Protect your computer

Computer safety is important. Being safe on the computer is easy and following some simple advice and save you from spending a lot of time later.

Getting a computer virus sucks (for the sake of keeping things simple I am going to use the word “virus” to describe anything negative that can happen to your computer). A lot of people I know have been asking for help getting rid of a virus on their computer. It's incredibly hard sometimes, they usually disable your anti virus software and can mess things up so much that you end up having to install your operating system. I remember sitting next to my father as a child watching him get frustrated and trying recover pictures after a virus raped our computer. Fortunately he was able to recover them, but if he had taken better precautions he would not have had to.

If you have an inferior operating system (ie. Mac or linux) skip this paragraph as well as the next. For you savy windows users virus protection software is vital. There are many of them out there, I would recommend downloading AVG or Avast through http://ninite.com/. Ninite is a cool site for fast downloading and installation. You can read more about it on their site. Now that you have anti-virus software let the scanning commence! Make sure you keep it running at all times and make

There have been (and presumably are) exploits in internet browsers which allow people to download things onto your computer. Needless to say you should try to stay on reputable sites as much as possible and refrain from clicking ads. In addition do not download anything suspect. If you are on youtube and you see a video advertising some program, lets say an especially cool text editor, and this video links directly to a download chances are the program is a virus. People can also attach viruses to programs that are legit, so always make sure you get your programs from a reputable source. If your anti-virus software says something listen to it! If it tells you something is a virus, most of the time it is.

My friend recently had his email, facebook, and paypal intruded upon. Someone got the password and user-name which he uses for everything and used it to mess with everything. On his facebook they put a picture of Jesus sticking up his middle finger and changed his password on everything else. He had no recovery options set up, so it took him literally days to set everything right.

Beside viruses there are several other methods for people to steal your passwords. Companies will never email you asking for your password, if you get an email asking for your password do not respond to it. Avoid logging into anything important on public computers. Check the URL of any website you go to, making sure the domain name is correct. In the event your password is stolen, it's nice to have some way to recover it. For most email companies there is an option to allow recovery from another email or even from your phone. For instance if you have a university email recovering it is super easy so attaching all of your emails to it would be advisable.

Almost everyone I know uses the same password for everything. Do not ever do this. I cannot stress this enough. It's such a bad idea. If one thing gets compromised so does everything else. Try putting a different number at the end of passwords for different sites. Or another cool method which I utilize, memorize one password and put the first three letters of the website name for each different website, keeps each password unique and is super easy to implement.

Start protecting yourself sooner rather than later.