Easy ways to protect your PC How to avoid a digital disaster
These days, we’re doing more and more things digitally: our holiday snaps sit on hard disks, our music is often in MP3 and we’re as likely to download films as buy them on disc. That’s great when your PC’s working perfectly, but how do you make sure it stays that way? Protecting your PC falls into three key categories: protecting your valuable data, protecting your PC from online threats and protecting your PC from physical damage. Protecting the hardware is the easy bit. Surge protectors can prevent nasty spikes in the electricity supply from causing any damage, and if you have a laptop you can buy a Kensington Lock to secure it to something suitably hefty. A compressed air canister can blow dust out of fan vents and debris out of keyboards, and it’s a good idea to keep your PC away from extremes of temperature - a sunny room in summer is a terrible place to keep a PC. Be particularly aware of potential spills: liquid can destroy computers and you won’t believe the damage a tin of baby food can do to a keyboard. It’s a very good idea to keep food and drink and PCs separate. No matter how careful you are, computers can and do break: every hard disk will wear out eventually. That’s why it’s really important to keep backup copies of anything important such as family photographs, home videos or iTunes downloads. You can do this in several ways - using an online service such as Mozy (www.mozy.co.uk) or Skydrive (skydrive.live.com), by burning them to DVD or by copying them to an external hard disk, but remember that if your backup is in the same place as the original, a domestic disaster such as a burst pipe might ruin both of them. PAGE 36
It’s worth remembering too that services such as Facebook won’t compensate you if they accidentally delete or damage your online photo libraries; once again make sure that if it’s important, you have more than one copy in case of disaster. The other issue to worry about is “malware”, which is software designed to do nasty things. Sometimes malware spies on you, trying to obtain your passwords and other details; other times it just damages files or slows your PC to a crawl. The good news is that it’s relatively easy to avoid: Windows 7 and Windows 8 both have firewall software, which can prevent nasties getting in, and if you’re suspicious you can avoid most malware. Don’t open unsolicited email attachments from people you don’t know, and don’t let fake emails from the bank fool you: your bank will never send you programs or zipped documents in an email. Always make sure you’re downloading from reputable sources, such as Microsoft.com, not Big Dave’s Totally Honest Download Page and make sure your web browser software is up to date. Old browsers are a real security risk. Last but not least, invest in some security software. You don’t need to spend any money - Microsoft’s Security Essentials is free (www.microsoft.com/ security_essentials/), as is AVG Free anti-virus (free.avg.com) and AVAST (www.avast.com), and there are also free tools to tune up your PC. One of our favourites is CCleaner (www.piriform.com/ ccleaner), which works miracles on sluggish PCs, and we’d also recommend the free Ad-Aware program (www.lavasoft.com) to prevent annoying software setting up shop on your PC. Keeping your PC safe isn’t difficult, time-consuming or expensive, but it’s worth doing. Think of PC protection like home insurance: you hope you’ll never need it, but if disaster strikes you’ll be glad you have it.
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