Recent marketing efforts by AOL advertise their giving away features to their software that will help prevent spyware and SPAM.  While we're happy to see every effort to reduce the amount of abuse your computers are receiving, we see AOL's approach as not addressing the fundamentals of avoiding spyware and SPAM.

The key to prevention is very simple:  education.  BC Services prides itself in our standard level of charm being to not only fix our customer's problems, but also to help educate our customers in preventive maintenance.

Most SPAM and spyware can be prevented by wetware.  Unlike hardware (physical computers) and software (programs), wetware (you, the user) are an unlimited resource for preventing most malicious code from reaching your computer.

The key to preventing malicious code from reaching your computer in the form of SPAM and spyware is:

Be selective in the use of your email address, and in the programs you allow to be installed to your computer.

Setup a second email address at mail.yahoo.com for all of your less-officious needs.  Let your secondary address take the brunt of the SPAM workload.  Keep your primary email address for only the people who count.

If the message box is asking if you want a free program, tell it no unless you know for sure the program is from a reputable source.  Bonsai Buddy, Gator, and CoolWebSearch are three "free" programs that have integrated spyware applications.

 

Reboot.  It’s amazing how many problems can be solved by rebooting a computer.  Too often, companies waste money on issues that can be fixed by helping the computer clear its memory and get reorganized.

 

Protect your data.  Incorporate power protection, antivirus, firewall, and backup procedures to your configuration.  Doing so can prevent not only the costs associated with rebuilding your computer, but also the manual process of recreating lost data.

 

Research issues yourself.  There aren’t many computer questions that can’t be answered through the Web.  Almost every computer hardware and software manufacturer has a support site.  Microsoft’s Knowledgebase is at  http://support.microsoft.com.

 

Perform preventive ,maintenance.  While it’s doubtful Benjamin Franklin was considering today’s technology when he wrote, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”, it still applies.  The best run business and hone networks owe their stability to regular software patches and hardware upgrades.

 

Ask questions.  BC Services takes pride in educating our customers about their computers.  Our personal interaction with end users, detailed history file, and invoicing based on service notes help our customers reduce their support costs.

 

Interested in learning more ways computers can increase your bottom line?  Give us a call at 845.795.5952

 

Defragmenting your hard drive keeps it running at peak performance.

 

A drive becomes fragmented over time with the placement of parts of a single file in several locations on a hard drive that are not right next to each other.  When the hard drive becomes fragmented it causes the read/write heads on the hard drive to waste time seeking out data that is scattered all over the drive. Defragmenting will rearrange the data on your hard drive so that files will be re-written in one area, as opposed to having parts scattered everywhere.

 

WARNING:  The following process can take many hours to complete.  Let us know if you would like guidance in speeding a defrag.

 

How to initiate the disk defragmenter utility on your Windows based PC:

 

From the "Start" menu select "Programs", "Accessories", "System Tools", "Disk Defragmenter". Choose the drive to defragment (C:) and select "OK". At this point the operating system will defragment your hard drive, this may take some time depending on how often it is defragged. It is usually a good rule of thumb to defragment your hard drive once a month or so.

 

Please let us know if we can be help.

 

With the recent onslaught of e-mailed viruses posing as updates from Microsoft we would like to provide you with this tip.