Happy Thanksgiving From Take Five with Eddie Baiseri - Tech Tip Friday Edition! Next week is good-ol’ Black Friday, so I just want to start off by saying Happy Thanksgiving to all our listeners. This is our annual special and we thought we’d kick off the Christmas season (is it really that time again?) by telling you about a couple of sites that can help you find those great early-morning bargains you can only get once a year.
Black Friday Sites: The first is 2011blackfridayads.com. At this site, you can view over 50 of the biggest ads including WalMart, Target, Kohl’s, Old Navy, Toys ‘R Us, Kmart, Best Buy, Sears, JCPenney, and Staples. The page has links to their Facebook and Twitter pages and if you enter your name and email address, you can get a free shopping list and strategy guide, plus when new ads come out, they’ll email you the scoop. By the way, WalMart’s black Friday starts at 10:00 pm on Thanksgiving Day, electronics deals start two hours later, at midnight.
The second site is blackfriday.info. This site takes a different tack. Yes, you can peruse various ads by store, but beyond that you can browse by categories, too. That can be helpful when trying to make up your action plan.
CyberMonday Sites But for you Cyber Monday shoppers, we haven’t forgotten you either. Cybermonday.net and cybermonday2011.com. This last site is powered by bradsdeals.com and is itself just a big cybermonday ad. But cybermonday.net is like the black Friday sites, but it takes you to the online deals offered by the big retailers. It’s also not limited to the brick-and-mortar places like the Black Friday sites are. As such it offers ads from Amazon.com and Newegg.com.
This Year's Hot Computer Specs For those looking to buy a computer for someone on their gift list, we usually go over my recommended specifications. This year, I recommend these specifications: Any 2nd Generation Intel Core i3, i5, or i7. As the number after the ‘I’ increases, so will the price. You will always find the lowest cost systems powered by AMD processors, and they’re OK, too; I just prefer the Intel chips. The computers I build use Intel exclusively. Memory should be at least 4GB for a desktop and 2GB for a laptop. More here is almost always better. The question of 32-bit vs. 64-bit Windows 7 is still up for debate, but I’m warming up to 64-bit as a recommendation. Several of the Acer desktops and at least one of their laptops gives you the option to choose which you want when you turn your computer on for the very first time. After that, you get the version you chose. That feature is called dual-hotload. When it comes to disk space, more is definitely better. I recommend 640GB to 1TB for new desktops, 320-640GB for new laptops, but 250GB is OK if cash is tight. For a computer with serious cool factor, look into the all-in-ones that are being offered now. These computers fit everything into the screen, typically have wired and wireless Internet connections, and often come with wireless keyboards, mice, and touch screens. Check the home page at DAConsult.com for full specifications.
Tabnabbing Finally, a caveat. There’s a new kind of phishing that’s been popping up since about August. It’s called tabnabbing. It affects every browser out there, and can be very hard to detect. When you visit a compromised website, it waits for you to move away to another tab in your browser for a period of time. When it detects that you’ve done this, it looks for other tabs you have open, like your banking site. It then makes the web page on that tab look as though your online banking session has timed out, but the login screen it puts you on belongs to the attacker, not your bank. If you try to log into the bank, the attacker will allow the faked login to succeed if possible. But now they have the information they need to steal your identity and clean out your account. How do you get around this? The best advice I can give is to close any tabs you’ve got open or if you get one of those “you have been logged out” pages, use your original shortcut or favorite to get back to that site.
