Being a recent victim of a computer virus, I sat down the other day and started thinking… just how do you protect yourself online? And why do people feel the need to create these viruses in the first place? After all, most people that get the viruses on their computer don’t even know the person that created the stupid thing. Here are some suggestions that I came up with:
- Be careful what sites you go to. Obviously, if you’re online searching through some shady stuff, there’s more possibility of picking up a virus. But my wife was working when my computer was affected. It seemed some computer geek with a hidden agenda was working for one of the companies that my wife was trying to work with. Needless to say, they lost her business LOL.
- Have a good Antivirus, spyware, and malware program. We thought we were okay as we had paid for a pretty popular antivirus program and hadn’t had any problems in the three years that we had used it. We were wrong. We know have gone with a different antivirus program that was recommended by the IT guy from my work, and also have seperate spyware and malware programs.
- Expect problems. Back everything up! I originally put off burning the restoral disc when I first purchased my computer, and eventually forgot about it. What a mistake. Luckily, you can purchase another licensed copy for a fraction of what the original Windows program costs, but that could’ve been avoided. I also always thought burning my iTunes collection of over 8,000 songs to a DVD would be too time-consuming, but replacing it would cost 10s of thousands of dollars. Luckily, we were able to save the files, and I will be backing up my collection to DVD in the near future. A DVD holds more information than a regular CD, which makes them perfect for backing up large files.
There are also online servers that let you upload your files to, either for free or for a nominal fee. These may be well worth it, as long as they guarantee that your files won’t be touched. One other thing that I recommend is getting yourself an external hard drive that you can put all of your important files on, that way if the operating system on your computer gets compromised, you will still keep your important files safe. There are several different ways that you can protect yourself online. Save yourself some headache, and don’t put it off until it’s too late. Take action now to protect yourself.
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Here is a solution as far as protection goes. I do not use McAfee software because it uses a lot of resources. I use the free version of Avira, I also use SpywareBlaster,Spybot search and destroy and Registry Clean Expert. With all of these I never have a problem. It is also very recomended that you perform “disk cleanup” and “disk defragmenter” before and after I use the computer. These two programs are standard features on all computers.My computer always works perfectly.