Hello Autumn....

Fall Clean up time...

Hello all.  We're just days away from the arrival of the Autumn season.  Right about now, I begin my annual declarations of "It's time to go to Florida", "It's time to move south", "We should be in Fort Myers Now", and many similar statements.  Yes, I hate the cold weather.  So I carry on about it.  But here I am.

I want to give a shout out to all the people I have met recently.  Nice people who I have enjoyed helping whenever I could.  It was a pleasure meeting you and I look forward to helping you again. 

Computing Philosophy

I also wanted to write a bit about my philosophy when it comes to computers, their care and their feeding.  My focus is on prevention, prevention, prevention.  It is much easier and more effective to exercise that ounce of prevention in order to avoid the pound of cure.  My wife and I get into some spirited discussions about computer use.

First, I stress to her never open e-Cards.  Even if she knows the sender and even if it comes from a reputable firm like hallmark.  And never open anything from the well meaning friend or co-worker who forwards pictures of cats jumping up and down or a lion yawning.  It's just not necessary and places your machine at risk.  I also find that when you do a search (google, yahoo, bing, etc) the farther you get away from the top 4 websites on page one of the results, the closer you get to a malicious website that will blow up your pc.

I am very careful when downloading free software.  There are a few programs that I have downloaded after much consideration, recommendations from trusted associates, and trials on my "lab" PC's not connected to any of my valued PC's or my Home Server.  I will cover those free programs in another section of this post.

Although many of my colleagues in PC support like those free Anti-Virus programs, I tend to lean more toward Norton products, with McAfee a close second.   I would use Avast, AVG, or Microsoft Security Essentials only if my client voices a strong opposition to buying Norton or McAfee.  And as you may know, some ISP's provide name brand AV Software for free with their subscriptions.  I use Comcast's Norton Security Suite for all my PC's.

I am a firm believer in off-site backups.  Two services to investigate (both pay subscriptions) are Carbonite, and Mozy.  Additionally, there are "replication" services such as Apple's iCloud and Microsoft's Onedrive.  These services are know as cloud computing.  They synchronize your files across several platforms (your smartphone, your desktop pc, your laptop, and your tablet).  By virtue of the replication, your files are backed up.  However if you make changes to a given file, those changes will be synchronized across your platforms  So the concept varies a bit from the traditonal sense of backups.   Onedrive and iCloud both offer free subscriptions; Onedrive is 7gb free storage, and iCloud is 5gb free storage.  In each case you can add storage space with a paid subscription.

I also believe that a computer in this era has a useful life of about 4 to 5 years tops.  This is because Microsoft has reduced the time between new Windows versions considerably.  Along with that, is the fact that the average PC today costs about $ 500.00, some including monitors.  In other words, hardware is very inexpensive.  The result is that after 3 or 4 years one reaches the point where the cost of repairing, reloading or upgrading the Operating System is almost the cost of buying a whole new computer.  Plus, Microsoft only supports versions of its programs for a finite period of time.  If you own a Windows XP pc, Windows XP support will end in early 2014.  At that time, all development of updates, patches, and security fixes will cease.  No vulnerabilities will be fixed.  So it makes no economic sense to spend any money fixing an XP PC when those funds could be better spent financing a new Windows 8 PC. 

In summary, I believe you will be well served by focusing on off-site backups, meticulous attention to antivirus software operation, and cautious web surfing.

Free Software

Here's one to try.  Open Office.  Open Office is a suite of office products (word processor, spreadsheet, business graphics, and database manager).  Each of the programs will read and write files compatible with Microsoft Office programs.  And best of all it's free.  MS Office Home & Student is about $ 140.00 retail.  So you save a significant amount of money.

So I guess at this point I will be quiet for a while.  Check my website at here for updates and news.

Have a good Autumn and get ready for winter.