Computer Stuff FAQ

Posted by Cyn


I receive many ques­tions from friends and fam­ily about using the inter­net and com­put­ers in gen­eral. I don’t mind answer­ing them, but since the same ques­tions do come up fre­quently, this is the eas­i­est way to answer them. Some of it is also intended as reas­sur­ance, because many peo­ple are unduly intim­i­dated by com­put­ers and the inter­net. I use Win­dows for the most part at home, so the resources I list here are def­i­nitely slanted towards that platform.

Please Read This, At Least

If you’re read­ing this, you’re on the net, right? And that means that you should be aware of and pro­tect­ing your­self against cer­tain risks. Just as you need more immu­niza­tions when trav­el­ing in cer­tain areas of the world than you do if you’re just hang­ing around your home­town, you need to be more aware of secu­rity and antivirus pro­tec­tion if you have your com­puter con­nected to the net than you did when you just used it for word pro­cess­ing and games.

Acquire an antivirus pro­gram. Install it, con­fig­ure it, and keep it updated reg­u­larly — I sug­gest daily updates at the very least if you’re a heavy inter­net user. If you down­load a lot of files — espe­cially if you get into warez—be even more careful.

If you have a broad­band con­nec­tion (cable modem, ISDN or DSL), you need both a hard­ware and a soft­ware fire­wall (go try Shields Up”> to see how vul­ner­a­ble you are). I’ve found eSet Smart Secu­rity pack­age to be rea­son­ably priced, easy to con­fig­ure, and con­ve­nient in that it com­bines antivirus, anti-​​spyware and fire­wall pro­tec­tion. We reg­u­larly have strangers sniff­ing at our fire­wall with var­i­ous tro­jans, but they don’t get through. If you want more infor­ma­tion, read some of this:


Computer Virus Myths home page

While we’re talk­ing about viruses, don’t bother for­ward­ing virus alerts. Any of them. Or any other email that includes pleas for you to for­ward it to lots of other people.

Permalink | June 21st, 2012

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