PC Maintenance and Security Lab

For the PC Maintenance and Security Lab, I chose three tutorials.  The three I chose were "Explaining Typical Problems found on many PCs," "Defining Malware," and "Managing your web passwords with Roboform."  I watched many of the tutorials to gain some other information as well.

I began right at the beginning of the tutorials with "Explaining typical problems found on many PCs."  I have never owned a computer that was not made by Apple, so I figured I should start at the beginning when dealing with computers that run Windows.  I run Windows on my Apple, so I thought it would be useful to know some of the problems that PCs may encounter.  It was extremely simple and mostly common sense; clean up the computer and get rid of junk, use a free clean up utility, and update and patch everything as often as possible.  I have a few friends who own PCs and I will definitely be sharing with them that there is FREE anti-virus software in order to keep the computer safe.  I always thought anti-virus software had to be bought and sometimes it didn't work, so what was the point in spending money on it if it was going to be ineffective?  I was surprised that "disorganization" was actually listed as one of the main problems of PCs!  To think that it could actually be causing problems and not just using up space astonished me.

I learned that malware is a computer term that means malicious software.  It makes sense now that I know what it means; anything that is harmful or bad for your computer.  I was stunned to learn that viruses and Trojan horses can actually break your computer and are designed to do so.  Whenever I think of someone having a virus on their computer, I just think it's a problem that could be solved pretty easily.  I learned that if something malicious gets into a computer that the computer could be broken, just as I could break a light bulb if I dropped it.  I had no idea it was so serious.  I will definitely share with my friends who have PCs that they need to protect their computers from malware as much as possible.

Last, I watched the tutorial about using Roboform.  I thought this was a brilliant program.  Roboform allows a person to have one master password instead of remembering all the many passwords from different sites.  How great would this be!  I know I have many passwords that I need to remember, and I think Roboform would be a great way to do so.  It also runs in Mozilla, which is great because most of the people I know use Mozilla instead of Internet Explorer.  I will be telling everyone about Roboform because it sounds like something great to use.  One thing that I found interesting about Roboform is that I can set it to log off automatically after a certain amount of time or inactivity.  I think that would be beneficial to keeping all my passwords and information private.