I believe that what I am going to talk is a useful one for all of you. We use our computers every day, for work or entertainment. And sometimes it crash and we can’t continue our work. It’s really annoying, I think. Maybe you have already got your methods to deal with these problems. But I still hope you can benefit from my presentation.
Ok, let’s get to the point. First I’d like to talk about the security. The second part is back-up and restore. The third part is about making your computer run faster.
So security first.
Viruses can’t run themselves, they can’t duplicate themselves. So they can’t protect themselves until they get executed. The key point is to find and delete it before it get executed.
The key point is to keep your eyes open. What I mean is to set your operating system to show all hidden and protected files. For example, one of the popular sources of virus infection is removable storage device like u-disk. So remember to use the right-click and choose the resources manager to open the u-disk, not the double click. If there are any executable files in it, and you don’t know where it came from, they are probably viruse. You can just delete them and then they are gone forever.
Most of you may have installed one security-software. But I want to say that Anti-virus software is not any smarter than you. Besides that, anti-virus software can’t repair your computer after any corruption from the virus. You must do it yourself.
Also remember to download files from official site and famous sites. There are such sites, such as duote.com, greedown.com and the official site of the software. Normally they have scanned their files before they get it published. So you can trust them.
There is a built-in Internet firewall within XP and Vista, remember to open it. It can protect you from network attack from other computers. And it’s enough without any other firewall.
Another tip is to open your automatic update options to get latest security updates.
The last is about your confidential files. For example, you may have some credit cards information in your computer. Remember to set a password to these files. You can set a password to your Word and Excel files. Also you can just put these files into a package by winrar and set a password on it.
The second part: Backup and restore. Sometimes bad things still happens, so we must do something before to prepare for it.
You can ghost an image of your hard disk on your mobile hard-disk. Although it may consume some time, but when bad things happened ,you will be relieved if you have one before.
Upload your personal documents to network space.
Sometimes your files maybe deleted mistakenly, you can still use some software like FinalData to restore them.
You may find that your computer get slower and slower after the last time you re-install it.
First principle about this is that the less software your computer installed, the faster it will be. So only install them when you have to.
After long time of use, your hard disk may have accumulated a lot of file fragments, so by defragging your computer regularly, you can increase the speed of your computer. Also if your believe your computer memory is large enough, like you have 1G or 2G memory, you can set it to use none virtual memory.
If you are careful enough you’ll find a system restore function in XP and Vista, in my opinion, there is no need to turn it on. It can only waste a huge disk space and slow the performance.
Sometime when your computer is connected to the Internet, you may find your computer get much slower sometime, it probably be the Windows Auto Update Options. So properly set the auto update options, let you choose when to download and update.
Like any other software, Anti-Virus software can consume a lot of your system resources. So like I did, you can just un-install the anti-virus software. My computer has run naked for almost half a year. It’s ok, really. Or if you really want one, I recommend to install NOD32，it is said to use the lowest resources.
