Ask DACS
August 2007

Jim Scheef, Moderator
Lisa Leifels, Reporter

We welcome questions from the floor at the start of our General Meetings. In addition, members who are not able to attend the General Meeting may submit questions to askdacs@dacs.org. We will ask the question for you and post the reply in DACS.ORG. Please provide as much information as possible since we can’t probe during the session.

Q. Is it possible to rent a laptop for a day?

A. If you do a Google search on the two words computer and rent, you will see that there are many companies out there offering to rent you a computer for one day or longer.
Generally speaking monthly computer rentals cost less per day than daily rentals. Typically desktop computers rent for less money than notebook and laptop computers.

Q. There was an article in Federal Computer Week magazine on the topic of protecting your valuable information. The article mentioned signature scanning, sandboxing, and heuristics. Do I get all of these features with most anti-virus programs?

A. Signature scanning is the basic mode of virus detection today. This is when your anti-virus program is looking for known viruses that can be identified by a unique fingerprint.

Heuristics comes from the Greek word “heuriskin”, which means to discover and it is used to detect unknown viruses. It is a generic method of virus detection where anti-virus software makers develop a set of rules to distinguish viruses from non-viruses. If a program or code segment follow these rules, then it is marked a virus and dealt with accordingly. Most of the more popular anti-virus software packages available today utilize heuristic virus checking.

A sandbox, is an isolated area that is used to test potentially dangerous programs in a controlled environment. By using a sandbox, you can learn what a virus might do in the wild without any possibility of its escaping and making changes on a real systems or the Internet. Most anti-virus programs do not offer sandboxing, since additional computer resources are required.

Q. I have DSL Service and I’ve noticed when my computer is doing nothing I see the lights on my modem and activity monitor blinking, even when I’m doing nothing. It also happens when my computer is shut off. Should I be concerned about this?

A. When the activity light on your modem is blinking this means that data is being received or transmitted. Some flashing of the activity light, even when the computer is not in use, is completely normal. In most cases, this traffic consists of ARP broadcast packets. ARP, which stands for Address Resolution Protocol, is used by TCP/IP to translate IP addresses into their associated MAC addresses, a process which is required for network operation.

Q. I setup many wireless networks using various security levels. I like to hide the SSID, but when I do this on a computers running Microsoft Vista I am not able to connect to the internet.

A. Double-click on the double computer icon in the lower right hand corner of your screen to open up the Network Center. The Network Center shows a graphical presentation of your network. Go to set up a connection or network, and pick the option to manually connect to a wireless network. Enter your network name, security type, encryption type and passphrase. Make sure you check the box to connect even if the network is not broadcasting.

Submit any question to: askdacs@dacs.org.