Backslash is doing a little spring cleaning and you can help! See, we’ve got a lot of extra stuff lying around and we’d like to get rid of it, so we’ve put it all on sale. Printers, cables, parts, and pieces — we have a bit of everything ready to go at incredible prices. Need a DVI monitor cable? How about a buck. Optical drive on the fritz? DVD-RW drives for as little as $10. You can pick up...

  Internet radio is cool, but not when it’s full of malware. If you get an email about a $29 charge on your credit card, don’t click on the included link. Doing so will install this pesky program and you’ll soon be listening to internet radio stations in the background. It doesn’t sound too bad, but it’s also spying on you while you listen. John and Steve discuss how to avoid this and other pieces of...

  Keep your cool, man! Dust and dirt are terrible for your computer system, but cleaning your machine improperly can cause more damage than good. John tells us how to take care of our expensive equipment to ensure a long life of computing.

  With no moving parts, solid state drives have all but eliminated mechanical problems with data storage. There are still some issues, however, so John and Steve talk about the benefits and pitfalls of SSDs. Listen to this week’s TechTalk to see if replacing your traditional hard drive with an SSD is a good idea in your...

The latest in Spring malware has arrived! While there are many things to watch out for on the Internet, sometimes the biggest threat is supposedly from your friends. No, your buddy isn’t out to get you, but his computer might be! John and Steve talk about Facebook malware and how to protect your machine....

  A fresh batch of malicious PDFs is making the rounds via email, with the attackers trying to trick users into opening the files by making them look like instructions for an update to their email accounts. The difference this time, however, is that the attack uses a technique recently published by a researcher that takes advantage of the /launch command in Adobe software. The technique enables an attacker to launch commands and...