“A well known telephone scam is now being used on cellular telephones.”

“If you receive a phone call on your mobile from any person saying that he or she is a company engineer, or telling that they’re checking your mobile line, and you have to press 90#.”

“End this call immediately without pressing any numbers. There is a fraud company using a device that once you press 90# they can access your “SIM” card and make calls at your expense.”

“Forward this message to as many friends as you can to stop it.”

AND

“If you are ever forced to withdraw monies from an ATM machine, you can notify the police by entering your PIN # in reverse order. The machine will still give you the monies you requested, but unknown to the robber, etc, the police will be immediately dispatched to help you.”

OK, I’ve had enough from some of my well meaning readers and one or two relatives in particular.  Please STOP sending me warnings like these.  They are hardly ever true and I have written about ones similar to the above two before, but many people just don’t get it.

The two above are resurfacing from a couple of years ago.  And they, like all other crazy warnings are false. At least these two are based on pieces of truth.

The 90# was related to something that could have possibly happened in the past, but no longer.  In the past some commercial phone systems only required you to dial “9″ for an outside line, there is a very slight possibility that this could have led to something but no longer.  Also home phones and cells phones can not be affected by this so don’t forward this message to anyone. 

The Reverse PIN trick was explored by Joseph Zingher in 1994 or 1998 (I’m not sure this is true since I have found multiple references to him that disagree on his employment and dates).  He thought up the idea although no ATMs have ever used it.  I have read that it would cost too much money and the police may not be able to get to the scenes quickly enough.  In addition, under pressure, you may not be capable of remembering your PIN backward.  Consider also those pesky palindromic numbers like 2992 or 1221 or even 5555?

Just Google a few words from these warnings and find out BEFORE you send them to others that they are fakes.  For one of the above I just pasted “you have to press 90#” into Google.com and in a second found that it was an obvious Urban Legend.  Don’t waste your friends’ and relatives’ time.

Oh, by-the-way, have you heard that there is someone online who wishes to meet you and is lonely tonight…give it up please!

Tags: computer, computer help, doyle, internet, newspaper column, Ron Doyle, Urban Legend

I got several emails about transferring files from old computers to new Christmas computers recently.   They wanted to know the best/easiest/least expensive way to move old, but still important files onto the new computer.

First — don’t move your program files.  For instance you don’t want to transfer a game to your new computer, primarily because it won’t work.  Programs must be installed on your new computer because when a program installs, it writes information in many places on your computer that you don’t know about.  Without just one small bit of that information it won’t work.  So gather all those CDs you threw in a drawer somewhere and start installing them on your new computer; when you have plenty of time.

The data files or files that you have created using those programs, can be transferred to your new computer a number of ways.  These are files like photos, the book you are writing, drawings, scans, poetry, etc.

An easy way is to copy them to CDs or DVDs with your burners (hopefully both computers have one).  Next, copy the files from the CD or DVD to the new computer.  One CD can hold a lot of info (about 700 MB) and a DVD can hold about 7 times that (4.7 GB).  This is an easy, fairly inexpensive way but it will take a while. 

If you don’t have a burner you can use a flash drive in the same way as a CD or DVD transfer.  Depending on size one of these could hold more files than a DVD.

Another way is to purchase an USB file transfer cable (under $25) if both computers have USB ports.  You then link the two computers together using the cable and XP’s transfer program.  If one computer has XP on it, it will allow you to copy the program to the other computer on a floppy disk.  Go to ALL PROGRAMS / ACCESSORIES / SYSTEM TOOLS / FILE AND SETTINGS TRANSFER WIZARD and follow the wizard’s instructions.

Also, with the price of external hard drives down well below $200 they could also be an option for your data files.  Copy them to the external drive and copy them back to the new computer’s drive.  Then use the external drive for backups or with MojoPac (mentioned last week).

Advanced users could install the old hard drive into the new computer and drag files to the new drive.  Wipe the old one clean and leave it for more storage.  BEWARE!  This will most likely void your warranty!  If you have the computer built locally, ask the tech to do it for you…it will be worth the additional cost. 

No matter which way you go you will need to be organized in locating the files you want transferred and do not select files you do not really need.  This could be a good time to perform some file spring cleaning.

Tags: computer help, doyle, new computer, newspaper column, old computer, Ron Doyle, Transferring Files