Hello I'm from Microsoft ...

This is a phone call that almost everybody has had although I still get the occasional client who rings up in a panic because of one of these calls. The calls are a scam. They tell the potential scamee that they can tell that they are having problems with their computer. Now this must have a pretty good hit rate as almost every household has at least one computer and probably most of these have one or more problems.
To further enforce the idea that they know what is happening they get the scamee to do bring up a log that shows hundreds of events on the computer.
Well this is the event log and all computers have thousands of entries so again another safe bet. What they do  then is get the client to let them remote onto their computer. The scammers then bang around for awhile on the computer at the end of which they try and convince the sucker  client to buy some unneeded software at 500 percent markups.
The best response to these guys is to just hang-up the phone. If you have let them onto your computer and you are worried then call your local computer support guy to give your computer a once over.

Network Issues - Could not connect - Asking for username and password

Networking seems to be very finicky in Windows. I had a business site where one computer could not access the printers from another computer. Both computers were XP.
From the first computer I checked and could not see the second computer. I went to the second computer and through the My Computer properties checked that the computer was in the correct workgroup. It was I next went into network neighborhood. I could see the workgroup but could not access the workgroup. When in doubt reboot. I rebooted but the computer but no joy. The next thing I do when there are network issues is re-run the network setup wizard. This wizard must do a lot of things under the hood and in this case worked.

I went to the first computer and though it could now see the second computer when I clicked on it a password was requested. I did a reboot on the first computer and the connection could be made.

Problem accessing the internet

Thanks to McAfee Anti-Virus a lot of computer servicemen are having a good August. A recent update has caused computers to cut off access to the internet. Of course they have released an update to fix this but how do you get it without internet access. There are a couple of easy solutions. The first is to do a system restore to a date before you lost the internet. The second way is to boot  into safemode with networking and force McAfee to do an update. The third way is to uninstall McAfee and reinstall it or buy somthing new.