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After spending quite some time reading up desktop computer buying tips and doing your own research on first hand and second hand computers, you finally got your own computer with an enhanced disk drive, lots of computer media storage, and a snazzy-looking chassis. You installed the latest softwares and games (legally, of course), read the Dummy's book on "how to use my computer", and are all ready to plug into the Internet...

Suddenly everything crumbles when your browser behaves strangely, you keep getting unwanted pop up windows with pornography and stuff which you don't wish to see, especially when your children are around. After you have done lots of document and media preparation for your important presentation the next day, the computer refuses to start up... What can you do?

This is a common situation most people faced when you don't happen to be a pc geek. Somehow, computer geeks don't seem to have this problem. Now, you can protect and optimize your computer by following the simple steps below at a reasonably low cost:

PREVENTION IS BETTER THAN CURE

1. It is always a good practice to partition your enhanced hard drive into at least two partitions - one for the windows system and your program files, and the other purely for your document and media preparation. Usually C: drive is your main system drive and D: is your data drive. If your drive is not partitioned into two partitions, you can use a software like the Paragon Rescue Kit to perform the partitioning.

2. After the partitioning has completed, create a folder called "Data" in the D: drive. Go to your windows desktop, right-click on the "My Documents" icon and left-click on "Properties". Under the "Target" tab, look for a box labelled "Target folder location". In the box next to the "Target" label, type in "D:\Data" and left-click [Apply] button followed by [OK] button. If prompted to proceed, select "Yes". You have just completed configuring your computer data folder to be at D:\Data directory.

3. First thing you do after you have set up your new or second hand computers is to install a antivirusprogramm and do a pc security check for viruses. You can use any one of the following recomended antivirusprogramm software:

a. AVG Antivirus ( free for personal and home use )

b. eTrust EZ Antivirus

c. McAfee Viruscan

d. Panda Titanium Antivirus 

e. ZoneAlarm Antivirus

4. The next thing to do after installing a antivirusprogramm software is to update the software immediately by downloading the latest virus data file and do a full pc security check for virus.

5. Following the installation of the antivirusprogramm, you should install a anti-adware, anti-spyware software. You can use any of the following recommended software to remove adware components found on your computer:

a. Lavasoft Adaware ( free for personal and home use ) - Download Now

b. eTrust PestPatrol

c. XCleaner 

d. ZoneAlarm Internet Security

6. Similarly, do a full pc security check after you have downloaded the latest updates of the software to remove adware components or spyware found on your computer.

7. Installing a personal firewall is optional as the firewall would not be effective if you don't know how to configure it. If you are familiar with configuring personal firewall software, here are the recommended ones:

a. Sygate Personal Firewall ( free for personal and home use )

b. Xeon Personal Firewall ( free, ad-supported )

c. eTrust EZ Firewall

d. McAfee Personal Firewall 

e. ZoneAlarm Firewall

8. The final step in Prevention is to create an image backup of your hard drive, and the ideal recommended software to do the job simply and effectively is the Paragon Rescue Kit. Paragon Rescue Kit is an integrated software package of hard drive utilities to get access to files ( just like a pc unerase ) wherever they are, whatever unpleasant has happened to the computer hard disk and whenever you need them. No matter what operation system and file system you had used on the failed computer, just boot from Paragon Recovery CD and you will again see the file system with all your invaluable files. Then you can save the whole hard disk partitions or separate files to new, safer locations, or record them to CD/DVDs using the embedded recorder. In the event of a irrecoverable error, you can use the Paragon Recovery CD to recover the entire system from your backup system image.

OPTIMIZE REGULARLY FOR TOP PERFORMANCE

9. As you use your computer for a period of time, you may notice that your computer may seem to perform slower than when it was first bought with an enhanced disk drive and lots of computer media storage space. Assuming that your computer is well protected from viruses and spywares, the reason for the slower performance could be due to a unoptimized windows registry or a highly defragmented hard disk, as a result of your heavy use in document and media preparation work on your computer. Despite an enhanced disk drive and huge computer media storage space, the many files and folders can become quite fragmented in time. To keep your computer always running in its optimal state, three must-have softwares are recommended:

a. Executive Diskeeper - to automatically detect and defragment your hard drive as and when needed so that your enhanced disk drive performance would be like a new disk drive;

b. PC Doc Pro - to automatically clean up and optimize your windows registry and keep the operating system error free;

c. SpeedUpYourPC - to automatically monitor your computer performance and tune system settings optimally for a given computer configuration.

10. When using Executive Diskeeper, remember the following tips:

a. Use the boot defrag feature at least once for all your drives;

b. Use the "Set and Forget It" feature to have the software run on auto-pilot.

11. When using PC Doc Pro, remember the following tips:

a. Use the Junk Remover feature once a month;

b. Set the software to start with Windows and schedule a run every day.

12. When using SpeedUpYourPC,  remember the following tips:

a. Ignore the recommendation to "Enable Security Threat Detection". Your security softwares mentioned above have taken care of this for you. There is no need to have a redundant function.

b. Under Anti-Crash, make sure "Terminate Suspicious Tasks" and "Restart Windows Shell" are enabled with the check box checked.

13. After optimizing your computer, it would be a good time to create another image of your optimized system using the Paragon Rescue Kit. Ideally, burn the image into a good computer media storage like CD or DVD so that you have a permanent restorable image on hand.

14. As you work with your computer doing document and media preparation type of work, you should make a conscious effort to save all your documents into D:\Data directory. This practice facilitates the next productive tool which you should have in your pc security check list - Automated Data Backup.

a. Second Copy - enables you to create different sets of backup profiles with schedules so you won't have to always remember to do your data backup before it's too late. Backup is done automatically on the fly and does not affect your computer performance during operation.

DAILY PROTECTION FOR THE FAMILY...

15. Generally, your home computer is used not only by yourself. Your children & spouse would most likely be using it as well. Certainly, you would want the best for your children and would want to protect them from the undesirable things like pornographic materials. Sometimes, you also wonder what your teenagers are doing with the computer on the Internet. Here are some recommended softwares for your family computer:

a. KidWidget - is a completely kid-safe computing environment for young children. This software has two major objectives - to keep your children safe, and to provide them with a variety of kid-friendly tools that promote constructivism and early childhood education. Read more...

b. ContentProtect Internet Filtering - is the most effective and flexible Internet filter available today! You can easily customize ContentProtect's settings to fit the needs of each member of your family. It is the only family-oriented application that allows you to manage your home Internet use from a remote location. Feature Highlights - A timing feature allows you to set the times of day when Internet access is permitted. Remote management allows parents to remotely disable access to specific categories and services, or, if desired, to completely disable a family member's Internet connection. Parents can also choose to be notified, via email, when a user attempts to access an inappropriate site.

c. e-Surveiller - is the world's most powerful pc system computer notebooks monitore software for monitoring and recording every detail of PC and Internet activity - in your home or in your office. Used in homes, offices, schools, libraries and even banks, e-Surveiller records both incoming and outgoing chats, instant messages, web sites visits, keystrokes typed, programs launched, files, documents and folders created, deleted, modified etc. Unless there's is real good reason to use it at home... it's more suitable for use in offices and public computing areas.

RECOVERY IN THE EVENT...

16. Generally, your computer should not give you any major problems after you have done the above steps. However, no one can ever predict a hard drive failure. Should such an unfortunate event happened, you would still be able to do recovery using one of the following ways:

a. For bad sectors - Use HDD Regenerator to revive your hard drive to copy out your important stuff and replace your hard drive as soon as possible.

b. For boot failure problems - Use 7Tools Boot Corrector to rectify the boot problem. If it doesn't work, you may need to restore your entire system from your backup CD / DVD that you earlier created using Paragon Rescue Kit.

17. You can actively monitor the life of your hard drive by using HDD Life Pro - a real-time hard drive monitoring utility with alerts, malfunction protection and data loss prevention functions. Get it if you really need it.

18. If you encounter unstoppable pop-ups, unchangeable dialers, stubborn IE start pages or search pages that you did not do yourself, then you may need the Browser Hijacker Recover (BHR) software to get rid of the stubborn spyware. Usually, this should have been taken care by the anti-spyware program but some spywares are not easily removed. The BHR is a designed for non-computer experts to remove such spywares.

19. MS Windows does not protect all the files that you delete in your using of your computer. As an added assurance, you may want to consider using UnDelete to fully protect your files in case of accidental deletion of important files. UnDelete is more than a file-recovery utility - it provides real-time data protection with instant recovery for your computer.

CONCLUSION

20. Finally, I wish your computer a long and productive service life for you and your family.

This article can be found at http://discovervalue.com/pc_security_check

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