It’s that time of year again. Time to gather for family, fellowship, food and fun! You may be fortunate enough to have younger children or teenagers running around who are pretty tech savvy. It won’t take long for them to find your computer and start to work amusing themselves. If it gets really quiet you should go check on them.
When you get back to work on Friday (or Monday) you will find that your computer isn’t working as well as it did on Wednesday. You call your relatives to see if you can figure out what happened. You will soon discover that you were visited by the invisible Family Circus gremlins “Not me” and “Ida Know”.
If you can’t lock up your computer or easily hide it, then here are three easy tips to protect yourself and your computer during the holiday gathering.
1) Be sure your anti-virus software is up-to-date. Those kids will take your computer places you never thought about and download “innocent” software. Unfortunately, in their innocence, they will expose your business lifeline to spyware, adware or worse a virus or Trojan. Five minutes could save you a lot of pain or a trip to the computer doctor to eradicate the virus.
2) Create a System Restore Point and note the date and time you did it. How? On many computers, click Start -> Help & Support -> Undo Changes to Your Computer with System Restore. Then click the button Create Restore Point. IF something really ugly happens, you can then restore your system settings to a point in time when you know things were running well.
3) Go to your local office supply store and buy a mini-notebook. It sounds expensive, but if the kids limit their activities to the mini, you’ve spared yourself a lot of pain. If the mini is attacked by a virus, you can easily wipe the hard drive and start over.
Enjoy your time with family and friends this Thanksgiving season.
Leslie
By the way…if you don’t want your Start Task Bar to move (it is frustrating to put it back in place), right click somewhere in the blue area, be sure “Lock the Task Bar” is checked.
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Leslie Knight is a small business consultant with over 20 years of experience in Information Technology management in Fortune 500 companies. She applies her experience in Corporate America (saving them millions) to smaller entrepreneurial enterprises. She is also the author of Navigating the I.T. Minefield- Straight Talk for the Small Enterprise. http://bit.ly/SNL4W
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by ITMinefield: Kids Coming Home for the Holidays? 3 Steps to Protect Your Business Computer http://bit.ly/4XqIjO…
I don’t usually write on blogs but had to on yours. You have a very distinctive writing style. A lot of people don’t have that touch, they just drone on and on in the most boring way. But not you – thanks!
Thanks for making such a killer blog. I come on here all the time and am floored with the fresh information here.
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Funny, I had been discussing this point with my older sister the other day, now I will have one far more argument in my hand when it’ll come to confrontation after again….
What you posted here helped me quite a bit and im grateful for it!