Productivity Portfolio

Typically when people read about security measures, they stop as they think the process will be too long or difficult. The result is they don't do enough. Instead, try breaking this project into smaller and more manageable tasks. For starters, Microsoft provides some great topics that can be read in 5 minutes or less.

This past month was an interesting one for us as we helped several people with computer problems. This is a practice we gave up long ago but for various reasons, we decided to lend a hand. Although we were able to resolve all the problems but one, it prompted us to think about prevention. Each problem we ran into could've been easily prevented.

This raised the question why is it we seldom take preventive steps to protect our machine and data? Is it a function of time, confidence, knowledge or combination thereof? Or, do we figure that because our machine is acting fine, we invulnerable? I'm not sure there is one answer.

What I can tell you is if you set up a procedure for updating your machine, your problems will be greatly reduced. By having a preventive system, you'll spend less time worrying about countless articles about security flaws and viruses.

To get you started with a procedure, we're offering some suggestions based on a Microsoft article and some of our own suggestions. Even though the press has repeatedly trounced Microsoft for security lapses, the company has provided some good material for consumers on this subject.

We're not saying you need to do all these steps at once. However, we would stress that security is only as good as the weakest link. We're just suggesting that you consider and address all the items at some point soon.

The seven steps outlined in the document include:

1. Assess your risks

Besides these items, we would add 3 more.

8. Install a software program to detect and remove spyware.

9. Create a Windows start up disk. This disk can allow you to access your files should the hard drive fail to boot.

10. Find your Windows Installation or Recovery CD along with your product activation code and put it in a safe place you'll remember. The time to find out that you're missing either your Windows CD or the activation code is NOT when you need to do a reinstall. If you don't know your Windows Product Activation key is, there is a free utility that will pull it from Windows Registry called Magical Jelly Bean Key finder.

Update: The original Microsoft article is no longer at the link I included. I removed the links and if I find where they put the article, I'll relink the content.