It’s occurred to me that if I were really very ill, quite a few of you would be stuck if your computer went belly up, so I thought I’d write a small missive on basic computer maintenance. 🙂

First of all, backups. Regardless of everything else, keep backups (copies) of anything you couldn’t replace if you lost the computer. Copy them onto CD-R, floppy disk, USB storage device…whatever. This includes things like documents, address books, photos, in fact anything you can’t replace by buying a new one from the shop, or reinstalling. If the worst happens, be it a virus attack, hard disk failure, flooding, EMP, etc. at least you’ll have a copy of your precious data safely stored away. If you don’t have a backup, once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.

Secondly, make sure you have all the CDROMs, DVDs etc. which came with your computer stored away safely so you can reinstall everything back to your computer if everything goes horribly wrong.

Thirdly, if you’re on the internet, make sure you have sufficient security. If you have Linux or MacOS installed you don’t have much to worry about, as they’re fairly good out of the box. However, if you have any version of Microsoft Windows (95,98,ME,2000,XP) you’ll need to keep it up to date with Windows Update. In addition, at the very least, you’ll need the following software:
Anti-Virus software such as AVG
Anti-Spyware software such as Spybot S&D
Firewall software such as Zonealarm

I’ve suggested free (legally) software in each case, but other software is available at a price. Regardless of whether you use free or paid-for software, you should always keep your software up to date. Most of the security packages have a facility to check for updates. You should also do a complete virus/spyware scan around once a fortnight.
It might also be an idea to use an alternative WWW browser to Internet Explorer such as Firefox, and an alternative email reader to Outlook Express such as Thunderbird.

With these basic points, your computer should be available to you more of the time, instead of spending time being cursed at by me. 🙂