Shaw Computer Services

Wendy says: if they called you, they're not your bank.

The version we're seeing most: someone calls claiming to be from your bank, Microsoft, or "computer support," and needs remote access to fix an urgent problem. The urgency is the whole trick.

Hang up. Look up the real number yourself. Call that one. You will never regret being the person who checked.

Those that are subscribed to our service are welcome to call us.

Don't have our service yet, give us a call and we will be happy to sign you up.

Be sure to share my electronic business card with everyone you know. Click on this link for the details.

Jeremy Shaw · Shaw Computers IT services since 2006. Save my contact, book a free consult, or see what I do.

A thank-you as September wraps up.

To every client — businesses and families, coast to coast — who trusts us with their technology: it means more than you know.

We started as the computer guy for a small town in Northern California. Today the list runs from Alaska to North Carolina — eleven states and counting — and most of those folks we've never stood in the same room with. Remote support made that possible. You made it worth doing.

A small business like ours grows exactly one way. Someone like you tells someone like them. If you know a person or a business wrestling with their tech right now, we'd be honored to be the name you pass along.

The Saturday Fix, No. 1: clean up your browser.

Those little add-ons in Chrome or Edge — coupon finders, toolbars, "PDF converters" — pile up over the years. A lot of them come bundled with some other download, so you never really chose them. Some slow your browser down, and some quietly watch what you do online.

Five minutes:

1. In Chrome or Edge, click the puzzle-piece icon up top, then "Manage extensions."
2. Go down the list. Don't recognize it, or can't say what it does? Remove it.
3. Not sure about one? Leave it, take a screenshot, and send it to us. We'll tell you which ones to keep.

Questions? We're around today. Call, and if we don't pick up, leave a message and we'll get back to you.

707-725-6442

New series: every Saturday, one small fix worth doing this weekend.

Tech nostalgia check: what was the first computer you ever used?
We’ll go first. That’s Jeremy in the photo, on a Tandy TRS-80 loading programs off a cassette drive — decades before Shaw Computers existed. Some of us never really changed hobbies, we just got better equipment.
Bonus points if yours had a floppy drive, a turbo button, or a dial-up tone you can still hear in your head.
Drop yours in the comments — extra credit if you remember the exact model.

Sylvester monitors it all.

The hallway. The front window. The spot where the printer makes that noise. Nothing in this house changes without him knowing, and he has never once told anybody about it.

Our monitoring works the same way, minus the secrecy.

It watches the hard drive that's started throwing errors but hasn't failed yet. The backup that quietly stopped running six weeks ago. The security update that downloaded and then sat there waiting for a restart that never came.

And it's now standard on everything we do. Not an add-on, not a separate plan — if we're taking care of your computers, we're watching them. Business network or the family laptop, same deal.

We'd rather catch it on a Tuesday afternoon than hear about it on a Saturday night.

707-725-6442

‘We Hacked the FBI:’ Hackers Say They Have Data on All FBI Employees A sample of 5,000 alleged agents seen by 404 Media includes names, addresses, phone numbers, and details on FBI employees' spouses.

One more from the fire service. Across all those years of volunteer calls, the ones that stuck with Jeremy weren’t the dramatic ones. They were the preventable ones.
The missing smoke detector. The overloaded outlet. The “we kept meaning to fix that.”
IT is no different. Almost every disaster we have ever cleaned up had a warning sign somebody noticed — and postponed. The failing drive that got ignored. The backup that quietly stopped running in March.
Whatever your “we keep meaning to fix that” is, consider this your sign. Fix it this week. Or message us and we’ll help you figure out where to start.

Your password will get stolen. That's not the disaster.

The disaster is when it's the only thing standing between someone and your account.

Two-factor authentication is the fix, and it's less complicated than it sounds. It just means getting in takes two things instead of one: something you know, and something you have.

The password is the thing you know. Assume a copy of it is already sitting on a list somewhere — after twenty years of breaches, most of them are.

The code on your phone is the thing you have. That part wasn't in the database anybody stole. Someone with your password and nothing else gets stopped at the door.

If you only do it in one place, do it on your email. Every other account you own resets through it. Your email is the master key, whether you've thought of it that way or not.

Not sure how to switch it on? That's a quick call. 707-725-6442