Clean your computer

I have a dirty secret. I've never cleaned my computer. Sure, I've dusted my monitor, but I haven't taken off the cover or tried to reach the crumbs lurking inside my keyboard.

"Your computer could fry if you don't keep it clean," says Jonathon Millman, chief technology officer for Hooplah Interactive.

Dust clogs the vents behind your computer, which causes your CPU to heat up—and heat is the biggest cause of component failure in computers. Regular cleaning could save you costly maintenance fees down the road.

Keep your computer in tip-top shape by following Millman's guide to a spotless computer system.

Preparation
You'll need:

•screwdriver

•can of compressed air (available from computer dealers or office-supply stores)

•cotton swabs (do not use a cotton ball)

•rubbing alcohol

•paper towels or anti-static cloths

•water

Always turn your computer off before you begin and unplug all the cords.

Step 1: Inside the case
Using a screwdriver, remove the side of the case that's opposite your motherboard. Touch as little as possible inside the computer, keeping fingers away from cards and cords.

Blow air around all of the components and along the bottom of the case, keeping the nozzle four inches away from the machine. Blow air into the power supply box and into the fan (from the back of the case). Lastly, blow air into the floppy disk and CD drives. Wipe the inside of the cover with a lightly moistened cloth before replacing it.

Millman recommends doing this every three months if your case sits on the floor, if you have pets that shed, or if you smoke. Otherwise, every six to eight months is fine.

Step 2: Outside the case
Run a cotton swab dipped in rubbing alcohol around all of the openings on the back of your case. Give them one swipe with the damp end of the swab and one swipe with the dry end. Do this as often as you clean the inside of your computer.

Step 3: Keyboard
Turn the keyboard upside down and gently shake it. Most of the crumbs and dust will fall out. Take a can of compressed air and blow into and around the keys. Next, take a cotton swab and dip it in rubbing alcohol. It should be damp, but not wet. Run the cotton swab around the outside of the keys. Rub the tops of the keys. If you have a laptop, follow the same procedure but take extra care with your machine. Do this monthly.



Spills — If you have kids, you're worried about spills. If it happens, disconnect the keyboard immediately and flip it over. Blot the top with a paper towel, blow compressed air between the keys and leave it to air dry overnight. For laptops, liquid can easily penetrate the hard drive so turn the computer over immediately and leave it in that position until it dries.


Step 4: Mouse
Rub the top and bottom of your mouse with a paper towel dipped in rubbing alcohol. Open the back and remove the ball. Wash the ball with water and let it air dry. To clean inside the mouse, dip a cotton swab in rubbing alcohol and rub all of the components. Scrape hard-to-remove grime with your fingernail. Finally, blow air into the opening. Replace the ball and the cover. Do this monthly.

Step 5: Monitor
Moisten a paper towel or a soft, lint-free cloth with water. (You can also buy monitor cleaning products at computer-supply stores.) Don't spray liquid directly onto the screen—spray the cloth instead. Wipe the screen gently to remove dust and fingerprints. Never touch the back of the monitor.

For laptop screens, Millman suggests buying a special cleaning solution available at computer stores. Do this weekly.

Finally, make sure that everything is dry before you plug your computer back in.

Article written by Alyson Munroe and adapted from an original piece from Microsoft Home Magazine.

Why hibernate option is not available

The hybrid sleep feature and the hibernation feature in Windows Vista may become unavailable after you use the Disk Cleanup Tool
View products that this article applies to.


SYMPTOMS
After you use the Disk Cleanup Tool in Windows Vista, you may experience the following symptoms:
• You cannot see the Hibernate option in Power Options.
• When you use the sleep feature, the computer does not recover its settings if power is lost.


CAUSE
This problem occurs when the Disk Cleanup Tool disables the hibernation file. The hibernation file must be enabled to access the hybrid sleep feature and the hibernation feature in Windows Vista.

When the hibernation file is disabled, and the hybrid sleep feature is enabled, a backup of open programs and open files will not be saved to the disk when you use the sleep feature in Windows Vista. Additionally, if the computer loses power while the Windows is in sleep mode, open programs and open files will not be recovered, and any unsaved work will be lost.


RESOLUTION
To resolve this problem in Windows Vista, run the powercfg -h on command at a command prompt to enable the hibernate feature and the hybrid sleep feature. To run this command, follow these steps:
1. Click Start Start button , click All Programs, and then click Accessories.
2. Right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator. User Account Control permission If you are prompted for an administrator password or for confirmation, type the password, or click Continue.
3. Type powercfg -h on, and then press ENTER.

What to Do If Your Computer Is Infected

Sometimes even an experienced user will not realise that a computer is infected with a virus. This is because viruses can hide among regular files, or camoflage themselves as standard files. This section contains a detailed discussion of the symptoms of virus infection, how to recover data after a virus attack and how to prevent data from being corrupted by malware.
Symptoms of infection

There are a number of symptoms which indicate that your computer has been infected. If you notice "strange things" happening to your computer, namely:

* unexpected messages or images are suddenly displayed
* unusual sounds or music played at random
* your CD-ROM drive mysteriously opens and closes
* programs suddenly start on your computer
* you receive notification from your firewall that some applications have attempted to connect to the Internet, although you did not initiate this, then it is very likely that your computer has been infected by a virus

Additionally, there are some typical symptoms which indicate that your computer has been infected via email:

* your friends mention that they have received messages from your address which you know you did not send
* your mailbox contains a lot of messages without a sender's e-mail address or message header

These problems, however, may not be caused by viruses. For example, infected messages that are supposedly coming from your address can actually be sent from a different computer.

There is a range of secondary symptoms which indicate that your computer may be infected:

* your computer freezes frequently or encounters errors
* your computer slows down when programs are started
* the operating system is unable to load
* files and folders have been deleted or their content has changed
* your hard drive is accessed too often (the light on your main unit flashes rapidly)
* Microsoft Internet Explorer freezes or functions erratically e.g. you cannot close the application window

90% of the time the symptoms listed above indicate a hardware or software problem. Although such symptoms are unlikely to be caused by a virus, you should use your antivirus software to scan your computer fully.
What you should do if you notice symptoms of infection

If you notice that your computer is functioning erratically

1. Don't panic! This golden rule may prevent the loss of important data stored in your computer and help you avoid unnecessary stress.
2. Disconnect your computer from the Internet.
3. If your computer is connected to a Local Area Network, disconnect it.
4. If the computer cannot boot from the hard drive (error at startup), try to start the system in Safe Mode or from the Windows boot disk
5. Before taking any action, back up all critical data to an external drive (a floppy disk, CD, flash memory, etc.).
6. Install antivirus software if you do not have it installed.
7. Download the latest updates for your antivirus database. If possible, do not use the infected computer to download updates, but use a friend's computer, or a computer at your office, an Internet cafe, etc. This is important because if you are connected to the Internet, a virus can send important information to third parties or may try to send itself to all email addresses in your address book. You may also be able to obtain updates for your antivirus software on CD-ROM from the software vendors or authorized dealers.
8. Perform a full system scan.

If no viruses are found during a scan

If no viruses are found during the scan and the symptoms that alarmed you are classifed, you probably have no reason to worry. Check all hardware and software installed in your computer. Download Windows patches using Windows Update. Deinstall all unlicensed software from your computer and clean your hard drives of any junk files.
If viruses are found during a scan

A good antivirus solution will notify you if viruses are found during a scan, and offer several options for dealing with infected objects.

In the vast majority of cases, personal computers are infected by worms, Trojan programs, or viruses. In most cases, lost data can be successfully recovered.

1. A good antivirus solution will provide the option to disinfect for infected objects, quarantine possibly infected objects and delete worms and Trojans. A report will provide the names of the malicious software discovered on your computer.
2. In some cases, you may need a special utility to recover data that have been corrupted. Visit your antivirus software vendor's site, and search for information about the virus, Trojan or worm which has infected your computer. Download any special utilities if these are available.
3. If your computer has been infected by viruses that exploit Microsoft Outlook Express vulnerabilities, you can fully clean your computer by disinfecting all infected objects, and then scanning and disinfecting the mail client's databases. This ensures that the malicious programs cannot be reactivated when messages which were infected prior to scanning are re-opened. You should also download and install security patches for Microsoft Outlook Express.
4. Unfortunately, some viruses cannot be removed from infected objects. Some of these viruses may corrupt information on your computer when infecting, and it may not be possible to restore this information. If a virus cannot be removed from a file, the file should be deleted.

If your computer has suffered a severe virus attack

Some viruses and Trojans can cause severe damage to your computer:

1. If you cannot boot from your hard drive (error at startup), try to boot from the Windows rescue disk. If the system can not recognize your hard drive, the virus has damaged the disk partition table. In this case, try to recover the partition table using scandisk, a standard Windows program. If this does not help, contact a computer data recovery service. Your computer vendor should be able to provide contact details for such services.

If you have a disk management utility installed, some of your logical drives may be unavailable when you boot from the rescue disk. In this case, you should disinfect all accessible drives, reboot from the system hard drive and disinfect the remaining logical drives.

2. Recover corrupted files and applications using backup copies after you have scanned the drive containing this data.

Diagnosing the problem using standard Windows tools

Although this is not recommended unless you are an experience user, you may wish to:

* check the integrity of the file system on your hard drive (using CHKDSK program) and repair file system errors. If there are a large number of errors, you must backup the most important files to removable storage media before fixing the errors
* scan your computer after booting from the Windows rescue disk
* use other standard Windows tools, for example, the scandisk utility

For more details on using these utilities, refer to the Windows Help topics.
If nothing helps

If the symptoms described above persist even after you have scanned your computer, and checked all installed hardware and software and your hard drive using Windows utilities, you should send a message with a full description of the problem to your antivirus vendor's technical support department.

Some antivirus software developers will analyse infected files submitted by users.
After you have eradicated the infection

Once you have eradicated the infection, scan all disks and removable storage media that may be infected by the virus.

Make sure that you have appropriately configured antivirus software installed on your computer.

Practice safe computing.

All of these measures will help prevent your computer getting infected in the future.

Spam - What exactly is it?

In order to combat spam effectively it is necessary to define exactly what spam is.

Most people believe that spam is unsolicitied email. However, this definition is not entirely correct and confuses some types of legitimate business correspondence with true spam.

Spam is anonymous, unsolicited bulk email.

This is the description that is being used today in the USA and Europe as a basis for the creation of anti-spam legislation. Let's take a closer look at each component of the definition:

* Anonymous: real spam is sent with spoofed or harvested sender addresses to conceal the actual sender.
* Mass mailing: real spam is sent in mass quantities. Spammers make money from the small percentage of recipients that actually respond, so for spam to be cost-effective, the initial mails have to be high-volume.
* Unsolicited: mailing lists, newsletters and other advertising materials that end users have opted to receive may resemble spam but are actually legitimate mail. In other words, the same piece of mail can be classed as both spam and legitimate mail depending on whether or not the user elected to receive it.

It should be highlighted that the words 'advertising' and 'commercial' are not used to define spam.

Many spam messages are neither advertising nor any type of commercial proposition. In additon to offering goods and services, spam mailings can fall into the following categories:

* Political messages
* Quasi-charity appeals
* Financial scams
* Chain letters
* Fake spam being used to spread malware

Unsoliticited but legitimate messages

A legitimate commercial proposition, a charity appeal, an invitation addressed personally to an existing recipient or a newsletter can certainly be defined as unsolicited mail, but not as spam. Legitimate messages may also include delivery failure messages, misdirected messages, messages from system administrators or even messages from old friends who have previously not corresponded with the recipient by email. Unsolicited - yes. Unwanted - not necessarily.
How to deal with spam

Because unsolicited correspondence may be of interest to the recipient, a quality antispam solution should be able to distinguish between true spam (unsolicited, bulk mailing) and unsolicited correspondence. This kind of mail should be flagged as 'possible spam' so it can be reviewed or deleted at the recipient's convenience.

Companies should have a spam policy, with system administrators assessing the needs of different departments. Access to different unsolicited mail folders should be given to different user groups based on this assessment. For instance, the travel manager may well want to read travel ads, whereas the HR department may wish to see all invitations to seminars and training sessions.

Ways to Avoid Spam

Ten Ways to Avoid Spam

1.Maintain at least two email addresses. You should use your private address only for personal correspondence. The public address should be the one you use to register on public forums, in chat rooms, to subscribe to mailing lists etc.

2.Never publish your private address on publicly accessible resources.

3.Your private address should be difficult to spoof. Spammers use combinations of obvious names, words and numbers to build possible addresses. Your private address should not simply be your first and last name. Be creative and personalize your email address.

4.If you have to publish your private address electronically, mask it to avoid having it harvested by spammers. Joe.Smith@yahoo.com is easy to harvest, as is Joe.Smith at yahoo.com. Try writing Joe-dot-Smith-at-yahoo-dot-com instead. If you need to publish your private address on a web-site, do this as a graphics file rather than as a link.

5.Treat your public address as a temporary one. Chances are high that spammers will harvest your public address fairly quickly. Don't be afraid to change it often.

6.Always use your public address to register in forums, chat rooms and to subscribe to mailing lists and promotions. You might even consider using a number of public addresses in order to trace which services are selling addresses to spammers.

7.Never respond to spam. Most spammers verify receipt and log responses. The more you respond, the more spam you will receive.

8.Do not click on unsubscribe links from questionable sources. Spammers send fake unsubscribe letters in an attempt to collect active addresses. You certainly don't want to have your address tagged as active, do you? It will just increase the amount of spam you receive.

9.If your private address is discovered by spammers - change it. This can be inconvenient, but changing your email address does help you avoid spam - at least for a while!

10.Make sure that your mail is filtered by an antispam solution. Consider installing a personal antispam solution. Only open email accounts with providers who offer spam filtration prior to mail delivery.