Executive IT Help, Inc. Blog

Basic Internet Security Tips

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Basic Internet Security Tips

I wanted to post some quick bits about internet browsing and security and how a user should be careful about what they are browsing when they are on the internet and what you should do if you suspect you have a virus.

Antivirus

Always make sure you have an up to date antivirus program installed on your home PC from a major manufacturer. Some major brands are Symantec, Norton, Trend-Micro, Kaspersky and McAfee. You may prefer one over the other due to differences in what the program does, or how much it costs, or what features come with it. There really is no excuse to not have an AV program, as AVG, Avast and Microsoft all offer free AV programs.

Internet Browser Choice

As long as you have up to date antivirus software and you keep your browser and PC updated with the latest patches and security fixes, the maker of the browser really does not matter. That being said, some websites will specifically only work with Internet Explorer, or might not work at all on Internet Explorer and will force you to move to a different browser. The most popular browsers at the moment are Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome.

Toolbars

I generally do not recommend installing any sort of browser toolbar for a few reasons. They can slow down browsing, cause the browser to lockup and reduce the area on the browser that displays the webpage. Most browsers come with built in functionality to display your favorites along the top of the screen, and for users that want to be able to do a quick search, I recommend setting your homepage to your favorite search engine then just opening a new tab using a keyboard shortcut (usually CTRL + T) then commencing the search from there.

Fake AV

At the moment the worst viruses we deal with are the “Fake AV” crowd. You could be browsing a generally legitimate webpage and an advertisement or infected piece of code can attempt to install a virus by popping up a message along the lines of “your computer is infected” or pop up a window showing a fake virus scan commencing. Do not click anywhere on the message if this happens.  If the name in the window is not your particular brand of antivirus, the best thing to do is immediately restart your PC. If you click on “yes” or “no” that virus can still get started on your system. By restarting, hopefully you can prevent it from gaining a foothold. Make a note of what website you were browsing on and avoid it.

Quick Desktop Maintenance Tips

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Desktop Maintenance Tips

Users commonly ask questions about how to make their personal desktops run better, or at least take care of common maintenance tasks that over time can slow down a PC and cause other issues. A few of the main tasks that users can do are to defragment their system’s hard drives and to delete temporary internet files.

Hard Drive Defragmenting

Your hard drive is analogous to a file cabinet. It is very easy and quick to find files when they are arraigned in the proper order and indexed properly. Over time, as the disk fills up and files are changed, small pieces of individual files must be stored physically separate from the rest. Defragmenting merges all of these pieces of files together so the computer can access the files faster. Generally we recommend that you defrag your hard drive once or twice a month. More than that won’t hurt anything, but there is little to no gain.

For Vista and Windows 7 users, defragmentation is actually a weekly scheduled item. It runs at 1:00 AM on Wednesday nights by default. As long as your PC is on at this time, it will defragment the hard drives for you. If you make a habit of turning off your PC during this time, it will continue to reschedule the task until it runs. You can either leave the PC on overnight, or start it manually if it has not had a chance to run in awhile. To open the defragment utility, type “Disk Defragmenter” in the search box after clicking on the Start Button.

Highlight the “C:” and click on “Defragment Disk” – this may take 30 minutes to several hours to complete, depending on how fragmented the disk is.

Windows XP users must run defrag manually. Pick a time that nobody will be using the PC, and click on “Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter". Select the “C:” drive and click on “Defragment Disk” – this may take 30 minutes to several hours to complete, depending on how fragmented the disk is.

Deleting Temporary Internet Files

Temporary Internet Files are stored by your web browser to actually increase the speed at which you can browse the web. Instead of downloading the entire webpage each time you access it, local files are stored and used instead as it is much faster than downloading the file again. However, over time these files can build up and cause issues with browsing websites.

In our example we will clear the temporary files from Internet Explorer 8. In the top right of the screen, click on “Tools” then “Internet Options”. In the middle of the screen, there will be a selection for “Delete” under “Browsing History” – Click on “Delete”.

Select Only “Temporary Internet Files” for deletion. Deleting “cookies” will delete your preferences for websites and any login information you have saved. Other options can be selected based on  your preferences. Click on “Delete” at the bottom and it will delete the files. Exit from the tools menu and you’ll be done.

These two little items will go a long way to promote your PC’s health and will make it stay faster longer. Executive IT Help does offer this service as part of a Managed Services package for desktops and laptops as well, allowing the customer to focus on the business while we worry about the computers. Please contact us for more information about our managed services below!

Case studies for Managed Services

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• • We recently installed our managed services software on a server for our customer. After one month, we began to receive alerts that one of their hard drives was about to fail. We contacted our customer appraising them of the situation and we began to contact the server’s manufacturer to get a hard drive replacement. We received the new hard drive the next day and went onsite to replace the failing drive. What most owners do not realize is that having a server in a RAID configuration doesn’t mean that there will not be loss of data if a hard drive fails. If your server is in a RAID1 setup, meaning you have two drives mirroring each other, you could lose one drive and never realize it because the server is running on the second drive. Unless someone is constantly checking the drive status, the server would be functioning normally with one drive. The problem is that if the second drive fails, the server can no longer operate and data loss is at a maximum. This is why it is crucial to every business to have someone monitoring your servers at all times.
  • A business owner was convinced that our monitoring solution was a perfect fit for her company. We installed it on all servers and workstations. Within days, we began to get alerts regarding the disk in the owner’s workstation. We were able to go onsite, run the manufacturer’s diagnostic, and verify that the hard drive was in a predictive failure state. We were able to take an image of the entire hard drive and move that image into a new drive. We placed the new hard drive in and she did not miss a beat. All of her data was still available from the time when she logged off to let us perform the image. If the owner’s hard drive would have failed without anyone’s knowledge, she would have had a hefty price to pay to get her PC rebuilt. We would have had to reinstall the OS and all of the applications that were installed, and then reconfigure all of her personal settings, and she would have been out of commission for at least a day. But with our monitoring software, we were able to discover the problem before any crash and resolve it in a timely and cost efficient manner