Computers and Information
Yesterday, being Father's Day, I mentioned my Dad. Have I mentioned what a computer clutz he is? Last year about this time, I did a major clean up on his computer. He had so much in spyware, adware, and viruses that his computer barely worked. We lost Norton's somewhere along the way, but I found him a new program that has kept his computer relatively healthy until now.
Last week, he got infected by a trojan. In the process of cleaning that one up, we found another. This is how you become an expert in internet searches. When you go looking for others who have experienced the same problems and see how they fixed the problems. I tell you that I can find anything on the internet...except my grandmother in 1930.
Any way, we've found some really useful tools over the last couple of days. There's a scan running on his computer now and after his show ends, I'll go back and take a look at the results. I think my computer is cleaner now than it has ever been. His is getting there. That one last trojan is causing problems.
Last year, I was almost at the point of reformatting his hard drive and reinstalling everything. Now, mind you, my father has video indexes all over the place. He takes great pain in making lists of all of the movies he has with information about who is in them. If any of those had been lost (and we've had a couple of fatal accidents), the video world would never have been the same again.
The worst I was threatening this time was to reinstall internet explorer. We haven't reached that point. So, what is the point? Treat your computer well and it will behave for you. Occasionally, give it a check up. I recommend a weekly physical. If it gets the sniffles, treat the problem. Safeguard any files you don't want to lose! Always consider the worst case scenario and have a backup.
Last week, he got infected by a trojan. In the process of cleaning that one up, we found another. This is how you become an expert in internet searches. When you go looking for others who have experienced the same problems and see how they fixed the problems. I tell you that I can find anything on the internet...except my grandmother in 1930.
Any way, we've found some really useful tools over the last couple of days. There's a scan running on his computer now and after his show ends, I'll go back and take a look at the results. I think my computer is cleaner now than it has ever been. His is getting there. That one last trojan is causing problems.
Last year, I was almost at the point of reformatting his hard drive and reinstalling everything. Now, mind you, my father has video indexes all over the place. He takes great pain in making lists of all of the movies he has with information about who is in them. If any of those had been lost (and we've had a couple of fatal accidents), the video world would never have been the same again.
The worst I was threatening this time was to reinstall internet explorer. We haven't reached that point. So, what is the point? Treat your computer well and it will behave for you. Occasionally, give it a check up. I recommend a weekly physical. If it gets the sniffles, treat the problem. Safeguard any files you don't want to lose! Always consider the worst case scenario and have a backup.
posted by Vickie at 9:05 PM
4 Comments:
Amen V
I do all my scans (spy, ad, virus, scan disc, defrag) every monday night, like clock work. Now if only there were some scan I could do to fix my road runner! They've sent out so many alerts about various connectivity issues lately it's ridiculous, I wonder if they'll give me a refund (note the sarcasm)
My day is Friday. I think that was the default day for Norton's and even though I don't have Norton's any more, I kept up the habit.
Good advice, V. Wish I had known back when I tried to restore my old PC to a certain point in time (before I somehow lost a few fonts) and it froze, shut down and no amount of tech support could bring it back. Turns out there was a glitch in Windows that would do that, and I never downloaded the update patch. Lost 100s of digital pictures, writing, etc. Ugh. Boy was THAT a hard lesson to learn!
Thanks for saying that, I'll take this moment to remind everyone to do the critical updates from Windows. The other day, we had 23 critical updates that never got done on Dad's. They didn't resolve any issues, but some of the security patches might protect him better in the future.
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