Online tech support is becoming a very lucrative business for scammers. According to Microsoft, tech support scams are the #1 consumer complaint from their customers, especially from the older generation. At Boxaid, our IT support experts unfortunately see the impact of these tech support scams first hand. We often get calls from customers AFTER they have been scammed. Unfortunately, at that point the damage has already been done and the scammers have often completed their objective which is making money from unsuspecting users. The scammers have devised several tactics and tricks they use t ..read more

Cruising the web and realize your web browser is moving a bit slow? Perhaps is time to do a bit of “spring cleaning.” While we are probably all online a bit more these days, that’s no excuse to continue to have a slow browsing experience. We constantly deal with slow browsers at Boxaid. Sometimes it just some cleanup, sometimes it’s invasive malware and sometimes it is your Internet speed. Our computer repair services and technicians are always happy to help but sometimes you can do so some simple computer maintenance yourself and save a few dollars. Some of the most common causes of the prob ..read more

Remember when you were growing up and you had a VCR? I remember driving to the video store (Blockbuster and a few local ones) with my parents and walking thru those aisles staring at all those VHS tapes with wonder. So many movies, so little time. I used to think that our VCR was so cutting edge. What could possible replace it? Well how about DVDs? I saw all my friends getting DVD players and I would say “I don’t need a DVD player, my VCR still works perfectly!” Well computers are similar. We get phone calls at Boxaid and we find many customers asking if we can make their computer faster. Y ..read more

Nowadays, hard drives come with plenty of space for all your storage needs. If you purchased a computer or laptop in the last three years you should have at least a 250Gb hard drive which is plenty of space for your photos, videos, music, and documents. But every now and then we get a remote computer repair phone call at Boxaid where one of our customers has run into an issue where they are getting messages warning that they are running out of disk space. Let’s take a look at how we can troubleshoot and hopefully show you how to fix a full hard drive on Windows. If you don’t want to do this a ..read more

If you are like most people, you have a love/hate relationship with the Notification Center on your Mac. These little pop-up alerts keep you up to date on all the most important news and information, like when a critical business call was missed, the availability of a must-have app update, or what time to pick up your daughter from gymnastics. It can be a very valuable and time saving tool, but can also be overwhelming and extremely distracting. There is nothing worse than getting bombarded with Alerts, Banners and dings, notifying you of the latest deals from Target, the millionth news update ..read more

At Boxaid, our technicians do a lot of virus and malware removal. Sometimes that can be easy to remove a virus or a hijacked browser and sometimes it is a lot of painstaking manual effort. Every now and then our customers call in thinking they are infected with malware or a virus because of excessive pop-ups which were very popular with malware several years ago. But the reality is that they are getting notifications from a junky/spammy website they have visited in the past. These notifications can easily be disabled in your browser in just a few steps by stopping the pop-up notifications in ..read more

We are shifting to a remote workforce in these times of COVID 19, and while for many workers in the United States that is the norm; it can be a big shift for others. We at Boxaid of course have all our employees working from home. We realized the benefit of this 13 years ago when we opened our doors. We communicate with our customers over a regular phone connection but many other businesses are using applications like Zoom, Webex, or Skype. These applications work well to share presentations, talk, whiteboard and in many cases you can see the other party over a webcam. Sometimes you can get by ..read more

We know the pain of our customers who have a generally slow computer. It is one of the most common computer problems that we troubleshoot at Boxaid. This is where our online IT support experts begin the troubleshooting process trying to determine if the entire computer is slow or a specific application or possibly the Internet connection is just slow leading to slow downloads and pages loading slowly in any browser (Chrome, Firefox or Edge) you are using. It could be anything, from an application conflict, an incompatible Windows update, or even a faulty network cable to your router. The possi ..read more

At Boxaid we have seen every technical computer problem in existence. We have fixed over 10,000 computers in the 13 years we have been business. Every now and then we do run into a problem that we have solved before but the typical list of solutions that used to work no longer works. This of course, is very frustrating to our customers and technicians alike. A common tech problem we get all way from Windows 7 to Windows 10 is broken file associations. We have written about the topic of unable to open certain files before but it’s been a while so lets revisit the modern version. How Windows Fi ..read more

At Boxaid we see countless technical problems every day. Some are simple virus removal and some are complex technical problems that take several hours to diagnose and fix. We of course use Google religiously to look up additional info if we don’t know the answers off the top of our head. We recently ran into an issue that was EXTREMELY difficult to diagnose. We saw countless articles that were also to diagnose the same issue but very little info on how to solve the problem. So we thought we would write a blog post in hopes of helping someone out. Unable to Send Email with Microsoft Outlook The ..read more