I will get this question 30 times in the next two weeks so I thought I would head it off at the pass.
When you buy that awesome new laptop on Black Friday here is what you need to do:
- DO NOT pay geek squad or staples easy tech to do anything to the laptop. Take it home as is.
- Set a password on your laptop. Remember no password for you means no password for a hacker.
- Uninstall the 120 day trial AV that came with it and any other trial software that came on the laptop.
- Install Microsoft Security Essentials Anti Virus. Its free, its good and it never expires.
- Use OPEN DNS. It will stop your computer from accessing a list of known bad sites.
- Install Secunia PSI. It will keep all the software on your system up to date without you having to do anything.
- Buy a portable hard drive with back up capabilities and USE IT. Nothing sucks more than losing all your data because a hard drive failed.
If you do these simple things you and your laptop will have a great long term relationship.
