Computer

When Barbara Loizeaux gets rid of an old computer, she's worried about what will happen to her personal information on the hard drive. "There's a lot of financial information on there," said Loizeaux. Consumer Reports just bought used hard drives on eBay to see if they had any personal data left on them. Tester Rich Fisco says the sellers described the drives as having been wiped clean. "We found Word documents with financial information, salary histories... a lot of financial information from people.

When Matt Ferranto opened an e-mail recently, it looked innocent enough. It wasn't. It had a virus in it. "Immediately something happened to the computer. Systems began going down," Ferranto said. Consumer Reports' Dean Gallea just tested 25 different software programs that promise to protect computers from viruses and other threats. Some just target one threat. Others, called "suites" offer a combination of solutions to protect computers from spyware, spam, and viruses. It helps if you know what the code of a computer virus looks like.

by Rebecca Gannon Thanks to a computer glitch, some Wichita State Shocker Baseball fans won't be getting the seats they thought they bought for this weekend's Super Regional. When the Shockers won their regional game Monday night, people on and off the field celebrated. "I sat here through 6 and a half games," said Karen Gonsalves, and they made it, so I want to go see them play some more. " And then she, like thousands of other fans, tried to buy tickets for the game.

by Matt Mauro Maggie's got it all.  That's all the energy in the world.   "She's been a real fun dog, it's taken a while to get used to it," says her owner, Tom Glenn.  "She has a tremendous amount of energy and she's real curious. " One day Tom got kind of curious himself.  So he took Maggie, put her in front of his computer, pulled up a video clip with dogs and cars in it and Maggie went berzerk.  "Yeah, the computer gets her excited. "  So excited, the little girl could barely sit still; her face was about ready to swallow the monitor and her tail was wagging hard enough to almost fall off. "She especially likes her YouTube videos.