Tag: hp

Common tech support and “Microsoft” scams: don’t fall for them!

I have been seeing A LOT of people lately who have been caught in today’s most common computer scams.

I want to review them briefly and help you avoid making a mistake and giving control of your computer or bank account to a scammer. All of them are modern takes on the “snake oil” smoke-and-mirrors show from history designed to separate you from your money.

There are three ways that the latest wave of tech scams work:

  1. You get a random call from someone claiming to be from Microsoft or another large computer company, sometimes on all of your cell and home phones in a short time frame. They’re always sporting a fairly heavy foreign accent and phrase things strangely. They’ll tell you all kinds of stories about how terrible your computer is or how many viruses you’re leaking on the Internet. It’ll sound REALLY BAD. They’ll offer to help you fix it…for a price of course.
  2. The pop-up scary talking warning! Your browser loads an infected website or a malicious ad and gets kicked over to a HUGE SCARY WARNING that says your computer is infected and you need to call the number on the screen. If your speakers aren’t muted, it’ll also talk to you in a synthesized voice. If you call, you’ll get the same people as in (1) but this time they didn’t have to luck up and cold-call you, plus you’ll already be terrified so they can trick you into doing what they want.
  3. You call “tech support” for a large company like HP or Dell. You’re not really talking to an HP or Dell employee; you’re talking to an iYogi employee in India whose job is to sell you a support contract. I’m not sure if they’re the same people doing the other two, but it’s the same song and dance as the other two: you’ll get a nice show hyping up how horrible of a situation your computer is in and a hard sell on buying support from them.

In all of these situations, the person on the phone will want to use remote support tools such as TeamViewer or Citrix GoToAssist to get remote control of your computer. Once they have remote control, they are capable of doing ANYTHING THEY WANT to your computer, though they don’t usually seem to infect machines; it’s mainly a high-pressure sales pitch for $300 of computer snake oil.

CUT SCAMS OFF BEFORE THEY CAN AFFECT YOU.

For cold-call scammers in (1), hang up quickly. If they call again later, keep hanging up. The more they talk, the more likely it is that they’ll convince you to remote them in and pay up.

For the huge scary pop-up in (2), open Task Manager and kill your browser from there. If that’s not working out, just hold the power button on the computer for five seconds and it’ll shut off. Your computer IS NOT INFECTED. If it happens again after rebooting, try power-cycling your modem and router; these can get temporarily “infected” in a way that causes the computer to land on these scary sites quickly, but this “infection” doesn’t survive the power to the box being unplugged.

For the big corporate tech support calls in (3), it’s a bit more difficult because sometimes you’ll be talking to a legitimate support agent that isn’t going to try to scam you. The key things that tell you it’s going to be a scam are that they (A) want to get remote access to your computer without spending a lot of time trying to talk you through it first, (B) they tell you that your computer has serious problems and want to help you fix them, or (C) they mention money at any point in the process. IF ANY OF THESE THREE THINGS HAPPENS, try calling back or seek help from someone else that you trust. Make sure you’re calling the support phone number on the manufacturer’s official website as well!

Almost all of the computers I’ve checked in the past month that were targeted by these scams didn’t have any serious problems before or after the scammer got on, but many of my customers had to initiate chargebacks on their cards or change their bank accounts or get their cards exchanged which is frustrating and annoying.

If you’re in or near the Chatham County, Randolph County, Orange County, or Wake County areas of North Carolina and you’re concerned that your computer has been messed up by a scammer, you can get support from me at Tritech Computer Solutions in Siler City, including 100% free in-store diagnostics and repair quotes.

HP Deskjet 2540 series (2542, 2543) won’t print at all? Try this…

I helped a customer with a Windows XP computer who purchased a brand new HP Deskjet 2542 to get his printer (which says on the box that it supports XP!) to work. The first printer I had him take back due to it not printing any documents at all and the alignment page missing many lines of information. The second printer would print an alignment page but would not print ANY documents, not even a printer test page. Here’s what I initially tried to get it to work:

  1. Updating the printer firmware
  2. Changing the USB cable
  3. Changing from USB to wireless connectivity
  4. Changing the network connectivity from JetDirect RAW on port 9100 to IPP
  5. Updating the driver from the provided CD to the latest driver from HP
  6. Changing the print processor from “XPS_EP -> RAW” to “WinPrint -> RAW”
  7. Trying random HP printer drivers that come with Windows XP
  8. An uneventful exorcism

Nothing worked until I tried the HP PSC 950 driver. After installing the printer, I brought up its properties, then used the “New Driver” button on the Advanced tab to switch the printer driver. The HP management software works regardless of the actual printer driver selected and the HP PSC 950 driver prints consistently. It’s sad that HP’s own drivers don’t work but a random old HP printer driver that probably shouldn’t work does the job.

“Special by default” function keys: a dumb idea

So many PC laptops, particularly those in the cheaper range, are now shipping with “special functions” such as screen brightness adjustment and wireless adapter on/off switching as the default action when you press the F1 through F12 function keys. On what planet was this a good idea? What kind of morons were sitting around at HP and Dell going “gee, no one ever uses F-keys, so let’s make them do something else?”

What’s the keyboard shortcut for closing a program? It’s Alt-F4. This has not changed since the days of Windows 3.1, and is a very commonly used keyboard shortcut with anyone that knows what keyboard shortcuts are at all. Not having to shuffle a mouse to the top-right corner of a box to close it literally saves many seconds of effort, and those seconds add up when multiplied across an entire day’s work. Now, however, Dell’s infinite wisdom has decided that the out-of-the-box configuration requires pressing the “Fn” function modifier key to use any of the F1-F12 keys for the functions they have maintained on their own for the past two decades. (Apparently Microsoft isn’t adding any extra combinations for “Alt-Brightness Down” anytime soon.) So, when  I get on a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop to perform service work, I hit Alt+F4 to close windows and instead of having the intended behavior, I just accidentally turned down the LCD brightness. Now I’m on the hook to press F5 to bump up the brightness again, then hit Alt+Fn+F4 to do what I originally intended.

Oh, but if you think that’s bad, it gets far far worse! Let’s say I’m downloading a big driver file for a printer or display adapter, because these are always hundreds of megabytes in size, yet 98% of the download is extra crap that isn’t required for printing a document or making a video card show cute rotating boxes. I’m waiting on a 200MB HP printer driver to come down the pipe, and while I wait, I’m performing other tasks. I find a file I need to rename for some reason, so I click the file and hit F2 to bring up the renaming function in Windows Explorer.

Guess what? Some complete and total asshats at Dell assigned F2 to be the magical key that disables the internal wireless adapter. Instead of renaming a file as intended, I just killed my wireless connection and lost the entire download. All that time waiting is lost as well, so I now get the privilege of waiting even longer for something that never should have been aborted in the first place. Just to make matters even worse, F2 is immediately above the number 2. Anyone who needs to type a 2 and overshoots the stroke could easily end up killing off their Internet connection instead. HP isn’t much better; while they usually put the wireless switch control on the F11 key instead of F2, F11 is still above the last keys on the number row and is still easy to accidentally press. Other functions such as internal/external monitor switching are almost as annoying, but tend to self-correct when they notice there’s no monitor to switch to, and so are somewhat more forgivable.

In the BIOS settings for most of these systems, an option exists to restore the function keys to their normal function key behavior, as it should be! The user should never have to change a BIOS settings on a factory released computer just to make the keyboard work properly! My problem is that the default setting from the factory is the one which is in favor of accidentally killing off your Internet connection and messing up your screen brightness. In my extremely not-humble opinion, every manufacturer that does this is stupid. No one should purchase these computers. It’s not worth supporting this level of ignorance about how a computer is used. Combine this kind of foolishness with the “ClickPad” garbage that’s being put into lots of laptops nowadays, particularly in HP laptops, and some of the ridiculous keyboard layouts on cheap Compaqs from the past few years, and you have a recipe for a brain-dead, productivity-hostile pile of crap laptops that I wouldn’t accept for free.

Add one more thing to the growing list of “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” nonsense I’m so tired of tolerating these days. Grumble, grumble.

those seconds

Synaptics ClickPad: by far the dumbest laptop touchpad ever invented

There isn’t much to say about these abominations, so I’ll keep it short. Many new laptops, most often from HP, are coming with multitouch trackpads known as “ClickPads.” Whoever designed them is a complete idiot, because the mouse buttons are directly underneath the bottom of the touch surface itself! There is no clean way to tap a button with your thumb with another finger on the touch surface. Other than very cautiously placing a single finger down on the desired button, there is no way to avoid moving the pointer while attempting to click. In fact, the only way to fix the misbehavior is to install the latest Synaptic drivers and, buried deep within the advanced options, reduce the functional area of the pad to not include the button section.

WHO COMES UP WITH THIS CRAP?!