain. The use of “ePolicyOrchestrator”, which is used to update virus definitions across a network, appears to have [led] to a faster spread of the bad DAT file. The ePolicyOrchestrator is used to update “DAT” files throughout enterprises. It can not be used to undo this bad signature because affected system will lose network connectivity.

The problem is a false positive which identifies a regular Windows binary, “svchost.exe”, as “W32/Wecorl.a”, a virus.

Engadget’s Nilay Patel quotes a statement from McAfee downplaying the impact on consumers:

The faulty update has been removed from McAfee download servers for corporate users, preventing any further impact on those customers. We are not aware of significant impact on consumer customers and believe we have effectively limited such occurrence.

That’s bad news for McAfee. Corporate customers are likely to tally up the one-day cost of fixing this damage (or multiple days, if Engadget’s report of tens of thousands of affected PCs within single companies is accurate), and they’re likely conclude that it’s time to find a new supplier of security software. At the very least, McAfee is going to have a lot of explaining to do at contract renewal time.

McAfee says it has already replaced the faulty virus definitions with an updated set, so if you update your definitions using the most recent set you will not encounter this issue. The company’s official recommendation for repairing the damage involves copying Svchost.exe from a working system and manually copying it to an affected system. The McAfee technical bulletin doesn’t include details about how to get to a command prompt on a system that’s been temporarily bricked. (Using an XP installation disk allows a tech support professional to boot to a recovery environment and copy the necessary files from a command prompt. The good folks at BleepingComputer.com have published a tutorial that explains the process. Third party recovery tools also provide access to the file system from command-line environments.) This sort of repair is not a job for end users, certainly, and generally requires a skilled support professional.

Now, it is hard to imagine picking a more crucial file to torpedo. Svchost.exe is one of the most crucial of all Windows system files. It hosts the services that make just about every OS function possible. As the symptoms described here suggest, Windows simply won’t start if Svchost.exe isn’t there.

The bigger question is how on earth an update like this ever made it out of the testing lab and onto a production server. This should have been caught at the very beginning of the testing process.

Unfortunately, though, this isn’t the first time McAfee has had a screw-up like this. Back in 2009, when the Conficker worm was making the rounds, I took a close look at how McAfee was handling its response to the new threat and was appalled at the sloppy, error-ridden documents they published for consumers and IT professionals

Source:  http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=2003&tag=nl.e019

Filed under: Computer Software, DIY - Do It Yourself, Small Business News, anti-virus problems, computer repair, mcafee, pc repair, virus removal, Your Computer Friends

BUY LOCAL!

Your Computer Friends attended the kick off meeting of the Buy Local campaign on Wednesday, October 28, 2009.   70 cents of every dollar spent at a local business stays locally, unlike money spent with National  Chain stores.  Since all that money stays local, it helps keep our local economy healthy and stable in these tough economic times.  For more about the Buy Local initiative see this article by Judy Royal of the Star News:

http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20091028/ARTICLES/910289943/1004?Title=Business-owners-start-buy-local-initiative

www.buylocalilm.com

 

 

 

 

Filed under: Small Business News, buy local, buylocalilm.com