Rich's Computer Advice
I am often asked for advice/help with computers....I generally spend a lot of time learning about the options available to me when I make a purchase or decision for software. Here are my recommendations. One page, no fancy editing...good for printing.

Updated last 12/1/05

EVERYONE who is running a Windows-based computer should take these precautions:
Run spyware removal programs. I am a big fan of Spybot and Ad-Aware. Run both, about once a month.
Run an antivirus program....A great free one, that I use is: AVG Free Edition by Grisoft.
Run a firewall...ZoneAlarm, the basic, free version is excellent. You can use it to track incoming and outgoing traffic.

Other, really useful programs are Mozilla Firefox for your browser. This is very tweakable, and it's faster than Internet Explorer. I use Eudora for my email system. It's not as cumbersome or full of security holes as MS Outlook. If you are starting from scratch, you may want to use Mozilla Thunderbird OR the new Netscape 8 suite of products.
You should be using Google for all your searching. Note that they have the image search, and also froogle, the price engine search. Also, use Gmail for your personal email, they give you storage of up to 2GB of data. Grab another free email account for your junkmail. (hotmail, yahoo, junkmail.com, or another free email service) This will let you give a valid email address to some online firm that you do not want to have your regular address, for fear of spam or of them selling your address. I recommend using different services so you don't have to 'log out' and then back in under a new name. Firefox will store all your online passwords for you.
Speaking of storing passwords, I use a program called Whisper to store my passwords offline. It's a good idea to use different passwords for different websites...if you use the same pw on every website, if someone hacks into only one of the services that stores your pw, they'll have access to ALL your other accounts, unless you use different ones.

Some fine utilities out there are Skype, which is free VOIP. I use this to communicate with my sister in Australia and for a local phone in Tucson. Calls are crystal clear. Festoon combines with Skype for free videoconferencing as well. Skype2 was just released, and is in Beta...it may replace the need for Festoon, since it is to have built-in videoconferencing. Picasa is a good picture manager, and has moderate editing abilities, but I pull out Adobe Photoshop for any serious picture editing (buy it retail). If you want to stay free (like everything else on my list), go with GIMP for picture editing. It is as powerful as Adobe.

If you have a router, you can further obviate the need for individual firewalls (I'd probably still run them on your computers all anyways). I am happy with the Belkin Pre-N MIMO router and also the Netgear WR614.

Before you buy anything, research it at CNet and/or Epinions.

Other general advice is...don't leave your email address laying around where anyone can find it...and by anyone, I mean a web spider or search bot, which will comb forums, and other locations looking for valid email addresses. If you ever HAVE to type it in a public place, either use your junkmail account, or type it so it is legible to a human reader ie me (at) myname dot com, but not something that a bot would understand. I only have my email address published on my website in one location, and I used a javascript trick to publish it (look up the source, if you want to see). Don't open emails from strangers, and don't 'reply' to spammers...(ie, they trick you into giving them your address...if you make an attempt to 'remove' yourself by sending an email, then you've just provided them with proof that someone exists at that email address.) Oh...and, for that matter...delete all those extra email addresses on those jokes, funny pictures, or whatever it is that you're forwarding to your friends....you let one of those long lists of valid email addresses fall into the wrong hands, and the spammers KNOW they have valid email addresses. I think that is how I am getting spam at my private email address. grrr.
If you're trying to get rid of things, or tweak and make your PC run faster, here's some advice from PC World. You can also look up things running on your task list to see if they are good, bad, or unnecessary (Ctrl-Alt-Del to get to your Task Manager). Finally, keep things from loading (like Quicktime, various Instant Messengers such as Yahoo and AOL that load when Windows starts even though you told it not to) by taking it off the startup list. Type in msconfig on the Run line and then choose the startup tab. Uncheck the things you don't want to automatically turn on when you start Windows.

Go back to my blog.