How secure is your backup strategy for home as well as business computers? Most people when asked whether it is important to backup a computer answered in the affirmative, yet common knowledge is not always common practice. Most of those who currently backup do so because they have experienced a loss of data or an hardware failure in the past, or know someone who has. The risks of data loss have never been higher. Viruses, spyware, malware and risk of hardware failure continues to increase as hackers and criminals become more sophisticated.  In order to ensure that data is protected, it’s important to have backup software and other protections against viruses and spyware.

Most would agree that both an onsite and an offsite backup software solution makes sense. There are plenty choices of companies offering file and folder backup services. Companies such as Symantec, Mozy, Baraccuda and so forth. The advantage of this type of offsite backup service is that it is cheap but a major disadvantage is that the services are generally limited to files such as documents, pictures etc and not to the entire operating system, personal settings, programs/installed software and so forth. So in the event of a computer/server crash it would be difficult to respore a machine to its pre-crash state.

A solution such as StorageCraft’s ShadowProtect can backup the entire computer and take super quick incremental backups as often as every 15 minutes, so that in the event that data is lost as little as one file or as much as the entire system can be restored. ShadowProtect can even restore the backup image to an totally different computer hardware or even to a virtual environment. ShadowProtect’s offsite backup solution has received PC Magazine’s editors choice award as well as numerous other industry awards for its speed and reliability.

When you get a new computer, one of the best enjoyments is the fast boot times. Within a few seconds everything is fully loaded and ready to go. As time goes on, this gets slower and slower. Eventually it can be at the point where you can turn on your computer, get a coffee and it’s still not finished. Almost everyone experiences this problem and we just learn to live with it, cursing at Microsoft everytime we turn on the PC. Well luckily, this problem doesn’t have to stick around and you can get back to the good old times with a very quick bootup.

There are various ways to fix this problem, one of the most common is to install a Registry cleaner. However, for the purpose of this article, we will not be making use of any software, so we will get back to the Registry cleaners later.

The cause behind the slow bootup is due to excessive load placed on the Windows operating system. As you install new software, files, applications, this all places extra workload on the OS. Many of these applications like to start themselves during boot time, hence the delays. If you add an extra eight programs, you can imagine that if each one of these needs to load at boot time, you are going to have to wait longer. Other contributors include an Adware or Spyware infection, these will also add huge delays to the boot process.

Get a Faster Bootup

Luckily, it is quite simple to speed up the boot time. With just a few quick steps you can have a lightning fast startup. Step one is to remove clutter from your PC. Get rid of any applications, programs and software that are no longer being used. Make sure that you remove these via the Control Panel, with the add/remove software tool. If you do not remove programs in this fashion, the Registry entries will remain and the startup will not be improved.

Upon removing unnecessary programs, the next step is to remove clutter by deleting temp files and getting rid of duplicate files. Try to keep your PC as clean as possible. The less junk, the better.

The last and most important step is to get rid of programs from the startup config. To do this, type “msconfig” into the quick search box. Now click on the “Startup” tab. Here you can uncheck items that you do not wish to begin at startup. This can massively improve performance. Just don’t uncheck anything you aren’t sure of.

Enjoy the faster bootup.

Backing up your data is the best way to prevent losing it. This method comes into play when you’ve suffered a system failure or hardware corruption. Your IT folks simply–or not so simply, depending on the method you used for backup–restore your data from the backed up files.

No matter what you do, data backup is the most essential part of a data protection plan. But is there something you can do to potentially prevent you from losing your data at all?

There are other steps you can take, in concert with data backup, to help protect your data. The best data protection strategy is to create a holistic plan that incorporates both prevention and restoration.

With data backup as the cornerstone of your plan, there are close to a half a dozen other actions you can incorporate across the board at your company.

• Run an anti-virus program to prevent and eliminate viruses that could take advantage of security flaws and compromise your data.
• Use power surge protectors everywhere to prevent power surges from causing hard-drive failure and potentially damaging your data.
• Always quit your programs and shut down your computer properly to eliminate the risk of losing any unsaved data. Quitting programs and shutting down properly allows the system to save vital data before exiting a program.
• You should neither disassemble your hard drive nor shake nor remove the covers on hard drives or tapes, because data will likely become unrecoverable once you have tried to perform a task with which you are not familiar.
• Checking the health of your computer with computer diagnostics programs is a good idea, allowing such programs to repair any issues they find can make it more difficult to recover data if you lose it.
• Assure your computers and laptops are in safe locations where they won’t be knocked over, stepped on, sat on, dropped or spilled on.
• Avoid moving your computer, particularly when it’s in operation.

Above all, never attempt any operation such as installations or repairs with which you have no experience. Leave the diagnostics to a data recovery specialist who has experience with all types of hard drives and knows how to perform successful data recovery.

If you use to have plenty of hardware – from printers to cameras, to scanners that you connect to your PC and now they seem to not be working properly, you may need to update your drivers.

Your PC may have was a success for you for some time now, and then it begins to have Problems with the printer, scanner or any other peripheral. It may begin to be lethargic. Your PC might have outdated drivers that are now non-compatible with the accessories.

Many accessory makers frequently make parts that improve the performance of their equipments and if you haven’t updated drivers on PC, you are probably going to have Problems with it.

Microsoft has a facility that provides regular driver updates. Other on-line internet sites also have databases of driver updates from almost all computer accessory makers. You can subscribe and be sure to receive regular computer driver update alerts and keep your computer prepared to work with any accessory.

Such subscription has a considerable number of advantages, which include :

( a ) By having regular driver update alerts, you can rapidly update your personal computer drivers and ensure that it doesn’t have any issues and in case of any, you can speedily fix them.

( b ) on-line driver update web sites maintain gigantic databases of drivers. You are assured of having the latest drivers at every point.

( c ) These sites deliver updates in a safe way and you do not to fret about viruses or bugs. Their links download files directly from manufacturers’ websites.

( d ) By subscribing, you are constantly ready to receive any driver update immediately it becomes available.

( e ) You save yourself a bunch of time and trouble going thru the web in search of new driver updates.

If you don’t like to sign up to Microsoft, there’s another choice : Auto Driver Update Software. Instead of trying to work out the simplest way to do all of these updating on your own, you can download an efficient driver update programme to download all needed drive rupdates for you in the background. No headaches, no blunders and zip to maintain.

Is your computer sluggish? It won’t open programs and you can’t get into anything? Well, maybe you have a sick computer. Just as people get ill from viruses, so do pc s. When this happens, you need to have a pc technician look at the computer to re-format and get rid of the virus. If you know something about computers, you might be able to do this yourself.

What is a Computer Virus?

A virus is a parasitic program written to intentionally venture a computer without the user’s  permission or knowledge. The word parasitic is used because a virus attaches to files or boot sectors and replicates itself, which allows it to spread. Though some viruses do little more than copy themselves, others can cause serious toll or affect program and system performance. A virus should never be assumed harmless or left on a system.

Types of viruses

Viruses are classified by the ways they infect computer systems:

1) Program: Executable program files such as those closing with the extensions .Com, .Exe, .Ovl, .Drv, .Sys, .Bin
2) Boot: Boot Record, Master Boot, FAT and Partition Table.
3) Multipartite: Both program and boot infector.

What is Trojan Horse?

Besides being a large wooden horse used in the Trojan war 2500 years ago (and more  recently by Brad Pitt), a Trojan Horse or Trojan is a computer program that seems innocuous or harmless, but conceals another more vile function. in general a Trojan is contained in a part of program brought into your computer from an away source – (e.g. floppy disk, CD, cyberspace download, dingy email). Trojans can be dangerous sometimes. For example a program may looking to be a pc game demo, but while you enjoy the game, it may be happily formatting your hard disk or emailing porn sites to everyone in your email address book.

Trojans are also used as a ‘back door’ or ‘trap door’ to sneak into a pc ’s operating system’s information. An example is a program that pretends to be the system log-in program (such as you find in Windows NT/XP or Linux). When an unsuspecting user tries to log-in, the Trojan program captures the user-name & password. Then it may indicate a failed log-in attempt and exit to the real log-in program. The user may successfully log into the system next time, but by that time Trojan has also got enough details to log into the system.

Example Trojans

Notroj. This Trojan horse pretends to be a program that guards against Trojans. It’s genuinely a time bomb that wipes out the hard disk later on it’s more than 70 percent full.

PWSteal.Refest A Trojan Horse that installs itself as a BHO (Browser Helper Object) for  Internet Explorer and steals online banking information when it is submitted in web forms.

PWSteal.Likmet.A A Trojan horse that displays a fake MSN Messenger logon window and steals the password provided.

Run.me. This is a graphics program, which plays the Star Spangled Banner and displays the American Flag while it worms its way into the hard disk and erases the data on it.

What is Worm?

A Worm is a self-propagating program that works its way through a system or network (like the Internet), oftentimes causing damage. It does not require a host program to trip it. somebody has to inclose a worm directly into network of interconnected computers where messages can be sent from one to another and data files and programs exchanged. An example is a local area network where each pc has its own files, programs operating systems and hard discs such as would be found in a university or corporate setting.

Example Worms

Alarm Clock Worm. A worm that reaches out through the network to an outgoing terminal (one equipt with a modem), and places wake-up calls to a list of users