Alpha Technical Solutions

Archive for the ‘Top Tips’ Category

It’s the last few days before Christmas and one of the hottest technology items that will be given away will once again be the laptop. If you are going to be giving away a laptop I would ask you to take a moment to think about the recipient. The person you are giving the laptop to will want to use it straight away. However if you give it to them out of the box they’re going to have to go through the first run sequence and then if they are sensible they’re going to download updates and get a good anti-virus solution going before they do anything. Christmas day is a day for fun- not being sensible. So I say why not prepare the laptop for them. Get it ready so that all they have to do is press the on button and have some fun.

Remember these  steps and you won’t go far wrong.

Before you start doing anything plug the laptop into the mains. Never setup a new laptop using the battery, you probably won’t have that much charge in the battery and you should fully charge a laptop before giving it away anyhow.

Start the laptop and follow the wizard to get it ready for use. At this point make the name of the user account the name of the person who is going to be using the laptop. If you are security conscious create a separate admin account and a named ordinary user account for its owner. In the long run this is more sensible – although you probably won’t be thanked for it.

Ok now that the laptop is up and running take a moment to see what software has been preinstalled on it. Get rid of 30 or 60 day demo software unless you are also giving away a licence for it. Take a look at the anti-virus software too. Chances are it will be a demo that will run out in a month. Unless you are paying for the antivirus get rid of that too. You don’t want to have the person you are giving the laptop too worrying about this one month after they receive it. I’ll tell you where to get an excellent free anti-virus from in a moment. The basic rule at this stage is get rid of things that are unnecessary or that will start asking for money in the near future.

Take a moment to check the firewall is on. It should be on all modern computers – but lets just be sure of that shall we.
Now it is time to go online. Your first destination should be:  http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/ This is the home of Microsoft Security Essentials a first class and free piece of software that guards against viruses, spyware and other malicious software. Told you not to worry about removing the antivirus.

By this point Windows Updates should have started downloading. If they haven’t go to Windows Update and start running Windows Update.  You should now download and install all the of the updates you can. These are an essential part of securing a PC so make sure that download all of the available updates. Also take a moment here to make sure that automatic updates are turned on. This will help keep the PC secure in the long run.

When the updates are complete take a moment to install a second browser. Its always a good idea to have a spare browser on a computer. Firefox, and Chrome are good choices here. Come to think of it – I prefer both Chrome and Firefox to Internet Explorer.

You’re almost done now – this next step is simply to install any software that you think the person who’s going to be using the software might like.

Make sure the laptop is fully charged. Once it is turn it off, unplug it and let the laptop cool down. Once it is cool you can wrap it up and give it away.

Do this and you will have a ready to use laptop, someone will be delighted on Christmas day.

Image via Wikipedia

Everyone should be used to the idea of backing up their work. I say should be use because for most people backup is either something that is done for you or something that is not done. Backup is not a popular topic, simply put its not perceived as being, cool, sexy or even necessary. However backup is necessary. It is very easy to lose some work. It is very easy for a computer to lose all of your work in one fell swoop, and when that happens if you do not have a backup you have nothing. An adage I’ve heard online recently and one that for me rings true is this. If you only have one copy of something you don’t have anything. That’s because a single copy of anything, anywhere can be turned into nothing instantly with no warning.

You’ll notice that I say anything, anywhere.

You see a lot of people have turned to cloud computing as a method of not needing a backup. I can understand why. Companies offering good cloud services allow you to feel looked after. You work in the cloud and they look after everything for you. All you have to do is work in the cloud and everything is alright.

This is something that is mostly true.

You see once your data is looked after by someone else you ability to gain access to that data is limited to them giving you access. At any time that access could be revoked by a number of reasons that have nothing to do with. Also even big companies can lose data. There was a nasty scare a couple of months ago in the US where the data owned by users of the T-Mobile Sidekick mobile phone appeared to have been entirely lost. Here’s a Telegraph article from the time that the story broke:

In the end the data was recovered but for a while it looked as if everything had been lost.

So what can you do?

The answer is to treat the cloud the same as you would treat your computer. Find a way to automatically copy your data from the cloud to a computer you control. That way you have multiple copies of your information and are safe.

How you backup depends on your cloud service. This means I can’t give you a single recommended answer. The trick is to look at how you work and to a technique that works for you. Whatever you do – make it simple  – simple usually works best.  One solution is to use something like Dropbox. I’ve mentioned Dropbox  before. Its a service that lets you share data between the cloud and your desktop. This makes it simple to have copies of work on your computer and in the cloud at once. I’m also happy to work with you on personal solutions – just so long as you have backups.

Email is a wonderful tool. However it does have its restrictions. One of which is you don’t know anything about the other persons system. In fact you don’t even know what other people on your system are doing. Normally this is not a problem. Email comes in and goes out and everything is nice and easy. Until that is you try sending a goodly sized collection of photograph, or videos or even some large PDF files. Pretty soon things can go bad, and depending on your system it can go bad for either you or the person you are sending the email to.

One way to stop this is not to send large files or collections of files by email as attachments.

So how to you do this?

The easiest way is to save your files somewhere on the Internet and to send the person an email with instructions of how to go and pick them up. That way the files can be downloaded nice and easily at their convenience.

There are quite a few services out there to do this. Here are 2 that I’ve used and found to be effective.

First up is Skydrive. Operated by Microsoft this gives a massive 25Gb of shareable storage. It’s not perfect though. In order to use it both parties must have Microsoft Live accounts and there is no tool to easily transfer files directly from your computer the Skydrive. However it is easy to use, the storage available is truly large and it works on company systems where you are not allowed to install extra utilities.

Next is Dropbox, this is a truly sweet system. A small download makes this part of your system. Files can be easily synchronised with  online folders which can be securely assigned to anyone with an email address. If you want to easily share files with anyone then Dropbox is a great solution.

So don’t send large files, arrange for it be picked up. Sooner or later someone will thank you for it.

Here’s the scenario and it is one that every computer user has faced at some time or another. You need some new software, but you have no idea what to get. I mean how can you be sure that what you are about to buy or download will be any good? This is where alternativeto.net comes in. At its simplest alternativeto simply collects user votes for their favourite software, in similar fashion to the way many shops offer customer reviews. However this is not the genius of Alternativeto. That part comes next. You see for every piece of software on the website there is a list of alternatives to it. This way you can see who has voted for what and you can see alternatives that may very well suit you better.

It’s a one stop software discovery shop.

Alternativeto covers software for WIndows, Mac, and Linux.  It also has a cloud computing section for web  based applications. Giving it coverage of all major software platforms (excluding smartphones).

I recently had to reinstall the LightScribe system software on a Windows 7 PC where LightScribe labelling had stopped working. I hadn’t been on LightScribe.com for a while and noticed that the various free tools and utilities available on the site had were now listed for use with Windows 7. Time to take a quick look.

A handful of downloads and a bit of testing led me to one conclusion. The updated system software works very well with Windows 7, and available tools work very well.

So if you need free LightScribe labelling software or good system tools take a good look at lightscribe.com. Its free resources that can help anyone with a Lightscribe disc.

So how many people here have data on a USB stick?

How many of you have that data sitting somewhere else other than on that USB stick?

Now what happens to that data should you accidently sit and break that USB stick?

So here’s my tip, backup your USB stick regularly or it could cost a bit to get that data back!

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