Understand what’s available

It helps to understand how a computer works and what the jargon means before deciding what kind of system would satisfy your requirements.
• Check the technology section of the newspaper,or computer magazines.
• Ask trusted friends and colleagues for their advice and recommendations.

The Xbox 360 is Microsoft's successor to their Xbox video game console, aka "Xbox 2". The console is scheduled to be released on November 22, 2005 in North America (two days before the American Thanksgiving and three days before Black Friday, one of the biggest shopping days of the year in the United States), December 2 in Europe, December 10 in Japan, and elsewhere in early 2006. The Xbox 360 will compete against the upcoming generation of consoles, including the Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Revolution.

"Why should you be afraid?", I can hear you ask.

I just got an email from my friend Miche who said,

"My laptop is sick at the hospital. Hard Drive failure. Am praying data can be retrieved."

Her exact words.

Ohhhh : tremors of fear running up and down my spine!

Why?

Because ... and I have to be honest ... I haven't *backed up* my laptop for ages!

Oh I can hear your derisive laughter, your looks of scorn ... I can feel your disbelief.

Me - of all people - admitting this. My friends call me "TechieGirl"!

Well, the best part of my friend's scary dilemma is that it's forcing me into action!

I'm dusting off the cd burner and plugging into the power, plugging it into the USB slot - now how *hard* was that? I've got a stack of blank cds gathering dust on my desk ... why not use them?

Simply put it acts as a barrier between your computer and the internet. To protect you from crackers, hackers and malware.

If your running DSL or a cable modem you should employ a firewall, as having a direct connection to the Internet can make you a target to attack.

Firewalls can be hardware or software based. With firewalls you set up ACL's or Access Control lists to allow or deny traffic.

There are three different ways a firewall can block traffic.

1. Packet Filtering- Packets are analyzed against filters in the firewall rulesets. Firewalls will drop packets that are not allowed in the firewall rulesets.

2. Proxy Service- Information from the Internet is grabbed by the firewall and delivered to the requesting service thru the proxy.

3. Statefull packet inspection- looks up criteria against a database of trusted information. To see if the packet contains anything that would allow

For as long as you can remember the basic Internet browser was Internet Explorer. Of course, there was a moment in time when Netscape was trying to get that market share, but Internet Explorer won out and there are many people that don't realize Internet Explorer is only their browser and they can change if they like. In fact, most folks believe Internet Explorer is the only option for reaching the Internet. However, this is not the case and there is a new kid on the block that is taking advantage of the security issues Internet Explorer has experienced and pulling a significant amount of market share in a short period of time. This newcomer web browser is Firefox.

Firefox is a browser that focuses on opening web sites rapidly while keeping those nasty pop-ups and spyware at bay. Firefox was in its final stages last summer and fortunately for the up and coming browser two federal agencies recommended Internet surfers choose a different browser than Internet Explorer due to security issues IE was facing. This timing was perfect for Firefox and when it was placed on the web for download there were so many people trying to download at once the server almost could not handle all of the requests.

Windows XP is an operating system par excellence. Easy to use it comes with some amazing features.

1. The computer management screen allows control of the operating system from a single interface.

2. The event viewer permits viewing of logs maintained by XP as default. Program and system errors are maintained in the systems logs for ready reference when recurring problems occur. Important is to enable this auditing system which is inactive by default.

Here's what you should look for when choosing anti-virus software:

• Effective Virus Detection. Viruses are detected by antivirus software in two ways: a full scan of your hard drive, or in real-time as each file is accessed. It is critical that antivirus software provide both these features, especially real-time protection. Does the product quickly identify infected files with a realtime scanner, whether it comes via email, IM Apps, web browsing, etc?