Computer 101: Automated USB Virus Scanner

Virus sources comes in many form, one major sources of virus that infect your computer, laptop or tablet is through the use of  Universal Serial Bus based drive or commonly called flash drive, flash disk among other terms used to describe a small rectangular stick of a memory house in plastic or metal that be used to plug in to almost any computer related devices. There are two reasons why the flash drive has become very useful in today activity. One it is very small and since it is small it is very easy to carry, it can be placed on almost any type of pocket in your jeans and bag or you could choose to it as a necklace around your neck as you move around. Another reason is that it can contain a lot of files like documents, mp3, video, and picture because of it's design capacity into it. From 1 gigabytes to 8 gigabytes or more, they sure come in handy. Also another that makes this device very attractive to use is it price. Depending on what currency your using almost all cost is very low compare to the benefits that it can bring.

Imagine carrying a thousand song in a very small device and that device can be plug-in to a player that automatically plays the song inside it without having to press any button or just pressing a single button for manual play. Now where do viruses come here? The very characteristic of the flash drive that can be plug in to all computers is the same usefulness that the virus uses to spread itself from computer to another computer. Let's say we have a clean flash drive and we plug it in on an infected computer without knowing that the computer is infected with a virus. It is then detected by the computer and is added to its system. Then once we transfer a file which is infected to the flash drive then we also create a scenario for that virus to infect our file once we activate the file that is infected. Another way of infecting a flash drive is as soon as the auto-run of the computer open the flash drive the virus immediately copies itself into the auto run files of the flash drive thereby spreading itself faster when we plug our infected flash drive into other computer or laptop. Remember not all anti-virus software can detect harmful scripts is a flash drive or from the internet. 

The best way to solve this problem is to install a USB port virus scanner. The function of this flash drive virus scanner it to scan automatically all flash being detected by the computer. If a computer has ten USB port it will be scan as soon as a flash drive has been detected on one of those USB port. USB virus scanner is very easy to install and requires small amount of memory to function. Once it is installed into the system of the computer it will always be active and on guard. We can verify this by expanding your task to see the icon of the installed USB port scanner. Remember folks this is an added layer protection for your main computer or laptop where we keep most of our original files and important documents. Together with the anti-virus installed in your computer the USB port scanner main task is to check every device that your attach to your computer especially flash drive. Having them installed is more safer than just relying on your trusted anti-virus software. We do not need to buy them there free USB port scanner available in the internet just search in the web to your favorite search engine and they appear instantaneously. Remember it better to safe than sorry.

How about you what do you think, care to share?

SmartPhone or Computer that Do More than Just Make A Call.

How time passes by and so is the development of the technology involved in creating and developing the personal computer and other devices that is associated with it. One example of this is the mobile from it early bulky appearance and call function only, to personalization and fashion style and adding SMS and MMS then again to colour display, MP3 and movie player with powerful camera and an ever expanding Memory card. Now we have packed every imaginable application to the mobile phone and making it a smart mobile phone.

How smart is the smart phone today. First all latest smart phone from Apple I phone 4, Motorola Atrix and HTC to name a few have a single or dual processor in them to run every bit of the phone and all applications installed in it. The latest smart phone is powered by a dual processor, a 5 Mega Pixel and up main camera, the ever expanding memory of 16 Gigabytes or 32 Gigabytes and the latest Android OS version. Plus a host of all types of standard application from WIFI connectivity, GPS tracking system HD display where watching video has become more fun than ever before.

What is the important of having a dual core processor in smart phone; well it can run your favourite games pretty nice and start all those application on a faster mode. The phone can do things simultaneously or it can do multi tasking of all your favourite android base application at one time. More processor also the Smartphone can handle more complex application compare to the regular application let say a weight monitoring and tracking software. A more complex health application would be an application capable of monitoring one’s entire body status from blood pressure and the like to alerting the right Doctor to inform them of their patience condition in real time environment.

Bigger memory means lots and lots of music, picture and video can put into the phone without having to worry of getting it full. Also an application runs and reacts much faster. We can enjoy hours of homemade video via the latest smart phone because it provide a bigger storage area. Plus more new application is being created for the entire latest Smartphone model regardless of manufacturer. Adding to the basic and advance feature of each phone and creating a smarter phone compared to its predecessor.  With all the new and present application plus the always evolving hardware counterpart it has become harder to choose from a simple view of an ordinary user which would not have any clue on how to use all the available application present in the current generation of Smartphone.

All the picture taken and video recorded is also very clear because of the 5 mega pixel camera and watching the playback is also very clear and enjoyable because of the High Definition display for each latest smart phone.

With the current trends in the mobile phone industry, old and new player will continue to churn out more and smarter phone feature and adding or expanding current technology and also developing new technology for this smart phone making them smarter than today latest generation of smart phone. Indeed the computer technology has evolve so much that it created a revolution called the Smartphone which have influenced us very much on how we communicate and do our task every day.

Computer 101: Installing a Printer on your Computer

Why? Well does everyone know how to install a basic printer? But there is the printer manual on how to install one. Every new printer that is bought off the shelf comes with one manual. Yes that true but does everyone really read those manual or do take time to understand them. To most of user installing a printer on their own is simply hard to do. If something's go wrong during the installation process they easily give up and ask a tech supp guy to do it for them with payment of course.

Most printers' installation is the same and they use the same cable connection with the computer Universal Serial Bus cable. Let's do a quick checklist on what we need to install a newly bought regular printer. The printer itself, CD driver, USB cable and the power cable. All of them must be present to be able to install the printer on to the computer. Most common mistake by people installing their printer is plugging the printer first to the computer then waiting for it to install itself. This will only work if your computer's operating system is regularly updated on all its driver and software front. Also even if you successfully installed the driver of today printer most of its monitoring software will not be included. This monitoring software is also important in the day to day operation of the printer.

When you're going to check for the ink level of your printer this additional software. Another function of this software it the maintenance side of it. Which we will not go into details here. To get started first put the CD or DVD driver into your CD/DVD ROM drive and let the auto play or if the auto play ask to allow it to run then go ahead and click the okay button. Then after clicking the button wait for it to display the welcome screen or the menu asking you to choose what kinds of installation would you like. Now to make this simple if you see an option to install all items then go ahead and check the box beside it or check all the box besides all the item listed including the driver. This make take a little longer to install but at least will you can be sure that all features of your printer are taken care of. Now click the next button to continue. Wait for the installation program to ask for you to connect your printer.

When the program ask you to connect your printer make sure that you connect the printer properly on the USB port of your computer and turn it on and wait for the program to detect your printer and to continue installing it and the rest of the software package that goes with it. Remember to wait for it finishes the installation routine. A screen will display that the installation is done and you will know it. 

Computer 101: The important of RE-Booting your Computer.

Re-Booting or Re-Starting your computer, how many times have you done that. Well for most heavy user or professional user then, this happens very-very seldom. Why, well for one they have tons of automatic software that run in the computer and for them simply re-booting there computer is not a good idea. The bottom line is they do not like to wait on there computer to re-initialized all those automatic software that they have put into and windows itself has some of them. But it takes simply the user to activate this and scheduled them. Even when they go to sleep they do not shutdown there computer claiming it a waist of time, because they needed there computer to work for them even at night when they themselves have to take a time out and rest there mind and body. Simply waiting for those programs to come online again after a cold hard reboot is an eternity to them. why bother with the re-booting your computer, there no real benefits on this.Well not exactly the benefit of this can be seen as months and years go by, meaning it is more beneficial on the long run. One cannot forever to ignore that his computer needs to re-boot or to restart. Have ever heard of the term "Metal Fatigue" well this is true for some part of your computer, like the hard drive, your power supply unit, also those little chips and I.C. that make up your computer. Another danger is the over-heating of component or over use cycle. Where all you component degrade slightly each every time it is being used continuously.

But before your start re-booting your computer take the time to also save all your  files and close any open program. Re-booting the computer will also allows it to save all those configuration that you have just made on all your software and hardware. Now how do we start to re-boot your computer. Well you just do not press the re-star button on your computer, that will do more harm that it will do good for your computer. to reboot your computer go to the task bar and click it. Then select the shutdown command, for earlier version of windows a confirmation box will appear asking what is your choice, Turn-off, Restart, or Standby. For re-booting purposes click the Restart button and wait for it to complete it task. For shutdown purposes click the Turn-off button. For windows 7 user if you click on the shutdown button the choices is no longer there the computer will automatically turn-off after pressing the shutdown button so be very careful to save all those files and close all open programs that your using to really maintain you computer.

They will argue my computer is always in the air-conditioned room 24/7 and minimal dust gets in.Well if your using Windows OS then re-booting is a natural part of your computer life. When installing hardware upgrade and/or software. The OS will request a reboot, because it needs to initialized the hardware and the software for its proper configuration, but this is normal re-booting. More important reason to reboot is when a software hangs or just suddenly freeze in the  middle of your session and there is no other way for you but to re-boot to clear all cache and close the problematic software. Another thing is one needs to rest the computer so that it can heal itself and free the memory of all those cache items that needs to be removed. Simply re-booting your computer will help it run better in the long run.

Computer 101: Using the DXDiag tool to know more about your Computer

Have you ever heard of the DXDIAG? Do you know what it's look like and where it is located or how to activate this free software? This free software is one of the most ignored software or unknown software tool in windows system. If your ask an a person regarding this tool, chances are you'll get a mixed reactions in there faces. In the first place why is it there if no one ever used it or cared to know more about this free tool. Well for one the content of this tool can be pretty intimidating to most user who does not have enough technical background. First how do we activate this tool to know what inside our computer. To activate this tool please see picture below.

To activate the DXDIAG tool press the start button then on the search bar type the word dxdiag and hit the enter key. The picture below will appear, but if it is your first time to activate this tool a question will appear first to ask you whether to allow dxdiag to check for digitally sign driver. Just press the YES button to continue loading the DXDIAG tool which should look like the picture below.

DXDIAG Tool

Notice there are several tab to this tool, they are the system, display, sound and input tab. Clicking on each tab will display there content. The first tab is contains the most common information about your current computer system, the hardware and the software. As you can see from the picture above the computer name, operating system, language, system manufacturer, system model, BIOS, processor, memory page file and the direct X version are all listed here. You may ask, So  what I'm i going to used this for. Well this figure and data may not be useful to an average person but to a technical support person, this is valuable information. This first tab indicate how many memory are installed into your system, what type of processor is there and most of all the computer model is indicated. Which should be useful for warranty information if you system is new and what to verify it's content of the manufacturer's websites or on the vendor's website. This tool can help you verify if the vendor is telling the truth regarding the machine he or she is selling. Remember to access the tool just go to the start button and on the search bar type the word DXDIAG and press the enter key to activate the free software tool. 

Computer 101: File Saving and Backup

Back up your file always, how many times have you heard that phrase? This stuff is very important in all your usage of the computer. Every time you use the computer to do your task somethings might go wrong during the activity.Do we really need to back-up our files and data, and if so how often? Well the answer is a big YES and more YES. It is imperative that we back-up our computer files.And how often, as often as you can, especially if you use the computer 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 12 months a year. Yup that how need to backup our stuff in the computer. I can't emphasis enough how important it is to back-up all your files. Remember if you don't back-up. There will be no chance for you to recover you data or files in the event your computer came crashing down.

The need for back-up now is more needed than ever before because of the huge volume of data that we put into our computer everyday.A lot people has the mentality not to back-up there files, especially the documents they working until they are finish. This practice is completely wrong. Let me explain further. Lets say you are going to work on a file for several days and this file is very large, 100 pages or more and its growing everyday. Because of the heavy data encoding and lots and lots of information to put in on the documents, the saving and the backup process has been the least concern of the user. This process only happens twice or thrice during the daily activity during the typing period. What happens if and during this long process your computer suddenly hangs and you didn't save or update you files. Another scenario is that your computer is fine and working yesterday, but for some reason when you open it today, it did not start. How would you feel. This things can be very disappointing and dangerous. The scenario i mentioned are real, i have experience them during my learning days. That why when i do some encoding or word processing, i always save them as often as possible and create a back-up files for the days activity.

Saving is the most common method of preserving newly created documents and files, from word processing, spreadsheet calculations, image editing to video editing or just simple playing with your favorite software. Some software has a feature called AUTOMATIC SAVE. It works by setting the needed time interval to save your documents on a regular basis while you work on it. It is measured in minutes, most common intervals is 5, 10, 15 20 or more minutes. This means when when you set your AUTO SAVES to 5 minutes. The document you are currently working is being save every 5 minutes. Some people don't like being disturb during the typing period by several time so they set the auto save function to longer minutes. When the auto-save activates, you will see that your word processor in reacting by temporarily not responding to your command. This can be noticeable on the status toolbar of the software where in it display the current activity. If the auto save activate this will clearly be display on the status bar of your word processor. But over used on this feature is sometimes not good, what if somethings go wrong with this feature and does not work properly. Therefore from time to time you need to manually save your work by pressing the save button on your word-processor or use the shortcut key equivalent for it like CTR L+S for most short cut key. It pays to be prudent on always updating your files and saving them, this will save you from allot of trouble and head ache in the future. So start training your selves to always save your file as often as possible.