Seven Deadly Sins of PC Users

Like you I get lots of junk in my inbox. However, every once in awhile I will something that I wasn’t expecting. HP recently sent me an email called the Seven Deadly Sins of PC Users. The article gives you the most important things to do or NOT do on your computer (school and home) that can help keep you safe and prolong the life of your computer and your data. Some of the tips, such as keeping virus software up to date, is what you would expect. You’ve heard that long enough so shame on you if you aren’t running something at home. The district offers Sophos (what we use at school) for free home use. There are also several good open source (free) versions of anti-virus software such as: ClamWin, and AVG. You don’t have to plunk down $50 to buy Norton if you don’t want…although if you keep your eye out during tax season you can usually get a great deal when you buy tax software and antivirus at the same time.

Two tips that we don’t talk enough about are backing up your data. At school, you don’t really need to worry about it since our servers are backed up nightly. You should be safe unless of course you safe work on your hard drive….don’t do that, please. You really need to be backing up at home too. I’ve found the best way to do this is to purchase one of the large external hard drives such as the Western Digital MyBook (http://www.wdmybook.com/en/ ). These are basically hard drives that sit on the outside of your computer and connect via USB. You can move them just by unplugging them in to a different machine. Many of the different brands of external drives come with free backup software. Usually a click or single button sends a copy of all of your data to the external drive. If your machine dies or hard drive dies you have a copy to pull from of all your work. An external drive will cost you anywhere from $75 and up. My 320gig drive was about $120 a year ago from Sam’s Club. I’m sure they are cheaper now.

The other tip I thought was especially good was being careful about who uses your computer. If you have a child at home you might be especially careful as they are prone to download just about anything and everything. The number #1 piece of bad software people download to get viruses are screensavers. Who can’t resist a cute screen saver of puppies or kittens? I can, because I don’t want a virus. I would strongly consider getting your child their own computer. Refurbished units can be purchased on eBay for less than $100.

The last tip shouldn’t be overlooked either. Don’t ignore the Windows updates that Microsoft is trying to force down to your machine. Usually these are for your own protection…meaning someone found a way to exploit a Windows machine and Microsoft figured out how to fix it. The updates to download are the fixes. If you aren’t sure if you are getting updates you should (in Internet Explorer) click on Tools, Windows Update and it will take you the MS site and directions will follow about what to do.