New Year Resolutions for your PC

Things to make you safer

As a new year begins, many of us will be thinking about the positive changes we need to make in our lives, such as losing weight, stopping smoking etc. But what about keeping your relationship with your PC happy and healthy?

Strengthen your digital security
First on the list is to take the time now to start changing your passwords FOR EVERYTHING. Make sure you have a different one for every account. Use a mixture of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols to create unique passwords. Two factor authentication adds an extra layer of security. This is usually a combination of something you know and something you have. The thing you know is often a pin number. The thing you have might be a unique token generated each time you log in. This is used in addition to your username and password.

Make backups of your photos, videos, and music
If your device gets lost, damaged or stolen, you run the risk of never being able to retrieve the irreplaceable documents stored on it. To save music, photos and documents, discs, memory sticks and removeable hard drives will suffice. However, it is worth using some sort of cloud storage, although do remember if you want to make your backups 100% fail safe, it is important to have both physical and online copies saved.

Get rid of desktop clutter
Keeping screenshots, images and shortcuts to files on your desktop can make finding things almost impossible. To get the initial abundance of apps out the way, create a folder on your desktop named ‘Old Desktop’ and transfer all your clutter into it. Your desktop will immediately look cleaner and more manageable. From there, you can go through the folder in your own time and put all the files in their rightful place, perhaps even sort out other folders whilst you are at it.

Clean that keyboard
To clean your keyboard, make sure your PC or laptop is shut down and that the keyboard is disconnected from the computer (if using a desktop PC). We recommend using a can of compressed air that will blast any dirt and debris out from between the keys.

Upgrade your PC
If your PC still runs on coal, or even worse, Windows XP or Vista, now is the time to upgrade to Windows 10. As we’ve mentioned time and time again, continuing to use Windows XP or Vista on the public internet is very much like going out in public with a virus and coughing on people.

Philip Brooks