How to Keep Your Computer Secure

Welcome to another CnP Systems Quick Tips session. I’m talking about basic computer security today. Some other things you can do to help keep your computer secure. What are those security programs for you? There is the firewall, which protects against backdoor intrusion. If people are getting on the computer on the wares, there’s antivirus program to keep those viruses off. And then there are the other programs that you need as well, the anti-malware, adware, et cetera—all these bad programs, these malware, adware could cause serious damage to your computer. Where do we find programs to fix these things and prevent them, download.com and sourceforge.net—they’re mostly free, I wouldn’t recommend producing anything. You could find what you need for free and they worked very well. Talking about the firewall for a second, there is one built-in to Windows and it’s in the security center. If you’re not going to be running a third party software, definitely have this running in the background all of the time. But you are going to be interested in using third party software, check out one of these three—Comodo, Outpost, ZoneAlarm. These programs prevent people from getting into your computer from the outside and prevent you have installed on your computer from accessing the internet without your permission. They’re important to have and again, these are all free. So it’s true that we need these programs, but when do we need them really? Okay, it depends on really what you and your activities are. If you’re going to have just you using your computer and being pretty conservative, then you just don’t need all of them. But if you’re going to have other people, then you’re going to need to need to have these programs running in the background. Why? Well, different things can cause problems even though attachments you can get from a friend that looks like some nocuous video, it turns out to be a virus or some kind of Trojan getting on your computer. Then, there other pictures and videos and forms, then especially the torrent files, the torrent programs like BitTorrent—those programs are giving access to your computer, by showing people around the world and also giving them the ability to install nasty programs unto your computer. So, you’re going to be doing any of those stuff that you see on the screen here, you need these programs running in the background. So going back to the types of programs that protect you, let’s first start off with antivirus—the AVG, Avira, and the Avast, the three most popular ones. I prefer AVG the most because it has a schedules scan availability and also the option to have the computer shutdown after an individual scan has finished. It doesn’t matter which one you use, just get an antivirus program on there if you are going to a bunch of different places on the internet, alright? Also, we need to have other programs aside from antivirus—SpyBot, malware, adware, all these programs take care of individual things or different things that the other programs can’t take care of. It need to be installed in a computer, even if it’s not running in the background, because some of the malicious software that is installed from emails and whatnot, those will sometimes prevent your computer for being able to install and run these prevent and maintenance programs in the future if you ever needed to, so get them on there and have them available. Where do we find out whether or not we have some of these programs available, it’s in the windows security center, you can see on the screen here that there are—I have AVG installed, I have the Windows firewall running, check this out and if you need to get something on that screen and saying you don’t have, then go ahead and go t the resources that I gave earlier. Now, if you’re pretty safe with your computer, then remember what I said before, you doesn’t really necessarily need to have these running on the background, you can see on the start button there, on the run, it’s in the yellow circle there. Get that and you’ll come to another screen that will allow you to turn off these programs from starting up when the computer starts up, this still will be installed. It’s just not running in the background. So after you hit the start run, type in MS config, hit okay, and you will come to this next screen, we’ll see the startup tab, go to that tab and remove any of the entries that you don’t think are necessary. If you have any question, you can either contact us or Google them and I would just recommend that you just keep those ones that you see on the screen there, check, if you’re loading it to a different computer. If you have any questions or you find that you have other needs, help and computer repair in the area, feel free to contact us, cnpsys.com or help@cnpsys.com. Thanks for watching.