• Keeping your Computer Safe from hackers & spies

1. Ensure that you have a firewall program installed and running before you connect to the internet. There are a lot of different firewall that reside between your PC and the internet and check the data coming in for legitimate trusted content.
   Zone alarm is a good firewall which can be downloaded for free from
   most magazine disks.
2. Have available at least 2 spy detection programs to deal with Trojans
   and other cunning spy software that sends details of your system back to the sites that produced them
   Ad-Aware and Spybot are two good programs to have and are available free to download from magazine disks.
   Run these programs after every 3-4 hours of internet usage.
3. Have a good virus detector and destroyer software and run every month or so
    VET, McAFEE make good virus detectors but you will have to pay for them but it is worth it.

Keeping your computer running at a fast speed

Everyone at some time will experience the computer slowing up, this will
occur many times during its lifetime if not attended to. One needs to think
about a maintenance routine to be carried out at regular intervals, depending
upon the hours of usage and the amount of program deleting and restoring performed

Problem areas are

1. The system registry where the detail of installed software and setting are
     stored

There are a few programs available to check the registry,
Registry Mechanic is a nice application which can be downloaded from the internet.
Be careful of some of the others as they can stuff up your registry.
I have never had any problems with Registry Mechanic.

2. The system memory becoming used up probably by programs which load into it at system startup or having insufficient memory in the machine to handle what the machine is being used for.  When the memory of the computer is inadequate the computer uses the hard disk as a memory(the swap file)which is extremely slow compared to normal solid state memory. The normal memory works in nanosecs compared to the hard drive millisecs

So check on the amount of software loaded at start time and get rid of the
excess.  If having done that without success you may need to increase the
size of the memory.

3. The Hard Drive that is used to store your programs will gradually slow down after considerable use. It will slow down due mainly to the removing and reinstalling software onto the disk. Compared to the solid state processor and memory the accessing of the hard disk is very slow,  being mechanical in nature and requires access times in milli seconds to write and read your data.

Several methods are used to try to overcome this lack of speed and are inbuilt into the disk hardware and some software applications cater for this.

However because of the way data is written and read from the disk program file will become fragmented e,g parts of the program /data file will appear in different parts of the disk instead of being contained together.

The effect of this is to slow the data flow considerably sending the disk heads here ,there and everywhere over the disk to read in the whole file.

The period over which this occurs will be determined by the amount of computer use, removing. and reinstalling software.

I have seen computers come almost to a halt with this problem ,however they may have not been defraged in their lifetime.

Obtain a software package which is called a defragmenter and check your hard disk at least every 6 months with heavy use. The defragmenter will analyse the hard drive and indicate the amount of fragmentation and suggest whether it need to be defraged.

Nortons systemworks has a good defragmenter but is not to happy with W2000 with sp4 plus.

The drefrager in system tools in W2000 works very nicely and I have had no problems with it.

Keep your hard drive in good condition and your machine should perform well.

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