Pierre e-mailed me this week’s first question: “Every now and then I receive e-mails notifying me of ‘Mailer-Daemon Failure Notice.’ Most of the failed E-mails are to [a specific domain]. What can I do to prevent this from happening in the future?” Pierre, there are a couple reasons you may be experiencing this. First, your computer may be infected with viruses or spyware. Second, your e-mail address may have been borrowed or stolen to send spam e-mails.
Most likely your computer is infected with a trojan called a spam-bot which makes up e-mail addresses and randomly sends them in hopes one of the users exist. Let’s say the spam-bot wants to target e-mail addresses at abc.com. It will generate the e-mail addresses john@abc.com, john1@abc.com, john2@abc.com, and so forth. Eventually one of the generated names will make it to a recipient. The failure notices you are receiving are most likely from nonexistent addresses.
This type of infection should definitely be removed. Damage is not necessarily to the files on your computer unless the spam-bot is trying to send an infected file. Most of the time your bandwidth will be clogged and your internet service provider may disconnect your service. Your privacy could also be violated if personal data is transmitted to random people.
Occasionally we see this at the shop. Most of the time virus software will find the infection and remove it. However, it may also be ignored and needs to have a few programs from our arsenal thrown at it. I suggest downloading, installing and running a program called Malwarebytes. It should pick up the infection and remove it automatically. As well, make sure your virus software is up-to-date. If neither finds the infection you may need to have your machine professionally serviced.
Chris asked this week’s second question: “What is the difference between memory and storage space?” Well Chris, you’ve asked a question which we receive all the time at the shop. Memory refers to the amount of random access memory (RAM) which the computer has installed. Storage space refers to the hard drive capacity inside the computer.
The hard drive is permanent storage used to hold your operating system (Windows), files and other settings the computer needs to operate. When the computer is powered on, Windows loads from the hard drive into RAM through the processor (or CPU). All user files; such as documents and pictures are read from the hard drive. When a document or setting is saved, it is then written back to the hard drive for permanent storage.
RAM is temporary storage – when the machine is on and running. As Windows is being used, files are being created and other functions of the PC are executed, RAM is loaded and unloaded. When the machine is off, RAM is unloaded and retains zero data.
If either the RAM or hard drive is missing or malfunctioning the machine will not work correctly. Both are common failure modes for computers and both need to be inspected regularly. Both failing RAM and hard drives will cause the computer to operate incorrectly; moreover, both present similarly during diagnostic tests and are sometimes hard to diagnose.
Tip of the week: Different operating systems run best with varying amounts of memory. I suggest a Windows XP system have 512MB of RAM. Windows Vista and Windows 7 seems to run best with 2GB of memory. Much less and Windows seems to run slow. Memory upgrades are fairly inexpensive and easy to do.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can e-mail him at Jeromy@LocalComputerWiz.com or call him directly at (978) 919-8059.)