Chatham County Computer Repair Services and Networking: Siler City, Pittsboro, Goldston, Fearrington, Bonlee, Bennett, Silk Hope, and more

I’ve been sitting in front of a computer almost every day of my life since I was three years old, so I eventually got around to thinking, “why not use all the experience I’ve accumulated to create a team of amazingly skilled computer aficionados?”  Since I set out to do just that and opened up shop, we’ve been in Siler City for around half a year now, starting with just myself and one other technician.  Since then, we have clearly provided a sorely needed service in Chatham County, because I now have four in-shop and at least two regional on-site computer techs doing work for me.  You see, we have some “crazy” ideas about doing business, such as **putting customers first** instead of our own wallets, and we’re willing to tell you exactly what’s going on without holding back information or making pie-in-the-sky promises.  Here, it’s not about the bottom line, it’s about YOU.

If you’re looking for anything computer related for your home or business, we can help you.  We’re aiming to be a one-stop computer shop, and we do pretty much everything you can imagine.  Since our opening, we’ve already set up or done major overhauls on a few local business technology infrastructures, and almost every single day, customers are waiting outside of our front door for us to open up because we’re that good at what we do.

Because we’re also the only shop I know of that is a convenient drive for Chatham County residents that deals with Macs and Linux, we’ve also helped local people who previously had no local support whatsoever for those computing platforms.  We also perform some repairs that most other shops don’t usually offer, such as replacing bad capacitors on motherboards, which has saved tons of our customers from buying expensive new computers with a simple $80 procedure.  We offer the best price you’ll find anywhere on laptop hardware and power jack repairs, typically half the cost of most competitors and totaling at least $19 less than the cheapest national laptop jack specialists as well.

I think that what ultimately makes us different is the fact that we care.  We care about you and your computer, and we care about your specific needs.  We want you to be happy.  You’re not just a number or a source of income.  You’re a prized and valued customer the second you walk in the door.  That’s all there is to it.  It might not be the way other people do business, but by gosh, it’s OUR way, and it’s going to STAY that way.

Areas we provide services in include Siler City, Pittsboro, Goldston, Fearrington, Bonlee, Bennett, Silk Hope, Ramseur, Asheboro, Liberty, and even in more distant places such as Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Durham, Apex, Cary, Raleigh, and Garner.  On-site or in-shop; it’s all up to you!  Call us and tell us how we can help you out.

As for the obligatory details, we’re at 1416 East 11th Street, Siler City, NC  27344.  Our hours are 10-7 M-F, 12-4 Saturday, closed Sunday.  You can reach us by phone at (919) 200-6003 (which automatically kicks over to a second line if the first one is busy) and on the Web at nctritech.com you can read much more about us and what we do.  Thanks again to all of our customers who’ve helped us to be such a huge success!  We love all of you!

(It occurred to me that I haven’t made a single post actually plugging my business for the local areas it covers; that’s why I wrote this.)

Antivirus 2010 on the horizon…and how we’ll help destroy it!

I just put up a new site in anticipation of the latest nuisance that I only recently came into contact with: “Antivirus 2010.”  You can view the new site at removeantivirus2010.com, but be aware that it’s pre-release at the moment, which is why I haven’t done any SEO or cross-linking for it yet beyond this post.

Antivirus 2010 is the successor to the infamous beasts “Antivirus 2009″ and “XP Antivirus 2008.”  The scammers behind these fake security programs have literally raked in hundreds of millions of dollars, and I’m quite sick of seeing them on our customers’ computers.  The major problem with removing these kinds of beasties lies in their inner workings: they use rootkit tactics inside kernel-mode drivers loaded very early in the boot process to hide themselves from any and all anti-virus and anti-spyware solutions on the market.  The loaded driver’s name always starts with the capitalized string “TDSS” and the older versions use “TDSSserv.sys” as the name.  The ultimate problem is that there is no simple way to delete this driver because of the security manipulation done by this virus: the service registry key permissions are typically null, automatically meaning everything in Windows is denied access to it and successfully hiding it from programs like AutoRuns, StartupList, MSConfig, and HijackThis; furthermore, the virus hooks numerous key NT kernel system calls and “edits itself out of the list” whenever a directory listing or process list is requested by any program on the system, such as Task Manager, Windows Explorer, and even whatever antivirus solution you use.

Worst of all, it locks your system down like this even in safe mode, and its early boot loading means boot-time scanning solutions such as Avast’s can’t get rid of it either.  It’s a truly clever little booger, immune from all your favorite security software.

Spybot can’t get it, nor Ad-Aware or Malwarebytes.  We can get it all gone, but traditionally you had to call a very highly skilled and expensive local technician to get this stuff removed, because a clean boot environment is required as well as somewhat complicated knowledge about the inner workings of Windows and how viruses tend to slip up in the process of securing their presence on your system.  Antivirus 2010 makes almost no mistakes, so you’re currently stuck either getting that expensive local tech or reinstalling.

Until now.

I’m currently writing software that will give Tritech access to a 100% clean environment remotely–free from viruses and spyware, which enables us to perform these horribly difficult virus removals remotely.  The details will remain a secret, but suffice it to say that there are precisely zero computer service providers in the industry today that can perform this kind of service right now: the kind of custom software needed poses a significant barrier to entry, and the alternatives are so much easier and safer to rely on.

It’s revolutionary.  Plain and simple.  No one else we’ve found does anything like it.  We’ve checked.  Regardless of whether you need to remove Antivirus 2010, remove Antivirus 360, remove Antivirus 2009, remove SecurityCenter 2009, or remove any other disgusting infection, we’re rolling out a campaign that can get it done, regardless of your location.  You don’t have to find a local tech and you don’t have to pay out the yin-yang.

Imagine getting this done wherever you are in the world, even if you’re in a hotel in Germany, and paying as little as $30 to have it done.  Geek Squad charges a minimum of $199 (I really hate that whole “$999.99 can be advertised as under $1,000″ pricing scheme! GRR!!!) to do this in-store, and they don’t even offer over-the-internet virus and spyware removal.  PlumChoice charges nearly $90 just to hop on their “SmartPlan,” and they can’t do what we do without an on-site appointment either. iYogi…well, if you think you’ll get this kind of quality and experience at their pricing level, you deserve what you get…they’re like a version of Dell’s Indian tech support that you actually pay money for, and you shouldn’t be supporting the iYogi Craigslist spammers anyway.

Bottom line: only Tritech Computer Solutions in Siler City, North Carolina, USA can remove difficult infections of viruses and spyware over the Internet.  No one else does this, period.

(Edit: a commenter objected to this statement, indicating that it implies other remote computer service providers are ill-equipped to handle difficult virus infections.  The distinction lies in the fact that no one that we have looked at currently does anything like what we’re rolling out; they certainly COULD do it, but they don’t; that’s why it says “no one else does this” instead of “no one else is capable of doing this.”  What we’re rolling out is unique, and fills a niche currently worked around by hiring a local technician…which sort of negates the purpose of “remote computer support” in the first place.  See comments on this post for more information.)

The only bad news is that this is still a work in progress.  I’ll update this post when that changes, as well as post a new one.  We’re looking to have this support platform completely up and running within about two weeks; more testing is necessary before release to ensure maximum reliability, but when this service of ours officially opens for business, it’s going to completely pull the rug out from under all of our competitors, and we can literally say that NO ONE ELSE does it.  We’re truly one of a kind in this industry.

Hooking up a wireless router to DSL service

One of my customers recently contacted me because she had moved her computer equipment and her DSL service subsequently stopped working.  I had to explain to her that she should plug her DSL modem into a COMPUTER (LAN) port on her router, rather than the INTERNET (WAN) port.  Problem solved.

“But that’s not how you’re supposed to connect a wireless router!” you might exclaim.  Let me explain the why and how of the situation.

DSL connects using a technique that essentially amounts to “dial-up for high-speed connections” known as PPPoE (Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet), and back in “the good old days” when you got a DSL connection, you also got a DSL modem that directly connected your computer to the DSL network.  The problem with that is that you still have to “dial up” to get on your DSL, one of the annoyances that cable Internet service providers conveniently remove from the user’s experience.

In order to compete better with cable, the telephone companies started using a different kind of DSL modem that would perform almost all of the functions you get in a non-wireless router.  Modern DSL modems typically “dial up” and maintain the DSL connection for you.  One of the side effects of this is that the vast majority of these “self-dialing” DSL modems also provide router functions as well.  This means that it assigns each of your computers a private IP address and is capable of “splitting” the connection such that more than one machine can use the DSL connection at once.

The big nasty problem: many of them don’t have wireless capability, nor do they have more than ONE port for you to plug a computer into.  They appear to work just like cable modems, where you can almost “plug-n-go” (after setting up your user name and password for the “dial-up” part), but they don’t look like they have any router functions at all.

Enter your own $50 wireless router.  You plug it into the DSL modem and…maybe it works, but typically it just doesn’t.  You also can’t forward ports e.g. for gaming if you use a DSL modem with an internal router connected to yet another router doing routing yet again.  What happens if you follow the directions in the router’s manual is sketchy at best.

(Before you read on, you need to make sure that the DSL modem works and you can browse the Internet without issues.)

Now, enter my solution to the problem!  All you need is the IP address for the router, which can easily be acquired from the ISP, or quite accurately guessed if you connect the computer to the DSL modem directly, go to a command prompt [Start, Run, "cmd"] and type in “ipconfig,” and use the “gateway address” that appears there.  (Type “exit” to close a command prompt.)  Once you’ve got the IP address for the router, connect the new wireless router only to a computer.  You can use the same “ipconfig” trick as above to get the router’s IP address, and type that IP address into the web browser of your choice.  It will likely ask for a user name and password; the most common combinations for a brand new router tend to be the following:

• admin, (blank password)
• (blank user name), admin
• admin, admin
• admin, password

Your router’s instruction manual should tell you these if you’re not sure.  Once you’re in the router’s configuration controls, you can then proceed to do the following:

1. If the router’s IP address doesn’t start with the same three numbers as the DSL modem, you have to change the router’s LAN configuration so that the first three numbers match.  For example, if the router is at 192.168.2.1 and the DSL modem uses 192.168.1.254, you need to get the router to switch over to start with “192.168.1.” first.  This may be called the “router IP address” or the “LAN IP address.”  When you change and apply this setting, you may have to re-type the IP for the router so that the first three digits match the new settings (192.168.1.1 in this example) and log back into the router.
2. With the router’s IP address and the DSL modem’s IP address in the same “range,” you now must ensure the DSL modem and the router don’t have the exact same IP address.  For example, both cannot be 192.168.1.1 at the same time as this will cause them to “break” each other when they are connected together.  Change the router’s IP to end in 1 or 254, depending on the DSL modem’s IP.  This may also be under LAN settings, however I have seen Linksys routers where this is on the first page and you don’t have to even look hard for it.  If you change and apply this setting, you’ll have to re-type the IP for the router as at the end of (1) above.
3. Your DSL modem and wireless router both start with the same three nunbers (192.168.1 in this example) but end in different numbers (1 for wireless router, 254 for DSL here).  The final step is to disable DHCP or “IP address assignment” on the wireless router.  This prevents the wireless router from giving computers its own configuration, and allows the DSL modem with routing capabilities to do so instead.  This is usually just a check box that you un-check.  Once you’ve applied this setting, you’ve completed the hard part of the router configuration.
4. You may want to take the opportunity to set up your wireless router’s encryption options since you’re already in there.  The best bet will be WPA-PSK, as this is generally compatible with almost everything out there today and does not require any patching for most Windows XP laptops.  WPA2 is stronger but somewhat incompatible, and WEP is weak but extremely compatible with practically every wireless device under the sun.  All of these options keep the neighbors from, say, robbing Bank of America blind via your Internet connection (not that they’re using $100’s as napkins right now, given the current financial market crisis) and BofA and the FBI tracing it back to your house!
5. Connect the DSL modem to one of the Computer or LAN ports on the back of the wireless router, not to the Internet or WAN port because it is guaranteed to fail if you do.  Plug any computers into the router’s remaining Computer or LAN ports, connect laptops to the new wireless network, and things should Magically Just Work(TM).

Why go through all this complicated stuff to set up the DSL connection?  The alternative is setting up the DSL modem in “bridged mode,” setting up the wireless router to dial-up via PPPoE, giving it your username and password, and setting it to be a keep-alive connection.  Some DSL modem firmware doesn’t even give you the ability to use “bridged mode” at all, meaning that you may not even have that option!

This method essentially converts your wireless router into a “wireless bridge with 3-port switch.”  The computers and DSL modem don’t know that anything has changed, and generally speaking it hasn’t.  The big difference is that now you can connect your wireless devices to the same network.  By cutting out a second routing system, you give yourself the ability to open ports on the DSL modem for applications such as gaming, if needed in the future, and if you replace your DSL modem with another that works the same way, you don’t have to make changes to anything at all because the DSL modem being in “bridged mode” is no longer relevant.  (What if your ISP took away bridging?  They wouldn’t, but what if they did?  Your loss, eh?)

I connect all DSL clients this way.  It’s more easily serviced by the client if something goes wrong, and it’s far faster and more reliable to set up than mucking around with PPPoE and DSL modem network bridging.

What’s most important, though, is that it works and works well.  Ultimately, that’s all we care about.