Windows OS - well maintaining
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Hi, Very sorry to bother you with a basic question. I am planning to well maintain my desktop PC. It has the Windows OS (Windows XP) and connected to internet. I do the following activities, on weekly basis. - Windows Update - Anti Virus Update - Scanning my PC with Antivirus Would you please let me whether I need to do any further activities? Many thanks. Regards, Reshma.
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Hi, Very sorry to bother you with a basic question. I am planning to well maintain my desktop PC. It has the Windows OS (Windows XP) and connected to internet. I do the following activities, on weekly basis. - Windows Update - Anti Virus Update - Scanning my PC with Antivirus Would you please let me whether I need to do any further activities? Many thanks. Regards, Reshma.
As well as running antivirus, you should probably look at running anti-spyware protection. I assume you have a firewall installed. Finally, schedule regular backups of your system - that's vital if you should happen to lose it.
"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith
As Braveheart once said, "You can take our freedom but you'll never take our Hobnobs!" - Martin Hughes.
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Hi, Very sorry to bother you with a basic question. I am planning to well maintain my desktop PC. It has the Windows OS (Windows XP) and connected to internet. I do the following activities, on weekly basis. - Windows Update - Anti Virus Update - Scanning my PC with Antivirus Would you please let me whether I need to do any further activities? Many thanks. Regards, Reshma.
Besides doing what Pete has said, don't rely on a single anti-malware (anti-spyware) program, they all check different things so no one is good enough, so, use a small selection of them. Also to keep your machine as efficient as possible, periodically run CCleaner and a defragmenter such as Defraggle. Also, from time to time, do a checkdsk. Also check that you do not have programs auto-running that don't need auto-running from boot. And if your computer does malfunction in some big way, worth your while having a boot-time recovery disk, as well as having access to SysInternalsSuite.
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Besides doing what Pete has said, don't rely on a single anti-malware (anti-spyware) program, they all check different things so no one is good enough, so, use a small selection of them. Also to keep your machine as efficient as possible, periodically run CCleaner and a defragmenter such as Defraggle. Also, from time to time, do a checkdsk. Also check that you do not have programs auto-running that don't need auto-running from boot. And if your computer does malfunction in some big way, worth your while having a boot-time recovery disk, as well as having access to SysInternalsSuite.
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As well as running antivirus, you should probably look at running anti-spyware protection. I assume you have a firewall installed. Finally, schedule regular backups of your system - that's vital if you should happen to lose it.
"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith
As Braveheart once said, "You can take our freedom but you'll never take our Hobnobs!" - Martin Hughes.
Pete O'Hanlon wrote:
anti-spyware protection
Either of the following seems to be a good from the free-world: 1) Inbox.com Web Security Guard (www.websecurityguard.com[^]) 2) K7 Web Protection (www.k9webprotection.com/[^])
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Hi, Very sorry to bother you with a basic question. I am planning to well maintain my desktop PC. It has the Windows OS (Windows XP) and connected to internet. I do the following activities, on weekly basis. - Windows Update - Anti Virus Update - Scanning my PC with Antivirus Would you please let me whether I need to do any further activities? Many thanks. Regards, Reshma.
As others have mentioned, you should have more than one anti-spyware product installed, as no one product catches more than 65% of the current malware in circulation. You also should have a backup plan in place and running; I strongly recommend a separate, external hard drive for this purpose, as saving your backups to a local drive doesn't do you much good when the system crashes completely. Something no one else has mentioned, though, is to have a plan in place for handling future growth. As you use your computer, it's going to get cluttered, and it will eventually become impossible to find things. Set up a plan to organize things on your computer, then stick to it. For starters, reserve a healthy chunk of disk space for Windows; it needs a bunch, and it never stops growing, even when you tell a program to install itself somewhere else. Second, reserve a space for programs and always install them in that space. All programs seem to think you want them in the C:\Program Files directory, and that will eventually kill your computer. Lastly, save a space dedicated to your data - your documents, financial files, pictures, videos, etc. Then remember to change the default locations for data used by all of your installed programs to point to that dedicated space. Most programs, again, think you want all of their data saved on the C: drive, and you have to force them to save stuff elsewhere. My reason for all this is that, when you eventually have to reinstall Windows when it crashes, if you let things go with their defaults you will lose them all. Keeping all your data separate allows you to re-install Windows without losing any of it. Also, by installing all of your programs in a separate space, you keep the size of your backups manageable, as all you really have to back up is the Windows directory. If you can restore from your backup, you won't have to re-install anything - it will all still be where it was before the crash.
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