As a member of this list, you are also entitled to free email tech support. Have a computer-related question or Internet-commerce question? Looking for the best place to buy something, particularly digital cameras? Just email.
This is not a spam list. We send out this newsletter once a month. We don't sell, trade or in any way make your information available to anyone else. We don't accept paid advertising. The web sites we tell you about (other than ours) are sites we have personally tried. No one paid us to disseminate this information. Yes, on occasion we will put up a link to a site that will actually give us something for sending you (so far we have received $22 in commissions over the past two years), but that is not why we present them. There are thousands of sites offering incentives for referring people. We only present sites (whether or not they pay us) that we have tried ourselves and feel you would benefit from visiting. We present information that will help you make the most of your Internet experience.
Complete Computer Services, Inc.
2412 Oceancrest Blvd
Far Rockaway, N.Y. 11691
(718) 868 - 3000
hardware & software * sales & service since 1983
- Beware of Words "Free" and "Bargain"
"Free" Services
Buy.com Idea of a "Bargain" May Not Match Reality
- Update on Merchant Accounts
- Internet Scams, Hoaxes and credit card fraud
- Mastercard Won't Shut Out Payment Services
- Does Amex Enable Credit Card Fraud?
- Why Are ISPs Going Out of Business?
- AOL Doesn't Use AOL!
- Payment Service News
- Breakthrough in Disk Drive Capacity
- Microsoft Supports DVD+RW
- Netscape Releases Open Source Browser
- Search Engine Smarts: Meta Tags and keywords
- Useful Sites and Software
- the Microsoft Car
May LCD flat screen monitor specials. Acer is offering dealer specials in order to get their products into dealer showrooms. These offers are limited to 1-3 per dealer. We are offering our readers the opportunity to get these fabulous monitors are reduced prices. First come, first served. They can be shipped from warehouses across the country and weigh under ten pounds, so shipping will be minimal (about $10-$15).
15" (normally $375) only $350. 15" with speakers (normally $400) only $375. 17" (normally $625) only $550.
Some places, including CompUSA, are offering Kiosks where you are invited to check your email. This is part of a promotion by AOL. What they don't tell you is that software on the kiosk is logging your activity. Don't be surprised if your mailbox starts filling with spam.
Yahoo has changed the terms of their service. Many users are finding that their original settings have been changed to opt in to junk mail. A more insidious problem is something Yahoo calls "beacons" which follow your activity and report back, targeting you for more spam. You have to opt out of these. Go to this link to do so.
Recently a customer reported that Buy.com was selling compact flash cards for less than my price. When I told him they were probably making it back on their high shipping, he reported that shipping was free. Since they were selling these cards for less than my cost, I had to verify that this was correct. Sure enough, the site showed these cards at $49.99 and big bold letters announced "free shipping on orders over $99 and under 20 lbs." So it appeared that someone could order two of these cards for $99.98 and get free shipping.
I say "appeared" because when I tried to do just that, I was charged 27.40 shipping for these two cards which weighed less than an ounce. I emailed to ask what was going on and Buy.com replied that free S&H did not apply to their "bargain" items. In other words, you can save a few dollars off the regular price if you agree to pay almost $14 shipping. Wasn't it a better bargain at a few dollars more and free shipping then at 49.99 + 13.70? Are people really that stupid or does buy.com just think they are?
Incidentally, someone explained to me how Buy.com pricing works and this is the explanation I was given: Take a popular item which sells retail for 59.95. This means that the retailer is paying about $50 for it. Buy.com will call the manufacturer and ask what it would take to get it for $45. The manufacturer will agree to the price if 1,000 are ordered. Buy.com will then advertise on on their site for $50 and start taking orders. Now the other retailers are annoyed because they can't sell it at that price. What the folks who place their orders with Buy.com may not realize is that their orders won't ship until Buy.com has enough orders to make it worth their while to order the 1,000. This may take several months. During that time, there may even be a price drop but if you placed you order, you will be charged the higher price in effect at the time. You can try to cancel. You can even get a confirmation of your cancellation. But some months later, you may come home to find a package waiting for you. Unless you have the time to call and email Buy.com repeatedly and threaten a charge back, you will end up paying not only your shipping back to them but their shipping to you as well. Then you can decide if the savings was worth the aggravation.
Since getting my merchant account, I made a few discoveries that is changing the way I do business. Read my article along with other helpful articles in Auctionbytes or on my site at Minimizing Lost Sales.
According to the Gartner Group, 5.2% of Internet customers fell victim to credit card fraud. eBay and others keep telling us that fraud is less than 1%. These revised statistics mean that more than 1 out of 20 folks buying on the Net are going to become victims. As most of you know, I am very careful with my credit cards, so much so that I have been accused of being paranoid. Yet despite my caution, two of my cards have been compromised over the past year. I suspect that some web site I trusted wasn't very secure.
Let me warn folks again, when the credit card companies try to tell you that using your credit card is the safest way to shop, that is only half the story. Yes, you can not be held liable for more than $50 if your card is stolen or misused. But this does not take into account the very real cost of identify theft. Once a scammer has your credit information, he can apply for additional credit cards in your name, using his temporary address. Since the bills go to him, you won't even know about it until they mount up tremendously and attorneys start calling you. Yes, you won't be legally responsible. But try getting a loan or a job in a secure industry and "your" bad credit rating will show up. It might take years and thousands of dollars to clean up "your" record. You might lose that dream job or that dream house in the meantime.
So don't take your credit card lightly. There are scam sites offering great deals whose entire reason for existence is to sucker you into giving them your credit card. I have had people tell me, "I won't send a money order. I'll use my credit card and be safe." If you don't trust someone with a money order, don't trust them with your credit card!
Before you hand out your credit card ask yourself, Is this a site I can trust? Is there an address, phone number, rating or any indication that this is a real business? Is the purchase worth taking the chance? It's silly to give out your credit card for a $10 purchase. Use Paypal, C2it, Billpoint or Paydirect instead. It is safer to give your information out once to a service and use it many times than to give it out dozens of times to different places. Does the deal sound too good to be true? Is the site in a trustworthy country? There is way too much fraud from Russia, Romania, Indonesia, Nigeria. Why would you believe that someone in another country can get a better price on an expensive item than legitimate dealers in your country? Imagine a lottery where the cost of the ticket is a few hundred dollars and if you win, you will get back $50 more than you paid. Would you buy a ticket? Now imagine buying an expensive item from an unknown website or a foreign dealer where the cost is a few hundred dollars but it is $50 less than you can get it locally. What's the difference between that and a lottery ticket? If the deal is legitimate, you saved $50. If not, you may have lost a few hundred. Does it make sense? I would be willing to bet that of the more than 1 in 20 folks who get scammed on the Net, most of them threw caution to the wind and participated in a questionable deal.
"NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - A new rule by MasterCard blocking merchants from accepting credit card payments through third parties, could hurt Internet merchants, according to a published report Friday. "
Unless a settlement is reached May 1, Mastercard will no longer allow third-party services to charge credit cards. Then the follow-ups indicated that Mastercard was only threatening this in order to get payment servics to agree to pay higher rates.
Personally, I think it was all too easy to defraud folks using payment services and there are many naive folks out there who don't bother to read or understand the rules and expect the payment service to protect them from their own ignorance. It didn't help that these services pretended to have "protection" in place. Add into this mix some very silly credit card rules and you get fraud.
I think the ability to accept credit card payments should be given only to merchants who have passed certain credit checks and criteria as established businesses, who should have an understanding of the rules and what is expected. Payment services should be restricted to bank account or pre-funded balance payments only. Mastercard would have been doing the right thing. I guess it was too much to expect responsibility from the same credit card companies who downplay fraud (as long as they can pass on the costs to others).
Someone else tried to use an Amex card giving an address different than the cardholder. I called Amex to report it. As soon as I told them the address didn't match, they immediately gave me a verbal authorization number. Huh? Isn't the point of address verification to catch fraudulent attempts? I explained that I didn't want an authorization, I just wanted to report an attempt to use the card and I thought they should contact the cardholder to ask if it was a valid attempt. They didn't seem interested. Then they charged me 65 cents for calling them. Amex charges for phone call authorizations. I didn't realize that they also charge if you report suspicious activity. Next time someone tries to use a possibly stolen Amex card, I won't bother to report it. Actually, there won't be a next time since I am no longer accepting Amex. I wonder if Amex has higher fraud rates than other cards. By the way, even though they have a CVV code, the Amex system does not validate it. They have the highest rates and the worst service. No wonder so many merchants don't accept it.
In the meantime, I have not been paid for the two Amex charges that I did put through and were validated. Amex told me to put them through again. I did and was not paid. They blamed my processor. I contacted the customers to ask them if they were double charged. One has reported that he checked his statement on line and has not even been charged once. So this is definitely an Amex problem and they are denying responsibility.
Basically, customers use to be online an hour or two a day. So every phone line an ISP owned was shared by a number of customers. Today customers stay on for hours, even days at a time. Now an ISP needs a line for every one or two customers. The $20+ a month an ISP pays for the line plus other costs doesn't cover the $15 a month he charges for the service.
To its chagrin, the company has finally admitted what millions of others already know: "...the e-mail software frequently crashed, staffers weren’t able to send messages with large attachments, they were often kicked offline without warning, and if they tried to send messages to large groups of users they were labeled as spammers and locked out of the system. Sometimes, e-mails were just plain lost in the AOL netherworld and never found." In fact, they found that about 2% of AOL emails never made it to their intended recipients!
Although AOL still touts its email as a wonderful thing in its ads, it now allows its own employees to use email from *other* ISPs!
Fujitsu claims they have the technology to put 180 gigs on a 2.5 inch disk drive.
Note that I replaced the HTML brackets with braces, not to confuse the browser
{HEAD}{TITLE}Your Descriptive Keywords Title Goes Here{/TITLE}
{META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Your keyword-rich marketing description goes here."}
{META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="your keyword phrases,go here,separated by a comma,but not a space"}
{/HEAD}
Why bother with putting Meta Keyword Tags on every page? Though fewer search engines make use of them, Inktomi and some others still make LIMITED use of them so it helps to have them. Abuse of the Meta Tags can be considered spam and negatively impact your ranking.
What Should I Put in This Meta Tag?
Do some keyword research through WordTracker.com to find best keywords for your site. Choose two or three relevant keyword phrases to focus on for each page of your site. Write or rewrite the site's copy based on your chosen keyword phrases. Create a unique Title Tag for each page using the same keyword phrases your copy was based on. Create a unique Meta Description Tag for each page as a marketing sentence based on your chosen keyword phrases for that particular page. Create a unique Meta Keyword Tag for each page with any revelant keywords or keyword phrases found on your copy. Seperate keywords with commas and do not repeat the same word twice. You can populate the keyword tags with many variations (even singular and plural and even common misspellings). The idea is to get folks to find your site. If you put in camera and cameras, it will find you no matter which word the user puts into a search. Make sure no word is written more then three times in any variation.
Irving Weiss sales@searchenginesmarts.com
www.mdwoptions.com. Want to learn about the stock market? How to use options to leverage profits while minimizing investment? Visit this site for an education.
Flash Clock - This one is hypnotic. A very unique way to display the date and time. Requires flash5 which is a quick download if you don't already have it.
the Fuzzpad - When you write HTML code, the steps typically are: 1) write and save the code, 2) bring it up in the browser to see how it looks, 3) go back and edit or add some more code (repeat as necessary). The Fuzzpad is a nice little tool. Enter your code right in the window and see how it displays in the browser immediately. When you have finished, just copy the code and paste it into your editor. There are also very nice lessons about HTML written for the novice.
Open Office another freeware version of a program that is supposed to do everything the Office 2000 does and handle Office 2000 files.
Easy Office. This is a freeware version of a program that is reported to be every bit as good as office and fully comaptible with office files (word, presentations, excel, quicken, quickbooks.) It also creates PDF files in many resolutions. It works in all versions of Windows. There is a freeware (ad-supported) version but the full version is only $40.
Statbar - a nifty status bar that shows you lots of useful information about your system and is very configurable. Works under all versions of windows.
CDR FAQ Site. A site for frequently asked questions about recordable CDs. A wealth of information.
DVD FAQ Site. A wealth of information about DVDs.
Eprompter. Check multiple mailboxes and stop wasting time on spam. In the last issue I told you about a program called Mailmoa (see below). Eprompter is very similar and I find it even better. It allows you to check up to 16 email accounts including Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. It shows a button for each and the number of emails waiting. You have the option of downloading the headers only - a good way to save time if you get a lot of spam. You can then delete the messages unread. You can reply to messages without opening up your email client. Mailmoa - This is a very useful program. It lets you set up connections to multiple email accounts which it will check on a regular basis (the default is every 3 minutes). If it finds mail in any of them, it will pop up a window showing you the account and the subject of the mail. Since it does not download the message, it does this very quickly. From that window, you can choose to view the message, reply to it or delete it. If you decide you want to keep it, you can fire up your email client and retrieve it normally.
I am now using it for two purposes. First, I don't have to check several email accounts regularly to see if I have mail. Mailmoa now does this for me. Second, I don't have to wait for every spam message to be downloaded and some of them take a long time with their annoying graphics. I review the retrieved subject lines in the mailmoa window and delete the spam unread.
Process Listing. This site has a list of hundreds of processes that may be running on your machine. Take a look and see what you might want to eliminate.
Drivers This site has the URLs for hundreds of drivers and DLLs by manufacturer and category.
push the freakin button Ever have a button or dialog pop up that you just want to close? This little program can be set to do it for you.
clipcacheplus Keeps a list of all the items you copied to the clipboard so you can bring any of them back.
Trend Micro Anti Virus Site - a virus scanner that works off the web
Want to comment? Email izzy@ccs-digital.com
Microsoft Car
- Damage from frequent crashes greatly limited by agonizingly slow speeds.
- MS-AAA mysteriously knows where you are and what you ran into before you even call.
- Lets you e-mail viruses to jerks who cut you off in traffic.
- Sure, you *own* the car -- but your nerdy 17-year-old nephew is the only one who can figure out how to drive it.
- Engine trouble? Just execute a Ctrl+Alt+Honk and the car repairs itself.
- "Crowby," the annoying, animated crowbar, keeps changing the radio station.
- It doesn't matter how good it is, those techno-snobs with the free Linux cars always look down on you.
- It's a royal pain to try to pull into a non-Microsoft gas station.
- Now only takes THREE MINUTES to start.
- Whenever you leave your driveway, the little paperclip guy jumps out of the glove box and says, "It looks like you're going to work! Can I help?"
- You have to reinstall the entire engine once a month.
- After putting it in park, it shakes and rattles for a couple minutes before you finally get the signal that it's safe to turn off the engine.
- Despite reassurances of improved security from Microsoft, hackers can easily gain entry by simply using the door handles.
- You can't lend it to someone else; they have to purchase their own.
- You have to pull to the side of the road, turn off and restart the engine whenever you change CD's.