Computer Maintenance, You have to do it.
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Today was another one of those days where I was racking my brain trying to think of what I could blog about. I have only had to write a short story once so far and I am avoiding writing them because I would love to put out good information. I want to put out information that people will actually be able to use and if i come across a funny moment I would like to blog about it and give people a chuckle. Well today I spent the majority of my day working on my laptop. I have an Alien-ware M17x R3 and I love this machine. I bought the machine two years ago to sell it on E-bay and I got no buyers. I was hoping it would cause a bidding war just before Christmas and it didn’t so now I have this awesome gaming laptop that I use for everything. Now don’t get me wrong, my wife was totally up set with me when I bought a 3500.00 dollar laptop making 13.00 dollars an hour. I will say this in my defense; there are two times a year I am expensive, Christmas time and my birthday. If I don’t get what I want on those days or know ahead of time I am not getting what I want I am going to buy something for me I want.
Virus Protection
So since I have started doing these blogs every day, my computer has been acting a little off. The reason being is that I harvest email addresses and sometimes I have to verify a domain. For instance “johndoe@xyz.com” XYZ.com is a real domain so therefore it has email addresses I can send to. The address itself may not be correct but the domain does exist which means I am going to unknown domains anywhere from two to four hours a day and some of them are quite malicious. This is where I definitely recommend two products to Windows users. First of all let me says this, I don’t believe in paying for anti-virus so I have Microsoft Security Essentials. Who better to protect your Windows operating system, than the creators themselves, Microsoft? Now don’t get me wrong. It’s not perfect security and it has bit me in the past but as of late it has been flagging items I have been downloading so it’s getting better with time. I have a backup to Microsoft Security Essentials and that is Malwarebytes. I don’t believe in paying for anti-virus but Malwarebytes has saved my computer so many times over the years that I bought a subscription. Now again I harvest email addresses and go to some pretty bad domains. If it is a really malicious domain and it’s in Malwarebytes’s database it will block me from going. It’s really that easy and it will notify you in the bottom right corner of your screen the site is blocked and show the IP address of the site blocked. I normally don’t recommend having two anti-virus software programs running at the same time but they seem to work quite well with each other and use very little system resources. So I figured it was time to backup my laptop. I have done a lot of blogs this month and I have made a lot of movies so a back up was way over due.
Today’s Maintenance
So today’s maintenance was just a simple backup with Windows 7. I have a 228 gigabyte SSD drive and it took hours. That was fine I set down in my living and played “Demon’s Souls” on PlayStation 3 as I waited for it to complete. It is important to do regular backups of your computer especially if you work online. I have a one terabyte external drive I use for for backups among other things. Here are some screen shots below to show you how to perform a backup in windows 7.
First of all Click “Start” and in the Search Box type in “backup”
Click on “Back up your computer” and you should see a similar screen below.
My external hard drive is all ready selected so when you get to this screen make sure your external hard drive is all ready plugged into your computer or laptop and then click on “Back up now”. After that just sit back and relax as back up begins and your system’s image is created on your external drive.