Keep Your Computer Healthy: How to Avoid Contracting a Virus

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What do you do to keep yourself healthy? Perhaps you stay active, take vitamin supplements, eat fruits and vegetables and get lots of sleep to keep your immune system strong? If you feel a little run down, you go to bed early and give your body the rest that it needs to fight off an impending illness. However, although you take care of yourself to prevent illness, do you take the time to protect one of your most important possessions; your computer?

Your computer is just like you; if it gets exposed to viruses and it’s immune system is lowered then it is at risk of coming down with an illness. However, rather than causing stomach flu, headache or sore throat, a virus in your computer can compromise your personal information and even destroy the computer completely. Even though viruses have a devastating effect on your device, many people pay very little attention to the health of their personal computer until it is too late.

However, there are many ways that you can keep your computer healthy and ensure that it has a great “immune system” for fighting off potential viruses. Here are a few ideas of what you can do to stay one step ahead of computer viruses and keep your device safe:

Vaccinate with an Anti-Virus Program

When it comes to computers, an anti-virus program is like a vaccination, it allows your computer’s immune system to recognize any invading viruses and stop them before they cause infection. You should always have a quality, trusted anti-virus software installed on your computer from the very first day that you use it. Every time you surf the internet you are exposed to countless malware, viruses and spyware so it is crucial to be protected.

Keep Your Immune System Strong

Every now and then, your anti-virus software will ask you to do an update. You should always click “yes” because this is very important to the strength of your computer immune system. Internet hackers keep coming up with new viruses and so your anti-virus software needs to keep updating itself so that it stays one step ahead of infection. If you miss this step, your computer could be infected by a virus that your anti-virus software doesn’t recognize yet.

Avoid Possibly Infectious Websites

You wouldn’t lick the handrail on the subway, or share a straw with someone in an infectious disease ward, so why would you hang around suspicious websites which could harm your computer? If you have a good virus protection program it will warn you whenever you are visiting a website that will put your computer at risk. Whenever you get this warning, close the browser window or navigate away from the website; it’s not worth the risk.

Be Careful What You Download

If you are like most internet users, you will probably download music, movies and other fun things. However, these downloads could be hiding a virus. Make sure that you only accept them from websites that you trust and that you scan them before you open them.

Know the Symptoms

Sometimes your computer can be ill for a while before you even notice, because you don’t know what symptoms to look for. You should have an idea of what normal pop-up windows on your computer look like and be able to spot the tell-tale signs that your machine is coming down with something. This will help you catch virus risks right away and fix them before they cause too much harm.

These are just a few ways that you can keep your computer strong and healthy and avoid a virus which will erase all of your important data. Your computer is important to you, so take the time to look after its health and it will run smoothly for a long time.

Taking care of your computer’s health such as by installing a program like&McAfee antivirus , will help prevent the loss of your valuable information.

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Computer 101: The ABC of File attachment and Transfer via your email or using Web Based Free Services.

Today I'm going blog about using the internet to send all types of files from you to your friend or simply just uploading them to your favorite social network or free on-line file storage website. Let's face it the internet has become an integral part of our daily work routine. Flash drive and external drive are simply not enough for some of us. We always want to access our file or at least a copy of it using the internet or move it from one location to another. Sometimes we are confused on what to use to accomplish all our desired goal of moving or more commonly called file transfer or file upload and download. Now how do we accomplish this task? Well there are several ways on how to go about it. First there your standard free email account from different email provider. Yup every kind of email account has function for transferring your desired file to your friend, work place and family email account. Let's your friend is asking for a copy of the birthday picture you have taken from yesterday's birthday. They requesting for copy to be printed. Instead of doing it yourself or giving the memory card to your friend which would require you to physically move around from your place to his/her place say you need to transfer picture stored on your computer to give them the copy. Why not use your email account to this. Just simple login and create or compose a new letter and after typing all the detail and message you are now ready to attach the requested picture by your friend. But wait do not attach the entire picture at once. Every email has this feature but this feature has a limit. Yup there a limit to how many you can send and attach per email. Also the process of attaching files to your email is also dependent on the speed that your computer is connected to the internet. Oh also file attachment speed is also dependent on how large each individual file and or how many file your going to attach to a single email.

 

You say, but my friends are requesting a whole bunch of picture that i have taken during the birthday party. Yup those are the reality of attaching picture thru your email free account. The size, number and the internet connection speed. All of this will determine how long you will take to upload those entire pictures and send them to your friends. One or two files you have no problem, but more than that and if each file has a large size then think of another way of transferring them via the internet. Okay how about we use free online storage system. There are a lot of them in the internet, hey that a great idea, they are much faster than on ordinary email file attachment plus you do not have to send the file always whenever your friend requested a copy. They can just copy or save the picture as they view them one by one. Well they one catch to this type of on-line storage, the number of file you can store is limited. Some of them offer up to 15 or 20 files per account. Also you need to sign-up or create an account with them in order to have your picture stored in this web based storage service. The same is true with your favorite social networking site. Creating an account is a requirement in order to use the services also every time you use the service you need to log in to use it. Well i guess is not a bad thing, it is also for security reason why you need to have an account with them. Yup they have limitation but this should not discourage you in using this kind of free file transfer services. 

Filecatalyst.com Home Page

Okay i will ask a question is there a web based free service that you could use to transfer your file without having to create an account and log on every time you need to transfer file? Well there is such such and they call their company File Catalyst and their website is http://www.filecatalyst.com/ just click on the link to go to their website. But wait let's make things clear first, I am not in any way related to them, i am just sharing this things because it may help you and me at some point in time. I am sharing this as an alternative means to transfer your files. It is up to you if you're going to use the free Fast File Transfer that they are offering a free service to transfer your file via the internet. Also if ever you're going to use their free services make a research of the company background and other stuff that are related to them. Everyone is free to make his own choice on what to use. Another thing when it comes to sending large files don't even attempt to send them through your standard email server. The file size is generally too large for the basic email server and it will usually exceed the limit. A great alternative is FileCatalyst, they have a free service where you can use their fast file transfer software for sending files quickly and easily, no login or registration necessary. Although you have to input your name and email address so they could notify you if the file transfer has been completed. They also offer several services including Managed File Transfers, FileCatalyst workflow, and many others. You can also always tell a company's success by their client list...check it out. To access the FREE file transfer service you can go to their products page at: http://www.filecatalyst.com/products.