Top 10 Tips-How To Protect your Computer

With Increased uses of the internet, there is a remarkable increase in online threats. It’s extremely crucial that you keep your computer safe from these threats. We are presenting 10 tips to keep your computer safe.

1. First and the foremost precautionary measure for keeping your computer safe is to invest in an antivirus program. Antivirus program will protect you from viruses and will help in avoiding any data loss or data corruption because of Virus infections. There is a new product line offered by all the Anitivirus vendors, called internet security. Internet security products protect you from antivirus, malwares and adwares.
2. Do not open suspicious email attachments. Many spam emails contain infected attachments. Make use of junk email filter and always block sender’s who send you infected emails.
3. Always install purchased software’s. Pirated software possesses threat and source files may be infected. Do not use keygens and cracks to activate pirated software’s.
4. Always scan email attachments, portable drives and CD/DVD media before copying data on your computer.
5. Do not download any suspicious files from websites, files with extensions like .scr, .vbs are executable files and are very common source of virus infection.
6. Always backup your data. This will help you to restore it in case your computer gets infected, and your data get corrupt. There are many online backup solutions available these days, which are cheap and easy to use.
7. Be aware of phishing emails. Such emails come from forged email addresses and often ask you to update your bank information or some other critical information like your email password. Information gathered using phishing emails can be exploited by the sender.
8. Use safe browsing practices. Install a pop-up blocker to disable advertisements, which lead to potentially dangerous sites. Keep your browser up to date to keep it secure, as many browsers these days release frequent updates to address the security issues. Keep your operating system updated with latest service pack and patches.

9. Do not share your personal information like phone numbers, bank details and passwords over messenger as many messengers do not encrypt the messages. The messages travel in plain text and can be hacked. Share sensitive data via email using encrypted email. There are some free encrypted email sending options available these days. Sendinc.com is one which is free and easy to use for sending encrypted emails.
10. Use a firewall on your computer and keep an eye on the traffic coming in, and going out of your computer. Block suspicious traffic. You can use hardware or software based firewalls. Windows come with an inbuilt firewall.

Tips on how to Speed up your Computer

Being a computer user, you always keep on finding ways to speed up your computers. Slow computer always results in spending more time in getting simple jobs done and results in low productivity. In many cases, the slowness is not related to computer hardware, it’s the junk and lack of organizing your stuff with the time that lead to slowness. We are presenting you 15 tips to speed up your computer.

1. Antivirus program: Always pay for an Antivirus program. If you cannot afford to go for a paid program, some of the top Antivirus Vendors like Avast and AVG provides a free Antivirus product, which is free for home usage. Viruses cause slowness and sometimes complete corruption of data on your computer. You risk everything if you do not have an antivirus program installed.

2. Unwanted Programs: Are you in a habit of downloading new programs and testing them? Every software you download and install for testing is taking up space, and in many cases it also modify the registry to run files at startup which eats your RAM. Make a habit to uninstall the programs you do not need.

3. Defragmentation: When you install a program or copy and save files on your computer the data is written to the closest available space and it results in fragmentation on your hard disk. Defragmentation process organizes the files on your hard drive and places the files together for faster access. You should defrag your computer frequently. There are many free utilities available to automate the process.

4. Disk Cleanup: If you are not a geek, Disk cleanup utility which comes free, with every version of windows can help you to cleanup junk files from your computer. You can find it under Startup Programs-> Accessories-> System tools.

5. Updates: Keep your system updates with latest patches. Keep your drivers updated. This will help you to run your computer at its optimum level. OS patches keep you safe from online threats and Virus infections. You can enable Automatic updates to update your system weekly.

6. Backup old data to External Drives: As External storage is cheap and very affordable these days, it’s always good to keep your old data on external storage and keep your computer free from unwanted or old data.

7. Upgrade Memory: Memory upgrade can give you significant boost. With Memory prices coming down, it’s always good to have more RAM in your system. More RAM helps in faster execution of programs.

8. Disable Startup Programs: To speed up the computer boot process, it’s always good to disable unwanted startup programs. You can do it by launching MSConfig utility.

9. Disable Indexing or Tweak the Indexing settings: Indexing files on your computer may result in slow performance. You should either disable Indexing or tweak settings so that indexing runs only when your computer is idle.

10. Multitasking: Depending on your computer hardware, you can run multiple programs up to a certain limit. Avoid using multiple instances of programs like Photoshop, illustrator, video editors and virus scanners at the same time.

11. Regular scanning: Schedule scanning your computer for any malware and adware programs. Malware and adware slow down your computer and sometimes result in frequent crashing of the application and computer.

12. You can use the sleep or hibernate mode to speed up the boot process.

13. Do not install unwanted Add-ons and themes

14. Do not browse potentially danger websites. Sites, which distribute pirated software’s and cracks are potentially dangerous sites and may infect your pc by exploiting vulnerabilities.

15. You can always use some tune up software’s like Advanced system care or Tune up utilities, these software’s scan your system and suggest you many tweaks, which you can apply with a single click to speed up your computer.