Available in 162 markets and 21 different languages, Office 365 Home Premium costs $99.99 per year, or a bit over $8 per month, and allows for up to 5 installs of a full Office suite—which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access 2013 on Windows—on Windows PCs and tablets, and Macs. (Other devices will be included in the future, Microsoft notes.) Subscribers can also take advantage of Office On Demand, which provides streaming access to any Office 2013 application from any PC, an additional 20 GB of SkyDrive cloud storage, 60 minutes of Skype world calling per month, and access to all future upgrades.

Read the full article at Windows IT Pro here

If you’re curious whether Office 365 Home Premium is or will be a good fit for your home computers, or if you’re interested in implementing Office 365 in your business to synchronize your email, contacts & calendar across multiple devices and employees, feel free to contact Computer Troubleshooters for more info!

….now is the time to do it!

Until January 31st, Microsoft is offering Windows 8 Pro for $39.99 as a digital download (Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista, Windows 7 installation required) or $69.99 for a DVD installation.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/buy

If you’re interested in upgrading and think you might need help to make the transition, let Computer Troubleshooters know, we’ll be glad to help!

Email kelowna@technologysolved.ca or call Jason at 250.681.7621 for help with this or any other computer or technology issue that you need solved.

Read the full article on PcMag.com here.

You can also purchase directly genuine OEM HP ink toner cartridges, black ink, copier toner, fax toner as well as products for Canon, Xerox, Sharp, Lexmark, Okidata and Brother printers.  We can handle all your ink & toner needs!

Contact Computer Troubleshooters to set up your own InkMart online portal (or else you can login here to set up your account yourself – use the Create Account option).  We can help you evaluate your needs and setup your portal so all you’ll need to do is login and click to order your next batch of ink & toner for all the printers in your business or home.  With guaranteed savings of 30% – 70% on high-quality, high-yield ink & toner, plus a 10% discount on first-time order AND free shipping on ALL orders over $50, you really can’t go wrong!

Order today and you will receive your order to your door within a day or two.

Link to Inkmart Canada

This particular wave of attacks includes some attacks that are frighteningly real looking. And they’re being used to serve up a toxic brew of malware to unprotected systems.

Read the original article at ZDnet here.

Let that sink in for a minute. Apple is trying to use intellectual property law as a bludgeon around the world to protect its sales.

Around the globe the battle goes. In Australia, Samsung wins, for now, the right to sell their Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. In Germany, Samsung redesigns the same tablet in an attempt to avoid a European Union wide sales ban. And, the battle goes on and on…

Read the entire article on ZDNet.com here

You’ve got enough to do without your computer acting up and wasting hours or days of your valuable time. One call to Computer Troubleshooters will get you honest, professional and reliable help by someone who understands exactly what you’re going through, has the tools and knowledge to get the job done, and has a global network of experts to back them up.  Click the green ‘Find Troubleshooters’ button to find your nearest Computer Troubleshooter!

Savvy consumers turn to the internet to check out the pedigree of a business, so it’s important to stand out from your competitors.  An ‘online chat’ on your site would enable your prospective clients to ask a question & receive an immediate answer, provided by someone in a sales or administration role.  Video content on your site (or linked to from YouTube) is great for engaging people instead of pages of text.  Also, regular email marketing campaigns and newsletters are an easy way to keep in touch with prospects that aren’t quite ready to buy from you just yet.  If a change to any of your website’s content means a call to your IT provider, look at a ‘content management’ based platform that allows you to make changes to text and post news updates without any coding knowledge.

Once reserved only for large corporations with big budgets, there are now a number of affordable solutions which allow secure remote access for your staff into your business network, to either access their files or even control their entire office computer and applications.  This can give your staff a greater degree of flexibility with their work hours, leading to greater productivity. You could even consider ‘cloud storage’ or hosting of your business information to make your office ‘virtual’ and accessible from wherever you have an internet connection.  Keep in touch with your remote workers with video conferencing software and an inexpensive internet camera and microphone.  This virtual team concept can be extended to include your clients and suppliers too, removing geographical boundaries.  If sharing files like documents or photographs with your contacts could improve your business, ignore the attachment size limits imposed on most email systems and look at an alternative solution for easy, secure file sharing.

Seek out suppliers and educational institutions that use the internet for online presentations (or webinars). These can be watched from the comfort of your own computer and may include a chat option if they are live. Some webinars are recorded, allowing you to inform or upskill yourself at your own pace, at convenient times.  Could your clients benefit from a webinar group training presentation on your products or services too?

The internet can also supplement traditional IT practices.  It enables fast, remote support from your Computer Troubleshooter who can connect to see your error message first-hand, without having to drive to your location.  It also allows for secure backups of your critical information to another location ‘offsite’, without having to transport hard disks or tapes. And if you haven’t looked at the cost savings of ‘Voice over IP’ yet, it’s worth considering instead of your traditional telephone service.

If this sounds a little daunting and you don’t know where to start, talk to Jason, your local Computer Troubleshooter at kelowna@technologysolved.ca, to help squeeze as much benefit as you can from the internet and your technology.

Microsoft said hackers exploited a previously unknown bug in its Windows operating system to infect computers with the Duqu virus, which some security experts say could be the next big cyber threat.

“We are working diligently to address this issue and will release a security update for customers,” Microsoft said a short statement.

News of Duqu surfaced in October when security software maker Symantec said it had analysed a mysterious new computer virus discovered by independent researchers that contained code similar to Stuxnet, a piece of malicious software believed to have wreaked havoc on Iran’s nuclear program.

Government and private investigators are racing to unlock the secret of Duqu, with early analysis suggesting that it was developed by sophisticated hackers to help lay the groundwork for attacks on critical infrastructure such as power plants, oil refineries and pipelines.

Senior vice president of McAfee Labs Vincent Weafer later said the virus was the first step in laying the ground for possible attacks onto critical infrastructure. He said it would take a few weeks for security companies to start to detect infections in machines around the world now that they knew what they were looking for.

Details on how Duqu got onto machines emerged for the first time on Tuesday as Microsoft disclosed its link to the infection.

Separately, Symantec researchers said they believe hackers sent the virus to targeted victims via emails with tainted Microsoft Word documents attached.

If a recipient opened the Word document and infected the PC, the attacker could take control of the machine and reach into an organisation’s network to propagate itself and hunt for data, Symantec researcher Kevin Haley told Reuters.

He said some of the source code used in Duqu was also used in Stuxnet, a cyber weapon believed to have crippled centrifuges that Iran uses to enrich uranium.

That suggests that the attackers behind Stuxnet either gave that code to the developers of Duqu, allowed it to be stolen, or are the same people who built Duqu, Haley said.

“We believe it is the latter,” he said.

But other security experts have said they do not believe Duqu was written by the same people as Stuxnet.

“Although the Duqu rootkit has been attributed to the Stuxnet gang, we believe the two e-threats are completely unrelated,” said Catalin Cosoi, head of the Bitdefender Online Threats Lab, in a statement.

“Stuxnet has been successfully reverse-engineered and its code was published online earlier this year. Now, Stuxnet is serving as a source of inspiration for other cyber-criminal gangs. That code is serving as open source for the virus community, basically adding millions of dollars in value to the virus community’s R&D.”

Ty Miller, CTO of Pure Hacking, said was highly likely to be one part of a larger operation.

“Organisations within Australia who run SCADA systems should ensure that all precautions are taken to minimise risk. Since the 0-day exploit is within Word documents, all Word attachments should be treated as malicious until a patch has been implemented.”

Symantec said Word file infection is “just one of potentially multiple installer methods that may have been used by attackers to infect computers in different organisations”.

Just like its predecessor – the Stuxnet rootkit – Rootkit.Duqu.A is digitally signed with a stolen digital certificate that has been revoked in the meantime. This allows it to install itself on both 32- and 64-bit operating systems on Windows platforms ranging from Windows XP to Windows 7.

The Duqu rootkit runs on the computer for 36 days and collects any kind of information entered via the keyboard, including passwords, e-mail or IM conversations. After the “surveillance” period ends, the rootkit gracefully removes itself from the system, along with the keylogger component.

Contact Computer Troubleshooters for more information about how to effectively protect yourself from these kinds of threats.