4.5″ by 2.4″. 8 GB. 3.5-inch (diagonal) widescreen Multi-Touch display. 480-by-320-pixel resolution at 163 ppi. 2.0 megapixel camera. That’s right. It’s the new iPhone 3G and we gave one away.

Last week MinuteFix strengthened our partnership with Skype. We brought in a small control group of testers to test out the technology, and to thank them for their involvement, we sponsored a contest. The offer was to win a 3G iPhone just for participating. With calls lasting up to 2 hours sometimes we saw a host of different tech issues ranging from a dropped laptop to a XP to Vista conversion. It was a challenging and wonderful week. So by now you are wondering, “Who won?” Luis Salazar did.

Luis, born in Ecuador and now living in Los Angeles is a 23-year old Office Depot employee who upon being told he was the winner uttered nothing more than “Oh, sh**….wow!”. When we asked him about his experience he added, “It was pretty good. I thought it was really good how MinuteFix figured out how to integrate a payment system with just doing a Skype call. Much simpler than sending a packaged download application or something like that or even having to chat questions back and forth. It was cool.”

We had to ask though, “Did you think you would actually win a phone just for testing something out?” “No, I mean I thought someone would win. You usually do these and you think, Oh someone else will win. But not me. I won’t win. So this is awesome. Feels really good. I got to help out and I won a sweet phone.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Most commonly used anti-virus software will give you the option of putting a suspected virus into quarantine or to delete it. We are often asked what the difference is; there seems to be a misunderstanding of the use of both.

Put simply, no antivirus software is perfect. Many generate false-positives (meaning that it might identify something as a threat when it is not one) and using quarantine is a way of mitigating these potential errors.

If you put a virus in quarantine, the virus is not removed from your computer, but instead it is put in a location where it cannot be accessed. In the event that this file is not malicious (for example it identifies a .exe file that runs one of your basic software) you have not removed it from your hard drive. If a program on your computer acts up after the quarantine, you might need to restore the files. If you delete the file, there is no turning back.

A smart practice to follow: when your anti-virus software detects a malign file, put it in quarantine. Make sure your computer is running as usual (give it a few weeks), then delete it.

I just got this tech support story from one of our techs, Mark Oren. Thought I’d pass it on… 

A helicopter was flying around above Seattle yesterday when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft’s electronic navigation and communications equipment. Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter’s position and course to steer to the airport.

The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, drew a handwritten sign, and held it in the helicopter’s window. The pilot’s sign said “WHERE AM I?” in large letters.

People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign, and held it in a building window. Their sign said “YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER.”

The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely.

After they were on the ground, the co-pilot asked the pilot how the “YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER” sign helped determine their position.

The pilot responded “I knew that had to be the MICROSOFT building because, similar to their help-lines, they gave me a technically correct but completely useless answer.”