Greetings Citizens of the Realm!

As hinted to in a previous post, the Paladin is doing his best to bring to pass yet another (hopefully) useful area of this website. However, he had to take a bit of a time out to help a good friend with his computer.

You see, Jim is a retired engineer who has had some serious health problems as of late. As such, his window to the world has been his computer and the Internet. Jim’s wife Sharon has told me (as well as Jim) that he will spend hours at time on the computer, reading articles, sending email, hunting down his family’s genealogy, and more.

Recently, the Paladin helped to secure a used laptop for Jim so that he can more easily access the internet (he has mobility issues and sitting at the computer desk for hours is rough on him). A very kind soul made a used laptop available and the Paladin spent time setting it up for Jim.

In his search for a backup tool, the Paladin came across a free program called PING. Ping has the ability to take a “snapshot” of a hard disk and save it off to some other device (CD, DVD, USB hard drive, network drive, etc.) so that you can restore it later if you have a problem.

Well, since the Paladin tries to practice what he preaches, he tried PING on Jim’s new (used) laptop and was very pleased with the results. He was able to make an image of the laptop’s hard drive onto an external USB hard drive fairly easily.

Well, it turns out that there was a catastrophic failure during a Windows update, and Jim’s laptop would no longer boot properly. So that Paladin took back the computer last night and restored the previous backup in about 30 minutes! Suddenly, Jim’s computer is up and running again!

The point here is that there is some excellent free software available out there and the Paladin will soon be offering a guide to such software, along with tips and other helpful hints.

In this case, you can read more about PING by clicking here.

Now, a word of caution. The PING utility works great, but it does require a little bit of computer savvy. Read the documentation CAREFULLY before using it (as you always should when you are messing with the contents of a hard drive).

In a nutshell, PING boots the Linux operating system from a CD without altering the contents of your hard drive. It then runs a utility that can perform the backup and restoring of an image. All in all, it is one pretty slick piece of software.

So if you are in the market for a disk backup/restore utility and have as much money as I do for such things right now (namely zilch!), PING just might be for you. I know that the Paladin is sold on it and will soon be imaging every machine in his household with it.

Greetings Citizens of the Realm!

It used to be that protecting your computer and data was a much simpler affair. Way back many years ago, most people (the Paladin included) figured that it was impossible to embed misbehaved software into anything other than a program.

For DOS/Windows users, this meant looking at only .COM and .EXE files. Files that contained executable code (also known as “executable programs”). My how the landscape has changed!

Today we have all sorts of add-ons to browsers, as well as utility software, that would at first glance appear to be immune to carrying viruses and such.

No one would have thought many years ago that a word processor or spreadsheet could contain a virus. These files contained data, and thus, how could they possibly cause harm to your computer?

But of course, as user’s needs increased, scripting languages were added to these programs, which were capable of being misused by the “bad guys” that we like to call the “Anti-Programmers.” In some cases, some brilliant (but demented) individuals discovered how to compromise your computer using files that did not even contain scripting languages!

The point to all of this is that in addition to keeping your operating system up to date with respect to patches and updates, it is also vitally important to keep your browser plugins and third party utility programs up to date as well.

Some programs you might not think to keep updated/patched are:

• Adobe Acrobat
• Adobe Flash (Formerly Macromedia Flash)
• Any Image/Photo Processing Software

This is not to say that you have to run right out and spend tons of cash to upgrade to the latest and greatest versions of these programs, but it would be wise to ensure that you have all of your software patched and updated (we are talking about the free updates here) on a routine basis. While this will take some discipline and effort on your part, constant vigilance will pay dividends in the long run.

So take a moments today to review the software on your computer and see which programs have updates and patches you can quickly and easily apply. The data you save may just be your own!

Isn’t it amazing how many people are concerned about you on the Internet?

You create a new email address and in no time at all, perfect strangers are suddenly very concerned about you having the best credit card, the best home loan, and especially the best “bedroom performance” possible. All of these “kind” people are sending you email every day in order to be sure you are up to date with the latest in electronics, the prettiest of Russian mail-order brides, and the most “exciting” websites you could ever want to visit.

The Problem

We have all been a victim of it. This thing called “email spam.” Unsolicited emails that clog your inbasket and make it very hard for you to find the emails that you actually care about. Congress has finally made some attempt to control spam, but there are still far too many loopholes for the unscrupulous to dive through in order to assault your inbox with junk email.

There are various tools you can use to try to cut down on the amount of spam that reaches you. If your email software allows for it, you can use a spam filter as well as a black list or white list. Unfortunately, each of these tools has their own drawbacks.

One Good Step Towards a Solution

One of the best ways to deal with spam email is to avoid the online behaviors that cause your email address to be picked up by spammers and added to their lists. What follows is a set of rules to help reduce the chances that your inbox will fall prey to a spammer’s unwanted attentions:

Read the rest of this entry »