These days there’s no shortage of applications - and people - trying to get information and data out of your PC. I’m going to cover the basics of what you need to use to keep your machine running as well as it can, and what you can do to harden it against attacks from the outside world.
It’s not hard, and I’m going to show you how you can do it all for the lowest price possible - free. Just because you pay money for something doesn’t mean its necessarily better than something that was free.
What this IS going to take on your part, though, is a little due dilligence. You’re going to need to make the effort to keep your anti-virus definitions up to date, and to backup on a regular schedule. Because if you don’t do the basics, eventually you’re going to run into problems of one sort or another. Sure, you might have the same issues even if you do all of what I suggest here, but your chances will be greatly reduced if you just take some simple steps.
Hard Drive Maintenance: Backup
Here’s a rule that you’re going to have to learn when it comes to PCs. Hard drives fail. Yours will too, if you run it long enough. It’s not a matter of if, but rather when. You only need to go through a catastrophic data loss once to get religion on backing up. Why not save yourself the stress and just get on board before your drive dies?
I recently came across a simple backup application called SyncBack, produced by a company called 2BrightSparks when I was trolling through Lifehacker.com. There are both paid and free versions of the software available, and the Lifehacker article explained in simple detail how to run nightly, weekly and monthly backups of whatever data you need on your PC. An external hard drive would be the preferred method, simply due to the fact that backing up 30GB of photos onto 4.7GB DVDs is going to be a pain, so you’ll be more likely to just skip it. Please don’t. Go read the Lifehacker article. Please.
Backups should be run nightly, once per week, and once per month, with each backup covering different folders on your PC based on the importance of the data.
Security: Anti-Virus
I’m not naiive enough to think that I’ll never get a virus on my PC. I have gotten them. Two, actually. Since 1992. I know others who spend big bucks on protecting themselves from the latest viruses and they still get infected three or four times per year, most commonly through email attachments. We’ll get into the whole email thing later, but for now, one of the best things that you can do for your PC’s security is to go and download the free version of AVG from Grisoft. Install it, upgrade everything that it suggests that you upgrade, and then in the Scheduler, set it to update daily at 2 AM, and scan at 4 AM. Obviously this works better if you’re accustomed to leaving your PC on all night, but even if you’re not, run the manual update and scan as often as you think about it. Having it run automatically means you won’t forget to do it, but, to each his own.
This should be run on a daily basis, both the update and the scan.
Maintenance: Defrag
As you use your computer each day, saving data all over the place, the hard drive doesn’t store that data sequentially on the disk, but rather wherever it can find space to put chunks of it, it will. After awhile things start to slow down as the drive has to search its disk to find the various pieces that make up your data. But if you run the Defrag tool (click on My Computer and right click on your hard drive and go down to Tools), this will help ‘realign’ the data on your drive making it more contiguous and improving the read time across the disk.
When you do run the tool, be prepared for a wait. It’s not a quick process, but it is a necesary process. To speed it up, turn off your screen saver and turn off the power saving that spins your disk down after a period of inactivity. In fact, just leave your computer alone while you run the defragmentation or it’ll just keep restarting itself and never finish.
I read somewhere that defragging a Vista machine isn’t necessary, but at the same time, Microsoft included the tool with Vista as well, so you might as well use it. It certainly can’t hurt your computer.
This process should probably be run once every week or two.
Security: Spybot and Ad-Aware
Over the course of time, your PC is probably going to pick up some spyware or adware. According to Wikipedia, spyware is defined as “…computer software that is installed surreptitiously on a personal computer to intercept or take partial control over the user’s interaction with the computer, without the user’s informed consent.”
Adware is “any software package which automatically plays, displays, or downloads advertising material to a computer after the software is installed on it or while the application is being used. Some types of adware are also spyware and can be classified as privacy-invasive software.” Slightly different, but still not something you want on your PC.
Thankfully, though, there are a couple of free applications that you can use to help get this stuff off of your computer. Spybot Search and Destroy (spyware) and Ad-Aware (adware) are two of the best known utilities in the personal security niche, and every tech that I’ve met uses at least one of these, if not both.
For now, you just need to know that they exist, but once you get them downloaded and installed, I’ll be posting a couple of tutorials on using Spybot and Ad-Aware.
Security: Firewall
Some people will tell you that you don’t need an external firewall because your router has one built in, or that Windows already has one. It’s true that your router might have one, but you shouldn’t assume that it does. And yes, the Windows Firewall is better than it was in the past, but would it really kill you to go out and download the free ZoneAlarm firewall? I didn’t think so.
