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The 2nd Most Important Thing a Home Computer User Should Do: Create a Standard User Account
Sep 19th
As a home computer user, your most crucial task is to make sure your data is backed up, and that you’re backing it up regularly.
The 2nd most important thing? Create and use a standard user account. By default, Windows (XP, Vista and now 7) create administrative accounts as part of the initial setup. These accounts are necessary if you need to install software, change security settings, etc, but for everyday use they are a liability.
Why Not Always Be Logged in as an Administrative Account?
In a word, protection. When logged on with a non-administrative account, viruses and spyware can’t infect your computer as easily as when you’re logged in with an administrative account.
How to Create a Standard User Account
Each flavor of Windows has its specific way for creating a standard user account, but the process is similar:
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7 (Ironically, this nicely-written how-to guide is from UnixWiz.net)
Whether you’re using Windows XP, Vista, or 7, it’s very easy to create and use a standard user account for your everyday tasks. Doing so makes your computer much less vulnerable to virus and spyware infections. It’s much more time-consuming to clean up an infected computer than to prevent an infection in the first place, so make sure you are using a standard user account for your day-to-day tasks.
Backup Your Hard drive Now — While You Still Have Time
May 24th
It’s one of those nagging things in the back of your mind: “What happens if my hard drive crashes, or the operating system gets corrupted, or…? I should do something about it.” Then you dismiss that thought because you think it’s too hard, or expensive.
It’s really not that difficult, nor expensive. We’ll look at a couple of options that give you an easy way to protect your investment. The basic strategy is to create an “image” of your hard drive, which is a file (or files) containing an exact copy of your operating system, applications, etc. Then, when disaster strikes, you boot from a CD, and restore that image file to your hard drive. Let’s look at the steps to do this. More >
Hacking an M3U file so you can get its MP3 file
May 17th
You’ve visited a website and clicked on an link to listen to an MP3 file. Your computer dutifully plays the audio file–so far, so good. Now, you go back to the site, hoping to download the file you just listened to. But wait–the file that downloads is an M3U file. What is this, and how can you find the MP3 file?
M3U files are playlist files that point to an MP3 file, so that the MP3 file streams, rather than downloads to your computer. The video tutorial below demonstrates how to download the MP3 file using only your browser and a text editor (like Notepad)
Get the Flash Player to see this content.
Whats on my PC? Belarc Advisor
May 13th
Belarc Advisor is a free-for-personal-use utility (http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html) that inspects your Windows computer and creates a nicely formatted HTML report of your installed hardware and software. Its worth installing and running (then backing up the report files thats saved by default at C:\Program Files\Belarc\Advisor\System\tmp) to have just in case.