SPAUG has a new service to its members that seems to be welcomed with enthusiasm.
I’m referring to the Saturday scheduled sessions where up to six persons attend a 1.5-hour session that reviews the actions necessary for them to maintain their computers at home.
The origin of the classes stems from the fact that six months after having fixed several computers to run well and to have malware and excessive files under control, the computers were coming back with the same problems because the correcting programs had never been run in the interim.
The programs were all in one place, generally on the right side of the screen in the “Maintenance Department” but unused by the owner.
So I tried the idea that up to 6 persons could attend a 1.5-hour session on Saturday morning dedicated to the concept that attendees would learn what to DO with those items in the “Maintenances Department”, thereby keeping their own computers healthy and malware free.
The course was predicated on the concepts presented in the February 2009 issue of PrintScreen, available on the SPAUG website at www.pa-spaug.org in the Newsletter, Archives / 2009 / February section. < http://www.pa-spaug.org/News09/News0902.htm > Indeed, that article was passed out to each participant.
At the classes, each participant was handed enough materials to permit them to independently maintain their computer.
However, going through the class caused each participant to encounter and, hopefully, concurrently understand where each function fit into the larger picture of doing malware maintenance on their computers to assure a satisfying computing experience.
No one had ever said that a computer was a hands-off situation or that one could merely roam the Internet with abandon without cleaning up the mess routinely on some schedule.
In practice, my favorite action is to start an automated cleaning procedure—by Google-searching [ windows live safety scanner ], “feel lucky”, and planning on a long run (say 6 hours or more) and then to walk out the door to some other activity such as golf or whatever. That is the way to assure that your computer is not a pain but a buddy in your surfing of the Internet.
I’m not going to try to set forth here the procedures that you need to use in the maintenance of your computer; rather the class is designed to cause you to become familiar with the necessary steps to be taken periodically to assure that the computer is maintained in healthy condition and that when called upon to produce some effective result, it is ready to do so.
Just as you have to maintain your automobile in order to use it, you have to maintain your computer in order to have full enjoyment.
The classes are held on the Saturdays immediately following the SPAUG meeting, each one not to exceed six participants.
Only two weeks of meetings are scheduled, and then the cycle starts all over again until all interested parties are educated on what they need to do, given the standard tools, to maintain their computers.
What is expected to be on an XP computer varies with the winds of change as something that performs poorly can quite often be whipped into shape by its owner. The present general guideline for the appropriate software for your computer is as follows:
● Internet Explorer 7 – remove IE8 if it accidentally gets onto the computer.
● The latest Adobe Reader—currently 9.3.2. Anything less is not acceptable, as Adobe Reader has unpatched malware access points.
● Avast Anti-Virus OR AntiVir anti-virus. Not both. Remove all other anti-virus programs with the exception of MalwareBytes, which can be downloaded and set into motion without requiring a reboot.
To assure lower overhead, remove all programs that are no longer in use. If you don’t know what it is, the probability that the program is not in use is pretty high. Research this point by asking Google what the program is and make your decision based on good information.
Be sure you have a working copy of Acronis and be sure you have a current copy.
If you don’t have it, go to the Acronis site and download a 30-day copy of the $50 product (currently Acronis2010). Go ahead and install Acronis but indicate you will pay for it later.
Then install and learn how to set up Acronis to do what you need.
Then go www.ugr.com and purchase Acronis with the reduced price of $29 using the SPAUG User Group code of UGTIH10. The additional support of Gene Barlow’s site will be available and you will save 40%.
The Saturday session will also cover the philosophy of making incremental backups in combination with repeating backups over a week or so. This affords long-term backups to permit recovery of key files over a period of months along with the ability to do a restore to the system state anywhere in the week before. This has the benefit of assuring that the data is verified good each night.
Setting up Acronis usually requires some help, but once in place, the results, in time of need, are impressive. Plan to have either a separate internal drive or an external USB drive. Merely using a singe drive partitioned into two pieces still means that when the drive fails, everything is gone – permanently.
Remember: There are two kinds of SPAUG Members reading this article—those that have had hard drive failures and those that are going to have hard drive failures. Let’s play Boy Scouts: Be Prepared.
