Are Bugs KILLING Your PC?

Your computer probably is not slow – it is just horribly infected. Your computer is vulnerable to a whole host of viruses, spyware, Trojans, and other unpleasant programs.
Computer insecurity statistics today are truly frightening. One study says 80 percent of users have some form of spyware on their system. There are roughly 3,200 viruses currently active. Those are alarming figures, but you are not helpless in this fight. Today’s security tools are more sophisticated and combined with good judgment and best practices, you can reduce your risk.
Neither virus scanners or sypware killers are 100 percent effective. Anti-spyware applications only stop about one-third of the treats. Therefore, setting up your firewall correctly; maintaining your software updates and patches; and only opening trusted files, URLs, e-mails, and pop-ups can help you reduce your risk.
Experts in the industry recommend that you use only one anti-spyware tool to block incoming attacks, but strongly recommend that you use two or more tools to scan your system regularly in the hope that each will cover the gaps in the other’s protection.
So, how do you know if you have a virus that your anti-virus software does not detect? Start by looking for unusual activity on your PC, such as unexplained hard-disk activity or network access. Remember that there are a lot of viruses traveling across the Internet . . . don’t let them get you down or affect your business.

Procrastinating Will BITE You!

What are the things you know you need to do, but keep putting off . . . flossing your teeth, changing the oil in your car, and backing up your data files? You know that it’s inevitable that procrastinating will eventually bite you and you end up paying more in the long run.
Backups are a necessary evil in some ways. The question of whether or not you should do them is more a matter of when you will have a data loss than if you will have a data loss. The reality with computers is that you will have a loss of data sooner or later. Murphy's Law not only suggests that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, it also adds that when it does happen, it will do so at the worst possible moment.
Now that we've got the inevitability factor covered, how often should a backup be done? It depends entirely on how important your data is and how current it needs to be. Let's say you run a business and you keep business records that need to be absolutely current in order for your business to survive, you need to decide how much data you could afford to lose but still keep your business going and then plan your backups in a time frame shorter than that.
If you decide you can only afford to lose 1 day's data, then you might choose to do a backup twice a day. That way, in any disaster situation, you will only have a half day of work to recreate. If you're using the computer to write papers and essays, maybe once a week is fine. You decide how often you need to backup based on how well you can face the trauma of a data loss.
Doing a backup does not need to be disruptive. Depending on whether or not you actually remove the data to another medium (i.e., archiving) you can actually free up some space on the system. You should not do any other work while a backup is occurring. We recommend end-of-day backups so that backups are a non issue.