by Tin Huynh

Created on: October 16, 2008   Last Updated: November 13, 2008

I hate when weird stuff happens to my computer so I take several precautionary steps to avoid issues.

First off your anti virus software should be up-to-date. The pc you bought most likely would have some sort of anti virus software include (Norton's Antivirus, BlackIce, etc), its worth it to pay the extra dollars per year to keep it up to date.

Separate user base. By this I mean, either set up a username and password for yourself and a separate username and password for each additional user of that PC. This way you keep others out and you keep them from messing with your settings, programs, and downloads. Although this sometimes does not entirely prevent the other users from causing damages to the hardrive but it will limit their ability.

Always shut down your PC after you're done for the session. Unless you're downloading something and want to leave it running (I will talk about downloading in a bit) in that case at least lock the screen. Shutting down the PC as a practice helps to clear virtual memory and caches so the next time you use the computer you start with a blank slate.

Turn on pop up blockers, phishing filters, on your web browser. This will prevent those annoying ads from popping up while you're surfing and for smart sites read your personal information.

Turn on appropriate security settings on your web browser. Internet explorer under Tools-> Internet Options-> Security Tab allows you to set appropriate security settings and lets you restrict websites from showing up if its not in your "trusted site" list. You can control which sites gets on this list.

Finally, the most important thing that you can do to prevent problems with your PC is to limit your downloads from non reputable websites, P2P file sharing, funny titled mail and what I call custom software. This is probably how the majority of viruses gets into your setting, registry, hard drive, memory, etc.

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