Gateway Website No Longer Selling PCs

Article

"Gateway on Friday said it would stop selling PCs through its Web site, instead focusing on selling PCs through third-party stores and other online retailers.

Gateway has been selling PCs through partner retail stores since 2004, but it is now cutting direct online sales to consumers in order to cut costs and align its business model with parent company Acer, the company said. Acer last year acquired Gateway for US$710 million in an effort to boost its consumer presence in North America."

Looks like no more cow boxes. I still remember over ten years ago when my friend got his cow box. $3500 for a P2 450ghz system with 64MB of RAM. Smoking!

Excellent Free Anti-Virus Software

AVG Free Edition 8.0 is an excellent AV application and it is free for personal use.

Malware Prevention

Malware is the number one issue for sluggish PC performance.

To help prevent spyware, adware and other unwanted programs from getting on your PC in the first place, considering using these tips.

- Use a browser other than Internet Explorer, like Mozilla Firefox. IE is the most used browser and is the main target of malware. Some would also argue that Microsoft products are naturally more susceptible to security holes by default. :)

- Keep administrator accounts separate from regular user accounts. This is especially useful if you have numerous users of the PC. In this setup, only the administrator account has rights to install programs and the regular user accounts do not. Now applications will only be installed when intended by the computer administrator. You can find users & accounts in the Control Panel.

Welcome

Hello, and welcome to BrieTech Online Tech Support!

I am an IT Professional by day, and am looking to do a little work and blogging on the side.

My first tip relates to Windows XP. For people who want to see what is launching at startup on their machine they can run a built-in command. This command is msconfig.exe. Simply open a Start | Run prompt, (Windows Key + R) and type msconfig.exe and hit enter.

You will be greeted with the "System Configuration Utility" then you want to click on the Startup Tab. You will see a check list of items that are launching on startup. Be warned, some items will be legit, so you do not want to go in and start removing everything.


Once you uncheck the desired (or undesired :) ) applications and hit OK, you will be prompted to reboot now, or reboot later. On reboot, you will get another pop-up letting you know changes were made. You will want to check the checkbox on the pop-up so you do not get the pop-up every time you reboot.