How Healthy Is your Computer?

Do you often despise shutting down your computer when you are finished because it takes so long to boot back up? Do you notice it is extremely slow when you are surfing the web? Or maybe it is just slow in general! Let’s walk through some simple tricks to making sure your computer hardware is healthy and running at its optimal performance. If you have answered YES to any of these then your computer hardware might be at risk!

1. Have you let anyone on your computer that you do not know?

Don’t fall for these easy hacks and scams. I know as a computer technician myself I see countless people a week that have fallen for these such scams. No one will ever ask to remote into your PC unless you have asked them too. Even these, you need to be careful that you are talking on the phone or using a website you can trust. And yes there are company’s out there that are great at making their website look just like the original website you were trying to get help from!

2. Toolbars are the devil!

Toolbars are not cool! These toolbars can destroy your bandwidth and make your computer more acceptable to getting a Virus! Even if you know of the company that you are trying to get a toolbar downloaded from. Ignore it, these waste resources on your computer and cause for a slowed down computer. Not to mention the security risk you are just asking for.

3. Updates are good, not evil!

Countless times I have seen people who want to turn their updates off on their computer, or do not know how to perform a computer update. Windows has a way that these can update automatically. I have seen technicians tell customers that they need to turn off the automatic updates from happening, and this is fine only if you are going to make sure to check them and keep them up to date! Updates have been known to cause issues but that doesn’t happen very often! Updates normally happen because people have found ways to exploit the current version and now the update is there to correct that! So if all else fails, run the updates! If you are not sure which ones you need to do or just want them to even be done for you. You can always check here to have someone help you!

4. No need for 3rd party Computer Driver Checkers!

I cannot tell you how many times I have been on a customer’s computer and they have a third party Driver Checker that tells them when their drivers need to be updated! Let me explain this is just one more piece of software that you do not need on your computer. Very rarely do you need to update a driver on a computer other than a display driver. And most of these, update automatically with your Windows Updates!

5. Have a Paid Anti-Virus!

Everyone thinks that paying for something is bad…Wrong. When you pay for an Anti-Virus you get the real deal! The top Anti-Virus company’s: AVG, Norton, Trend Micro, and McAfee have a free version of their protection. But what people do not realize is this only protects you from the most basic Virus’s. This does nothing with Firewall, Email Protection, or online personal Protection! It is a very small price to pay for an Anti-Virus!