skip to main |
skip to sidebar
If you find a virus in your system and can establish precisely what it is, it is a time to remove it from your system. Having procedures in place to detect viruses is important is a plan for how you will remove what ever you find.
you must remember that the majority of virus alarms turn out to be false alarms, and are the result of some user , software ,or hardware error , proceed with your detection assuming that although it may be a virus , it just as likely to be something else , so note all symptoms carefully and see what the combination point to.
If the problem turn out to be a virus, it is still important not to panic. You need a cool head to minimize further damage and to remove the virus as cleanly and efficiently as possible, don?t just get out your copy of FORMAT or FDISK and start formatting the hard disk.
Using an Anti-Virus Product
Most antivirus products offer virus removal capabilities. Usually these functions are built into the scanner, giving you the option to remove a virus from a file the moment it is detected in the file. Removal of some viruses is fairly straightforward for antivirus products can remove some viruses, but can?t remove very many. When choosing a product, ask whether the product can remove all common removable viruses.
Some viruses can?t be removed, no matter how clever the author of the antivirus software. This is because the virus has overwritten some of your original program, effectively erasing it. Without knowledge of what was supposed to be where the virus ?sat down? all an antivirus product can do is offer to delete the entire program.
Virus Detection Strategy
If the virus is detected in the memory, but not in any file, and if the virus detected is an extremely rare virus, ask yourself whether another scanner that leaves in memory the scan string it was using can produce a false alarm when another scanner runs.
If the virus is detected in only one program on your hard disk , ask your self how often you have used this program ,If you have used it several times in the past , then any virus it has had an opportunity to infect other files, if it has not done so yet, it probably a false alarm , don?t delete the single program in which the virus was reported and don?t attempt removal, instead , reboot from an uninfected , write protected floppy disk and run another scanner to determine if it too finds something in this file . If it doesn?t assume that it is a false alarm.
If the virus is detected in several programs you use commonly, you almost certainly have an infection. Do not attempt to remove the virus product yet! You may cause irreparable harm to your files.
Protecting computers from viruses
Simply, do not give out your email address to widely, and never access a floppy disk given by someone you don?t know. Plus there is a load of antivirus software available which can help detect and clean out viruses, but then remember, virus programmers are driven
By the desire to stay ahead of this kind of software.
PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE OF COMPUTER SYSTEMS
There are three things one can do to prevent viral infection in a computer system. These are:-
1) limited sharing of software
2) limited transitivity
3) limited functionality
One can limit sharing by limiting information flow so as to form a post office set of communicating information domains in a network system , in such a system , a virus will spread only to those domains which are in the transitive flow path from its initial source.
In a system with unlimited sharing by limited information paths, limited transitivity may have an effect if users do not use all available paths, but since there is always a direct path between any two user , there s always the possibilities of infection . as an example , in a system , with transitivity limited to a distance of 1, it is safe to share information with any user you trust without having to worry about whether the user has wrongly trusted another user.
About The Author
Rajdeep kaur is a student of computer operator and programming assistances and enjoy writing about computer tips. For more information please visit: http://www.100computertips.com/
Internet has almost become a lifeline for the new generation. Many businesses now depend entirely on the Internet. People residing in different parts of world are able to talk to each other via the medium of Internet. Video conferencing is a live example of it. Many marriages are also made with the help of the Internet. The list of benefits that Internet provides is limitless.
But, what would you do when you have a slow speed internet connection that takes a lot of time? That internet connection would simply be useless to you.
The speed at which you are connected to the Internet plays a very important role in enjoying the advantages offered by it. For example, suppose one of your relatives who is residing overseas, has sent you a holiday clip. Now, if your Internet speed is slow then first of all it would take a long time to load the mail website. Then you would enter your user name and password. It would again take extra time to verify it. Also, downloading the clip would be very slow, even if its size is very small. Overall, you can say that having a low speed Internet connection (dial-up connection) is not a good thing.
There are many choices available for a high speed Internet connection. DSL, Cable and Satellite are some of them. You can select the best one from them. Here are some of the common benefits that all these high speed Internet connections provide.
* Viewing of streamlining clips or videos is very easy and fast in these connections. Dial-up connections may not even allow their access. * You can upload web pages and download any kind of information or software with more than twice the speed of dial-up connection. * Downloading of images and huge e-mail files can be done almost promptly. * High speed Internet connection has proven to be a boon for all businessmen. They can now access the world wide web within a few seconds. Their businesses have been highly benefited through efficient and quick video conferencing which would have been impossible in a slow dial-up connection. * For those people who work from home, a high speed Internet connection can assist them in increasing their overall work efficiency and output. * On a long term basis, the high speed Internet connection can prove to be highly economical.
DSL: The best choice for high speed internet connection Now-a-days, DSL has become the leading choice for a high speed Internet connection. DSL works on existing telephone lines. With a DSL connection you can browse the web and talk on the phone at the same time. Generally, a DSL connection requires a DSL router, a dedicated phone line and a network card or a modem for each system. The installation of DSL at your location is the responsibility of the service provider. Last but not the least, this high speed Internet connection is offered at very affordable prices.
About The Author
Toh Poh Leng owns and operates http://www.dsl-upgrade-help.com Dsl Upgrade
With the rising cost of gasoline, many Christmas shoppers are turning to the internet to find some of the items on their Christmas shopping list. With the aid of the internet search engines, it is possible for Christmas shoppers to pinpoint the location of hard-to-find items and have them shipped exactly where they need to go. Finding discounts from online retailers is an easy thing to do too and people love the convenience that internet shopping provides them.
Internet shopping for Christmas gifts can be fine-tuned to fit the needs of every family. To find clothing items in a specific age range, an internet shopper can find great sales and the latest styles in everything from jeans to party dresses that will be worn for Christmas dinner and church on Sunday by using the address line on their home computer to shop at a brand name store that they trust.
Through the internet, Christmas shoppers can find decorations for the home at a fair price and feel confident that they can return what does not fit to the retailer. Some people wonder how they can do this because they think the retailer is so far away. Online shoppers know all the rules about shopping online, especially after they have spent some time carefully reviewing the store's return policies online at their website.
While Christmas shopping online is fun and convenient to do, there might still be some skeptics in the world that worry about the security of the websites and the personal information that they are asked to provide. The security features online have been strengthened to meet the needs of today's smart shoppers, and the retailers have spent a lot of their own cash purchasing encryption software that ensures that all credit card and banking information is kept safe always.
Some Christmas shoppers choose to start shopping for Christmas early in the year. They know that there will be many holidays before Christmas and those holidays will bring great discounts to shoppers. With specific items in mind, they can access the internet and look for discount coupon codes that can be used to buy the items that they need, while still taking advantage of the major discounts offered because it is a holiday sales period.
Holidays are a specific time of the year that online shoppers can mark on their calendars as days to save money and time. To budget conscious shoppers, the holiday shopping represents a chance to gain a foothold on holiday expenses and define what the payments will be on any credit cards that they make their holiday purchases with. By shopping for Christmas online, shoppers can keep track of all of their holiday spending and know first hand what to include on the budget for the New Year.
One other factor that makes shopping online so fantastic is that holiday shoppers can find great deals on a variety of items and be exposed to unique items that they might not have considered but realize are perfect for the special people in their lives. They can also save a lot of cash by shipping items directly to people that live out of town and save money on gasoline that they would have used by driving all over the town to get their Christmas shopping finished.
About The Author
James Brown writes about http://www.latestcouponcodes.com
1. Defrag Disk to Speed Up Access to Data
One of the factors that slow the performance of the computer is disk fragmentation. When files are fragmented, the computer must search the hard disk when the file is opened to piece it back together. To speed up the response time, you should monthly run Disk Defragmenter, a Windows utility that defrags and consolidates fragmented files for quicker computer response.
* Follow Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter
* Click the drives you want to defrag and click Analyze
* Click Defragment
2. Detect and Repair Disk Errors
Over time, your hard disk develops bad sectors. Bad sectors slow down hard disk performance and sometimes make data writing difficult or even impossible. To detect and repair disk errors, Windows has a built-in tool called the Error Checking utility. It?ll search the hard disk for bad sectors and system errors and repair them for faster performance.
* Follow Start > My Computer
* In My Computer right-click the hard disk you want to scan and click Properties
* Click the Tools tab
* Click Check Now
* Select the Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors check box
* Click Start
3. Disable Indexing Services
Indexing Services is a little application that uses a lot of CPU. By indexing and updating lists of all the files on the computer, it helps you to do a search for something faster as it scans the index list. But if you know where your files are, you can disable this system service. It won?t do any harm to you machine, whether you search often or not very often.
* Go to Start
* Click Settings
* Click Control Panel
* Double-click Add/Remove Programs
* Click the Add/Remove Window Components
* Uncheck the Indexing services
* Click Next
4. Optimize Display Settings
Windows XP is a looker. But it costs you system resources that are used to display all the visual items and effects. Windows looks fine if you disable most of the settings and leave the following:
* Show shadows under menus
* Show shadows under mouse pointer
* Show translucent selection rectangle
* Use drop shadows for icons labels on the desktop
* Use visual styles on windows and buttons
5. Speedup Folder Browsing
You may have noticed that everytime you open My Computer to browse folders that there is a little delay. This is because Windows XP automatically searches for network files and printers everytime you open Windows Explorer. To fix this and to increase browsing speed, you can disable the ?Automatically search for network folders and printers? option.
6. Disable Performance Counters
Windows XP has a performance monitor utility which monitors several areas of your PC?s performance. These utilities take up system resources so disabling is a good idea.
* Download and install the Extensible Performance Counter List (http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/reskit/tools/existing/exctrlst-o.asp)
* Then select each counter in turn in the ?Extensible performance counters? window and clear the ?performance counters enabled? checkbox at the bottom button below
7. Optimize Your Pagefile
You can optimize your pagefile. Setting a fixed size to your pagefile saves the operating system from the need to resize the pagefile.
* Right click on My Computer and select Properties
* Select the Advanced tab
* Under Performance choose the Settings button
* Select the Advanced tab again and under Virtual Memory select Change
* Highlight the drive containing your page file and make the initial Size of the file the same as the Maximum Size of the file.
Windows XP sizes the page file to about 1.5X the amount of actual physical memory by default. While this is good for systems with smaller amounts of memory (under 512MB) it is unlikely that a typical XP desktop system will ever need 1.5 X 512MB or more of virtual memory. If you have less than 512MB of memory, leave the page file at its default size. If you have 512MB or more, change the ratio to 1:1 page file size to physical memory size.
8. Remove Fonts for Speed
Fonts, especially TrueType fonts, use quite a bit of system resources. For optimal performance, trim your fonts down to just those that you need to use on a daily basis and fonts that applications may require.
* Open Control Panel
* Open Fonts folder
* Move fonts you don?t need to a temporary directory (e.g. C:\FONTBKUP?) just in case you need or want to bring a few of them back. The more fonts you uninstall, the more system resources you will gain.
9. Use a Flash Memory to Boost Performance
To improve performance, you need to install additional RAM memory. It?ll let you boot your OS much quicker and run many applications and access data quicker. There is no easiest and more technically elegant way to do it than use eBoostr (http://www.eboostr.com).
eBoostr is a little program that lets you improve a performance of any computer, powered by Windows XP in much the same way as Vista?s ReadyBoost. With eBoostr, if you have a flash drive, such as a USB flash thumb drive or an SD card, you can use it to make your computer run better. Simply plug in a flash drive through a USB socket and Windows XP will use eBoostr to utilize the flash memory to improve performance.
The product shows the best results for frequently used applications and data, which becomes a great feature for people who are using office programs, graphics applications or developer tools. It?ll surely attract a special attention of laptop owners as laptop upgrade is usually more complicated and laptop hard drives are by definition slower than those of desktops.
10. Perform a Boot Defragment
There's a simple way to speed up XP startup: make your system do a boot defragment, which will put all the boot files next to one another on your hard disk. When boot files are in close proximity to one another, your system will start faster.
On most systems, boot defragment should be enabled by default, but it might not be on yours, or it might have been changed inadvertently. To make sure that boot defragment is enabled:
* Run the Registry Editor
* Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction
* Set the Enable string value to Y if it is not already set to Y.
* Exit the Registry
* Reboot
Hope you find these 10 tips useful. Have a nice day!
About The Author
Andrew Zarudnev is the CMO at eBoostr, the software tool to boost your Windows XP performance
http://www.eboostr.com
Everybody has computer problems from time to time. Some of the problems are simple ("I can't get the printer to print") and some are more alarming ("why is my computer monitor's screen blue?"). The good news is that most of the common computer problems are easily fixed.
Usually the biggest problem a computer will have is negligence by the owner. Almost all of the common computer problems can be avoided by some simple maintenance that gets done on a regular basis. As a computer owner, you will want to take care to empty your cache on a regular basis, make sure that your major software is up to date, clean your registry often and run anti-virus and anti-spyware scans routinely.
The most common of the common computer problems is a lack of speed. Your computer can slow down for a number of reasons. In fact, some slowing as time goes on is normal. After all, regular wear and tear on anything will slowly break it down, right? Your computer is no different. That being said, your computer could be running more slowly because of a number of reasons. Perhaps you have fragmented files, or you have overloaded your system with a bunch of programs that you no longer need nor use. Sometimes your start up menu gets overloaded. All of these common computer problems can be fixed manually and there are a number of easy to follow tutorials that you can find on the internet that will tell you how to fix them.
Sometimes it will seem as if your computer has changed all by itself. Maybe you used to be a die-hard Mozilla Firefox user and now when you try to boot up the internet, Internet Explorer has become the default program. Sometimes your home page will have changed or instead of having a google toolbar, now your web browser displays a yahoo toolbar. This means that somehow a hijacker has taken over your computer. Sometimes hijacking can occur from spyware that has been installed. Sometimes it can happen because of a virus that you have accidentally downloaded. Sometimes there is a very savvy computer hacker out there who has managed to get into your system. You can thwart these hijacking attempts by installing an anti-virus firewall and by running an anti-spyware program and make sure you run scans as often as possible. Some anti-virus programs have firewalls that will let you know when a hijacking attempt has been thwarted.
Of course some of common computer problems are a result of hardware and mechanical failures. The "blue screen of death" is usually an indicator that something has gone wrong within your system that you will need help fixing. If you have kept up with your maintenance routines and have done everything possible to make sure that you haven't overloaded your computer's resources, a "blue screen of death" is a certain sign that your computer needs professional attention. A professional computer repair person can have you back up and running in no time.
About The Author
Steven Magill
"FIRE your Computer Guy! For the FIRST TIME, I am about to reveal exactly the same information I routinely charge my clients HUNDREDS...even THOUSANDS of dollars for!" Check this out !!
http://www.slowcomputerproblems.net
What is Linux?
Linux is an operating system, like Microsoft Windows, MacOS, or Unix. It was created as a hobby by Linus Torvalds, a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland. What most people don?t know about Linux is that its source code is available to anyone. The Linux source code is called the kernel and it is the base of the Linux operating system. Because the source code or kernel is free, it has enabled hundreds of companies and individuals to release their own operating systems based on the Linux system. These operating systems or formats are often referred to as Linux distributions.
Each distribution has its own set of features and functionality that makes it unique. While Linux is generally considered free-ware and people associate that with no cost, that is not always the case. Some distributions are available for download for free and others are available on CD or floppy disk and have a small charge associated with them. You can find a list of distributions at http://www.linux.org/ and a list of applications at http://www.Linux.org/apps/
Because if the adaptability of Linux it has been embraced and supported by a number of operating systems and software programs. For example, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and other giants of the computing world have embraced Linux and support its ongoing development and openoffice.org and Mozilla run on Linux. US retailing giant Wal-Mart began selling Linux systems back in 2002 - if Wal-Mart isn?t mainstream, nothing is.
What are the benefits of Linux?
Many people fear that Linux is going to be difficult to work with or that it will be difficult to find software that will run on Linux however Linux is a very standard operating system, compatible with just about any software you need.
Beyond being a standard operating system, Linux supports open source software which makes it a very economical operating system, especially if you program your own software. It offers many free or low cost applications which include, basic desktop applications like web browsers, email programs, word processing programs, spreadsheets, graphics programs, and file managers.
Linux can easily operate as a central server for your business. With Linux, you can serve your own web pages up for public consumption and handle your own email.
Linux doesn?t require top of the line hardware though many recommend you have at least 256 MB of RAM and at least 4 GB of space in your hard drive.
Linux is considered to be extremely stable and doesn?t need to be rebooted periodically to maintain performance levels. Think about the last time you sat at your computer and it froze. Not fun, right? That doesn?t happen with Linux if it is configured correctly.
Linux isn?t going to be replaced anytime soon and when bugs are found in the system, a developer are quickly on the job and often times a solution is offered within a matter of hours, not months or years like many other operating systems.
Linux is also fast and can handle a number of tasks at the same time.
Linux also claims to be one of the most secure operating systems isn?t plagued with the viruses that other operating systems generally deal with.
Linux is free from having to upgrade it or deal with proprietary file formats and licensing fees. You don?t have to register it due to its open source format.
You can have both Linux and windows on your computer. (You?ll have to partition them on your hard drive and you can only boot them one at a time.)
Drawbacks of Linux
There is no 1800 customer service number to call. However, most distributions offer a support number or email to call if you find a bug. They also generally come with installation instructions.
You cannot run applications for MS windows on Linux. However, there are Linux emulators or applications that enable you to run some windows applications on your Linux system. They operate like a translator. Some of these ?translation or emulator? products are free and others are available for a price.
Linux is not able to run some advanced financial applications or reproduce some proprietary multimedia formats.
Tips and Advice:
Choose a popular distribution has a large developer community. A large developer community means that you?ll find the programs that you need easily and you will be able to install them with the same ease. The more well-known distributions have prepared programs in ?packages? that are easy to install. On top of this, there are tools designed especially for a particular distribution to manage these packages to make sure that programs run correctly right away. The website Distrowatch.com maintains a comprehensive list of the most popular distributions.
Get the latest version of your chosen distribution. The newer the Linux distribution version, the better the hardware support. The number of glitches you?ll get in the installation process decreases with the newness of the version of Linux you choose.
Consider paying for your Linux distribution. It is true that you can get a full-featured Linux operating system free of charge by downloading it from any number of sources. This is an excellent alternative to an operating system like Windows, which either comes pre-loaded with a newly purchased computer (which gets figured into the cost), is bought separately or copied ?illegally?. In most people?s experience, the popular Linux distributions are easy to install. However, if you do run into some glitch (normally hardware related), you may have a frustrating experience. Although there are a number of excellent Linux support forums out there, personalized advice on your particular problem may be hard to find.
Use an appropriate computer. if you want to use Linux to do the same things that you would with Windows XP or Mac OS X, then you?ll need the newest computer you can get your hands on. Avoiding ?elite? video cards and new, exotic hardware will also work in your favor because you won?t have to deal with hardware support which may be inferior to hardware support from other operating systems.
Bottom Line:
Linux is a fantastic and powerful operating system that can handle most or all of your operating needs. It is secure, fast, reliable, and generally extremely cost effective. When purchased or obtained through a reliable distributor and installed and configured correctly there are virtually no drawbacks to running Linux. Additionally, you don?t have to give up your windows if you don?t want to.
MemberSpeed Content Management software can run on any Linux Any Linux based Hosting Platform (Preferably RHEL 3 or above).
About The Author
Jeremy Gislason is a leading expert on membership sites, marketing and online business. For more Business Strategies, Resources and Membership Site Manager Software visit: http://www.memberspeed.com
