Almost fell for this one at work .. but noticed that the links in the email did no match the link shown at the bottom of my browser. Very sneaky. Of course, best practice is not to just click the links in an email, but to type the main website e.g. canadapost.ca into the browser to get to where you want to go. Sad to say you just can't trust any old mail you get these days..

May 11, 2011 - Significant activity was detected on May 9 related to spam email messages that claim to contain a Canada Post shipment notification. The text in the email message instructs the recipient to follow a link to view an invoice.

These emails are not coming from Canada Post, and are fraudulent. Please do not click on the links or open any attachments. The anonymous authors of this email virus unfortunately are using the Canada Post name to get you to trust the message.

Frustrated with your SLOW computer? Your PC will run faster .. guaranteed! spring special $99

It was still working, but just crawling along and getting worse everyday. The problem(s)? Running out of disk space (less than 5% free), old version(s) of various anti-virus programs still installed, Vista (need we say more), pending Windows Updates not installed yet.

Solution: after cleaning up old programs and updating everything, still had to deal with the low disk space issue. In this case, the user had several users set up, each with their own file sets .. all former teenagers who had been happily downloading various music and video files .. into each of their various locations.

Downloaded free duplicate file finder from download.cnet.com/windows called Duplicate Cleaner ver 2.0.5. Ran it for music and video files and found and removed over 10GB of duplicated files. Yay. It is recommended for savvy users, as an inexperienced user could delete system files, but turned out to be very easy to use and to automatically flag and clear out those duplicate files. I recommend it.