April 2009

Online bill pay with Little Apple Technologies is now available! Just follow these simple instructions to make online payments.

1. Go to www.littleappletech.com/billpay.php (direct link) or go to www.littleappletech.com and click on "pay bill online" from the left-hand menu bar.

2. Enter all of the requested information.

3. Type the two distorted words at the bottom of the page and then click submit. If accepted you will see a page that says that your card was charged and an email receipt will be sent to you. Otherwise, you will see an error message with further instructions.

Many Internet service providers (ISPs) market "up to" speeds. This only tells you the speed that you could potentially get, and gives no guarantee. LAT sells broadband in guaranteed, synchronous speeds, meaning that you are guaranteed to receive the subscription speed for both download and upload. (Only the speed from our network to the Internet can be guaranteed - once you are on the open Internet many variables will affect the speed of your connection to a particular destination, including routing and the destination server's bandwidth.)

Our burst rates are four times faster than the subscription rate. Burst rates will be noticeable on downloads after periods of inactivity, making web browsing much snappier, and making overall connection speeds faster during low traffic periods at the main access point.

The subscription rate and burst rates can be thought of as a bucket filled with tokens. The bucket size is the subscription rate. Tokens are Internet bandwidth. Tokens are placed into the bucket during times of inactivity, and at anytime the main access point has the extra resources. Anytime you use the Internet these tokens are used at four times the subscription rate until the bucket is empty. An empty bucket will transfer data at the subscription rate. The bucket is then filled again with tokens at the burst rate.

Burst rates are especially noticeable on service plans of 768Kbps and greater. Because the burst rates are so high on these plans (>3Mbps on a 768Kbps plan) the bucket is essentially being filled with tokens at a greater rate than they are being poured out. Customers with a 768Kbps service plan will usually see speed tests of 1.2Mbps or greater.

Beware of fake anti-virus! They claim to be anti-virus, but actually download viruses to your computer.

If you find yourself on a website that claims to be scanning your computer for viruses, you should close your web browser immediately. Do not click on anything except the RED X in the upper right corner. The CANCEL button provided can be an OK button that will cause the virus to download.

These fake virus scanners will indicate that your computer is infected with many viruses. Websites do not have permission to view the contents of your computer without installing software like an ActiveX control or a plugin.

Some known fake Antivirus programs are:

• Antivirus 360
• XP Antivirus
• XP Protect
• System Antivirus 2009

Keeping an up-to-date antivirus program on your computer is essential to protecting it from attack. If you are concerned that your computer may have been infected, or would like advice on what antivirus program to use, give us a call.

Images directly from most digital cameras are too big to email, and need to be resized to be effectively sent via the Internet. Not only is the photo size too big, but the storage space required is way too large. When we send a large photo like this, some people will not be able to view it at all and most will have to wait a long time for it to download.

A free online photo resizing tool is available at http://webresizer.com/. With this free tool you will be able to crop, reduce size, add a border, rotate, and convert to black and white. It displays your original photo and the resized photo. Even without resizing, this program optimizes the image so that it can be emailed.

This program includes a privacy policy that can be viewed at http://webresizer.com/privacy.html.

An alternative to emailing photos is posting photos online for sharing. A neat, free program for doing this is located at http://picasa.google.com/.

An exasperated caller to Computer Tech Support couldn't get her new computer to turn on. After ensuring the computer was plugged in, the technician asked her what happened when she pushed the power button. Her response, "I pushed and pushed on this foot pedal and nothing happens." The "foot pedal" turned out to be the computer's mouse.

Send us your favorite tech joke and we'll share it in a future issue.