In late December 2015, an update to the Avast antivirus began causing daily blue screens of death on Windows 8.1 computer. I first became aware of the issue after a client that uses Avast complained of nearly daily BSoDs on most computers. This happened shortly after I had put in place the Registry settings to control the Windows 10 upgrade prompts and Get Windows 10 (GWX) … [Read more...]
Amazon announces the Kindle Oasis e-reader
Amazon has announced the latest Kindle e-reader. The Kindle Oasis will be released on April 27th for $289.99. It is a black 6-inch reader with WiFi. The Oasis, as rumored ahead of the announcement, is thinner and lighter than previous Kindles. The e-ink extends the battery life compared to a tablet and even though the Oasis included 10 LEDs for lighting the text, the battery … [Read more...]
Logitech acquires wireless audio company JayBird
Logitech announced that it has agreed to acquire Jaybird, a company based out of Salt Lake City that has been making wireless audio wearables since 2006. Logitech also owns Ultimate Ears and will similarly keep Jaybird as a separate brand while benefiting from combining team strengths as all three companies have audio engineering and design products. Jaybird's most popular … [Read more...]
Popular ARRIS (formerly Motorola) SURFboard 6141 cable modem vulnerable to unwanted reboots
For those with cable Internet providers like Comcast, Mediacom, Time Warner Cable, and others, there is a common cost savings method of buying your own cable modem. One of the most popular modems to buy is the ARRIS SURFboard 6141 cable modem. As it only costs $70 on Amazon.com, it can pay for itself in less than a year with a monthly rental of $5.99 or higher from the … [Read more...]
Symantec Cloud portal suffers all-day outage
The portal to access and manage Symantec.cloud (the antivirus and other services hosted by Symantec in order to reduce the local infrastructure required) is suffering an outage that has been going on all day today. The company is not being very disclosing of the incident directly to customers or through social media channel despite being quite disruptive to their customers. The … [Read more...]




