THINGS YOU SHOULD DO TO KEEP YOUR COMPUTER RUNNING PROPERLY
VIRUS PREVENTION
Keep an anti-virus program installed and updated. You should check to make sure that the virus definitions are
being updated, and run a full scan once a week. If you do see a “Trojan” type virus, make sure that you go to your
virus maker’s website, search for the particular type virus that was found, and follow their instructions to remove
it. If you cannot, you should immediately take it to a shop and have the virus removed. If you continue to use the
computer, you risk losing data and causing corruption of your Windows operating system, which also is not
covered under any company warranty.
Our preferred Anti-virus/Anti-Spyware solution:
VIPRE 2014 or VIPRE Internet Security 2014 – Home & Commercial
www.threattracksecurity.com
SPYWARE CLEANING
Keep a Spyware remover on your system, and run it! Although there is no guarantee that it can remove 100% of
the Spyware that comes down to your PC while you are on the Internet, it does remove most.
If you have the new VIPRE anti-virus and anti-spyware running, it automatically prevents all the bad
things from infecting your PC and it updates the definitions automatically, all for as little as $39.95 for a
one year subscription! Other versions are available for multiple PC’s and multiple years of updates.
Call or email me for a quote!
POP-UPS
Never, Never, Never click on a pop-up to see what the offer is. You must immediately click on the X in the top
right of the pop-up. If you click the close button within, or go "into" the pop-up to take a look at what they offer,
it is too late, and now you have allowed them to install software onto your machine that cannot be removed by
Malwarebytes and/or VIPRE.
If you see a pop-up come and has an "offer" for you, or tells you that you have spyware and can click on
something to clean it, don't do it! This is a common trick to get you to go into the "offer" and for them to install
software onto your PC in the background.
The newest and most dangerous threat resulting from clicking on a pop-up is rogue anti-spyware malware.
Malware is any type of adware, spyware, virus or worm that invades a computer without the knowledge or
permission of the user. A rogue, or fake, anti-spyware malware tricks the user into thinking the computer is
infected when in fact all the infections are fake. Further, it can actually hijack a system so that no program files,
such as Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, anti-virus software and anti-spyware software does not run.
Removal of a rogue is difficult and can take several hours in our shop. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true,
it is!
TEMPORARY FILE DELETION
About once a week, it would not hurt for you to clean up the temporary files on your computer system. These are
files that are not needed anymore and that were created by Windows during your use of the computer. Every
computer has them. If you do not clean them up once in a while, the hard drive can become full and cause
slowness or lockups.
We recommend that you use the CleanUp! utility, which can be downloaded from our website at
www.tcs-pitcairn.com/links.html, to clean the temp files, cookies, and temporary Internet files from your system.
If we have worked on your computer, then the utility should be on your computer, either on the desktop or the
taskbar. Open it up and click Cleanup! and the utility does the rest. The advantage of this utility is that it cleans
up all users and not just the user logged on.
Optionally, go to My Computer, right click on the hard drive (typically C), then left click on Properties, then click
Disk Cleanup. It will take a few minutes to complete the check out of your files. When done, it will show you a
list, with check boxes of what is no longer needed on your hard drive. You must put a checkmark in the box next
to the files that need deleted. DO NOT CHECKMARK OFFICE SETUP FILES! Each category that has files
in it can be safely deleted.
After running disk clean-up, you should run disk defragmentation. We recommend running Smart
Defrag 3, which can be downloaded from our website at www.tcs-pitcairn.com/links.html. It has 3 levels of
optimization, can be set to run automatically and is free. You can choose to run the disk defragmentation that is included
with all Windows XP and Vista. Double left click on "My Computer", right click on the first hard drive (usually "C"),
then go to bottom of menu and left click on "Properties". Then select the "Tools" tab, select "Defrag Now", and the
defrag program will appear. Select "defragment" and follow the directions. If you do this frequently, the less time it
takes, and the faster your PC will operate.
ADVANCED SYSTEM CARE
One of the newest utilities we now use is called Advanced System Care. It is a free utility from IOBit and we now
load it for free on all of the PC’s that we work on. It checks, and fixes problems in 10 areas of you PC, including
optimization and registry problems. We suggest you run this at least once every 2 weeks to keep your pc running at its
peak performance.
Note: Run Cleanup!, Ccleaner, Smart Defrag, then Advanced System Care in
that order at least every 2 weeks.
See our website at tcs-pitcairn.com for more info.