Internet Tips

Internet Security.

It is advisable when spending time online to have your pc adequately protected from harm, as not only is the internet a wonderful place for finding information, but also can hold a host of other unseen problems for the average surfer. These problems will be looked at in this section and sensible solutions to them suggested.

The first step is to make sure that your computer's operating system is up to date with all the latest fixes, with Windows this is done via Windows Update, which is to be found in either the control panel, or Internet Explorer under the Tools menu. Click on where it says windows update, and IE. will take you to Microsoft's update pages where you can scan for updates that have been released for you operating system and install them. The "Critical Updates" are must haves, as they are for important bug fixes, and security vulnerabilities which do help lower the risks of certain viruses that use Windows vulnerabilities / security holes to spread, Trojans and other possible dangers.

There are also new Drivers released by some of the hardware and peripherals manufacturers that are released via Windows Update as well as their home pages. It is important to back up your drivers b4 installing newer versions as sometimes you can get errors with the equipment if you have upgraded the drivers, and have to go back to the older set. This isn't common, but it is always best to be safe than sorry.

There is a section called Windows Updates, these are for minor bug fixes, improvements in compatibility with software written for older versions of Windows or improved networking for example. These updates are non-critical so you can ignore these if you wish, or if you feel you don't have the need for one. (i.e. if it's for improved communication with a Notebook-PDA and you don't own 1, there isn't really the need for the "fix" to be installed on your system.)

Always remember to carefully read the information about all updates you are going to install before installing them I know it can be very tempting to just click next, but this is inadvisable I feel, as it's best knowing about the item that's to be installed before installing.

A virus is a malicious program purely written to cause problems to the computer it "infects" and will try to spread it's self to other computers by attaching it's self to other files so that you inadvertently send them to someone via an email attachment or lending a disk with some saved data to a friend. Some more intelligent ones, will e-mail them selves. You might have seen on the news, articles about viruses that have been causing problems for industry and causing lots of data to be lost and a lot of time taken up fixing and cleaning up the computers affected, these are not just limited to causing problems for companies, but the home user as well.

So it not only is necessary to have anti-virus software (a good free one can be found via the free programs page) but to keep it updated as well so that it has the latest virus definitions and will be able to detect block and remove them if the need arises. All anti virus programs have an update facility built in, so you can set this to be a regular event, i.e. when you first log on to the internet. When ever I am accessing the internet I always have my anti virus running an "active scan" in the background. This means that it will scan every file I download and open on my pc, any web sites that I view and therefore reduce the risk of infection, web pages do take slightly longer to load, but if the web site server is infected it shouldn't be passed onto my computer.

It is also worth noting that you can get "online" virus scans as well, I tend to run one of these once a month just to be on the safe side. The one that I use for this, just incase my normal scanner has missed something is http://housecall.trendmicro.com/housecall/start_corp.asp you will have to install a small program that enables the scan to run before you can use this. Trendmicro produce the PC-cillin anti virus and firewall.

This is considered by many people as your first line of defence for your pc, as it is designed to only allow only the applications or programs you have started to connect with the internet and communicate normally, but stop any unwanted connections posing a threat to your pc. These threats can be attacks on your pc from malicious computer users either after finding out what is on your pc, cause your pc problems, or spoof your IP (An IP is your address on the internet. Spoofing your IP means that everything they do online appears to have been done via your IP) The Firewall will block these "attacks" and prevent them from causing problems for your computer.

There are many different firewalls, a few of these free ones out there and ones that have an anti virus software inbuilt such as Norton Internet Security. Different people will say that a different "wall" is better, it's mostly down to personal choice. Many new PC's come with anti virus and firewall software as part of a package, if they don't it's a matter of reading up and making an "educated choice." You can get the information you need from computer magazines and the various companies websites.

This to needs regular updates to make sure that your computer is protected against the latest threats which can be set up as a scheduled task from within the programs options.

What is a Trojan you might ask, a Trojan is another malicious program, that sneaks onto your system and try's to "dial out" to  a "remote pc" and allow the user of that pc to gain access to yours. Many are blocked by the Firewall and Anti Virus, but some manage to get past them, so a separate Trojan Scanner can be used, as with the other program types mentioned here these are many and numerous. These too need updating for the same reasons as mentioned above. You can also find online Trojan scans, the Trendmicro site mentioned in the Anti Virus section also scans your pc for these.

Spyware is picked up from general surfing, often implanted via a pop up window and sits there monitoring your net usage and sending statistics off to their company that developed it. Some will install an extra tool and search bar under your normal menus of internet explorer or "hi-jacks your browser" and you will open IE and will always be at a website, one you never set for your home page, and no matter how many times you reset your homepage.

Many programs are recommended for this the 2 most commonly advised are AdAware and Pest Patrol, both very good "cleaners".

Search Tips

When looking for information on the internet there are many different “Search Engines” that you can use for this, www.google.com is this most common of these to be used. There are many others however, some run their searches via several other search engines combining the results into 1 long list, different search engines can pull up slightly different results, and not all results being properly related to the specific information you are after. So it helps to be specific in your searches rather than just putting in one or two words, like ‘windows help’ which would pull up as many pages on windows help as it could find for all versions of windows.

To help make the searches more specific there are several command symbols you can use to try and pull up more accurate results from your searches.
 

1. Speech marks  “ “ : This make the search engine look for the exact phrase you entered into search and pull up results that are more or less what you are after. I.e. a search for windows 98, the engine would search for the terms ‘windows’ and ‘98’, which would bring up web pages containing windows and 98, so you would get many results for different versions of windows, not just 98. Where as if you’d have entered the search like this “windows 98” then it would return primarily windows 98 related websites.

2. Plus symbol + : This places greater emphasis on the word that it is placed in front of and only web pages with that word on them. So the above search could have been +windows +98 and only windows 98 web pages would appear.

3. Minus symbol - : This make the search engine exclude pages with the word following the minus symbol, which can be helpful when filtering out results. I.e. windows 98 –2000 would exclude any pages referring to windows 2000.
    

There are other commands that you can use to refine your searches but these tend to be “site specific” which will allow you to improve the success of your searches. These should be listed within the search engines help section with a brief explanation of how they work. The ones listed above are more or less standard across all search engines.

These symbols can be “mixed and matched” to suit your needs this can take a bit of getting used to, but very helpful in removing irrelevant pages from your search results.