Thought Sparks

My wife often comments, "what do people do who don’t have a techie for a spouse?" For those of you frustrated with computing gotcha’s and don’t have a resident techie, here’s some simple stuff to do to keep your computing environment at home humming along.

1. Turn your machine off at night or for longer periods when not in use. This reduces your overall vulnerability from hacking. You’ll also save on electricity.
2. Use daily to several times a different virus and bot scanners. Some of my favorite free ones are:
   1. AVG Anti-Virus Free at free.grisoft.com
   2. Spybot-S&D! at www.safer-networking.org
   3. Ad-Aware at www.lavasoftusa.com
3. Use an internet filter. I like K9 Web Protection at www.k9webprotection.com. It’s a great parental control and does warn you of site content before you hit the page. Great for sensitive and discerning eyes.
4. Remove unused programs. Use ‘em or lose ‘em.
5. Use FireFox to surf the web. IE7 is better on security than 6.0 but who likes IE7?
6. Delete the cookies from your browser often.
7. Don’t save passwords.
8. Off-load data from your drive. When a HD gets over 80% capacity, it starts to choke, especially if you do any major graphic/multimedia editing.
9. Run Defrag and Disk Clean-up every once in a while. I forget that this is important, but it makes a difference in performance.
10. Custom configure your home network interface.
    1. Create a unique IP address and subnet.
    2. Limit the DHCP range to only the number of machines needed. This may be necessary/convenient for laptops.
    3. Even better would be to disable DHCP and enter IP, Subnet, Gateway and DNS entries into each machine.
    4. Don’t enable SSID broadcast which does not display the wireless network to your neighbors.
    5. Use WPA-PSK instead of WEP. WPA-PSK takes a little more work to crack with 64 character pin instead of 10.
    6. Change your settings on a regular basis.
11. Keep your Windows OS patched with updates.
12. Keep your MS Office patched with updates.
13. Don’t surf nasty sites like porn and hate site. It will keep your mind clean (most important) and will reduce your computing liability.
14. Use webmail. No need to download email to your machine. Highly recommend the ever popular Google mail – gmail.com. They just got it right. If you haven’t tried it yet, do yourself a favor.
15. Learn to be shrewed with email. When in doubt, delete it.
16. Keep your ear to the ground for latest threats. You don’t have to be a subscriber to Slashdot – slashdot.org/ to keep up with the critical issues. More and more threats make the news.
17. Take the cover off of your desktop and blow-out the dust. If it’s in a dusty location, do this every month or two. Also, make sure your machine is well vented.
18. Make friends with a techie and bribe them with brownies and Diet Coke (or whatever their choice of caffeine). Then you’ll be armed when it eventually hits the fan (because someday it will).
19. Pray daily to God to protect you. Not kidding here. God is into the details of our lives and computing can wreak havoc to your schedule and if you blog for a living to your monitary gain.
20. Use a Mac and save yourself some trouble. Yeah, do as I say and not as I do. Mac’s are great. I’ve just not made the leap just yet. Windows at work, Windows at home. ¿Que lastima?