I’m sure many of you would want to start 2009 with a clean slate. May I then suggest that you start the new year with a clean and secure PC. There are many ways by which you could accomplish this.

Delete Unnecessary Files

If you’ve worked and traveled a lot last year, then your desktop or laptop may be filled with pieces of evidence of your industriousness and restlessness.  The proofs that I’m referring to are the countless files that you’ve saved and sent to your boss, and the equally innumerable multimedia files that you’ve compiled during your weekend getaways.

If you do not intend to open or access these files anymore at the start of the first working day of 2009, then I suggest that you either delete them or transfer them to an external hard drive. Delete old files that you don’t use or need anymore. While they may take up only a few kilobytes of your enormous hard drive, they can still slow your computer down. You’ll feel their weight during system scans or when you conduct an automatic search of files or programs on your computer. Search engines will scour every data on your hard drive, including ones that you’ve already forgotten. Hence, the more files you have on your hard drive, the longer the searches and scans will take.

Reformat Your Hard Drive

If you really want to forget any memory of last year, then you might want to consider performing the ultimate purge by reformatting your hard drive. While this would surely eliminate any malware residing in your primary storage device, your hopes for a virus-free new year would largely depend, though, on the data that you would reintroduce to your computer. Make sure that the storage device which contains your backup files is free from viruses and spyware. You may have unintentionally backed up copies of some or all of the malware that were saved in your hard drive.

Clean Your Registry

Whether you choose to perform a selective purge or nuke everything in your hard drive, your PC’s performance might still not improve if you have an infected Windows Registry. Everything that runs on your computer almost always involves or requires the participation of the Registry. It’s therefore imperative to keep the Registry free from the influence and control of any malicious application. A healthy Registry can efficiently manage the flow of traffic inside your computer. An infected or defective Registry, though, could clog your system with needless instructions or processes, thereby putting a strain on your computer’s resources.

Invest in a good registry cleaner. While you may have an efficient antivirus program, it’s not designed to handle Registry infections or problems. If you’ve experienced a system slowdown last year despite negative reports by your antivirus or anti-sypware software, then your Registry might be the culprit. RegCure can free your new year from the ghosts of the previous one. Start your new year right. Install all the essential programs and delete the unnecessary ones.

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Malware could be very unforgiving when it decides to strike. While some unwanted programs would already be contented in creating small shanties for themselves inside your hard drive and just monitor everything that you do, others are not so passive and will pillage your system until they are the only applications left in it.

Of course, antivirus and anti-spyware programs are always there to save the day. But what if the carnage happened before you installed your security suites?

The Easy Step / Solution

Before anything else, let me just make it clear that anti-malware programs will still work even if you install them after your PC gets infected. Antivirus programs do not just prevent unwanted apps from entering into your system, but they also remove those which have already injected themselves therein.

The most common solution to an infection is to run a thorough virus or anti-spyware scan over your entire system. The security suites would automatically do the detection and removal of the malicious programs. Most of the time, the detection and removal will be successful. However, things will become a little bit different and complicated when the infection is so severe and it already involves vital system files.

It Doesn’t Always Win

There are times when security software cannot safely remove a virus from a file. Even if it can, doing so might render the file useless as the removal process could damage the data. In cases like this one, what the antivirus program usually does is to just leave the file as it is and recommends that you replace it with a new but similar one. This may seem easy, but I’m telling you that it isn’t. Take note that many programs come from zipped or compressed files. This means that you can’t just look for the infected program’s installation disk and get the needed file therein. You won’t find it in the disk. What you’ll probably see is just a few compressed files that need to be decompressed or unzipped first.

The Final Solution

If the infection is extremely severe, such as when a variety of malware have already nailed a “home sweet home” sign in your computer, then opening your antivirus to extract a cure may already be futile. The infestation in this case is already so serious that you cannot anymore remove the unwanted programs without damaging the whole operating system.

If your antivirus cannot remove many of the malware found in your system and you can’t also delete the infected file because it is vital to your system’s operation, then the only viable and effective solution to the problem would be to reformat your hard drive and reinstall your OS. This may seem a very tedious task that but a pandemic definitely requires the most extreme solution.

Fresh Start

Reformatting your hard disk and reinstalling your operating system would give you a fresh start in your effort to keep your system free from malware. A reformat would wipe out all programs, good or bad. As with all fresh starts or second chances, make sure that you won’t have to go into that situation again where you have to go back to the drawing board. Before you go online or introduce other programs aside from your OS, make sure that you install an antivirus and a registry cleaner first. This would ensure that no malicious program would get in your way when you surf the Web or run any application.

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Instant messaging or internet relay chats were not yet popular during my high school days. Although I was able to communicate with a few people who I don’t know from Australia and New Zealand, I have our school’s pen pal program to thank that for. But don’t get me wrong, though. The thought of speaking with somebody who’s from another continent isn’t exactly considered a Michael J. Fox movie even when I was still in kindergarten. Unless you’ve already forgotten, a sort of instant messaging service was already in existence even during our grandparents’ time in the form of telegram services.

Small, Small World

The world shrank further a few years later when the Internet’s popularity increased exponentially. Web sites were not yet widespread back then, and people were not that reliant on the same for information. What many appreciated the Internet for during that time was for the messaging services. Yahoo! or Windows/MSN Messenger was not yet available. The first communications tool or application that I remember using was mIRC.

Internet relay chat programs allow users to exchange messages in real time. It’s no different than with the instant messengers that everybody’s using nowadays, well except that the former’s GUI is a bit prehistoric, and the smileys are still “cro-magnic.” Oh and of course, Web cams were unheard of back then.

Exploiting for Exploits

As with anything on the Internet, hackers soon found a way to use IRCs to infect PCs with their creations. While IRCs primarily process messages and send them to their intended recipients, they also have the ability to send files.

It’s very easy to spread malware through IRCs or IMs. Almost all people who have Internet access use them, unless the persons that he needs or intends to communicate with all live in his house. Hackers usually open up accounts and pose as chatters who pretend to be interested in befriending you. During the course of your conversation, he will ask you to receive a file from him, purportedly a picture of him or something that might be interesting to you. If you’re too trusting (or gullible), then chances are is that you’ll be reformatting your hard drive the next day due to a hopeless case of registry infestation.

Surfing With Bodyguards

We’re always told to never talk to strangers. While you may think that such warning doesn’t apply in the virtual world, think again. The admonition is actually more relevant, or at least equally applicable in cyberspace. Don’t underestimate the cunningness of con artists lurking around the chat rooms. Many have already been victimized personally and virtually. The danger is real. You could be robbed or maligned in cyberspace. While you may escape physical harm when entertaining strangers in IRCs or IMs, the virtual or electronic injury can be likewise equally painful.

Protect yourself and your computer from being mugged in cyberspace. Make sure that you have electronic sentinels before taking a trip in cyberspace. Two bodyguards in the form of an antivirus and registry cleaner programs should already be enough to ward off malicious attacks.

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The thing that I really hate about malware attack or OS malfunction is data loss. I could deal with having to reinstall applications or even reformat my hard drive. While they may be time-consuming, they’re nothing compared to the time that you’ll spend in rewriting or recreating the files that have been damaged or deleted.

Antivirus

There are many ways by which one could prevent data loss, first and foremost of which is by installing security suites. The saying that “an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure” also holds true with regard to PC health. Indeed, why flirt or invite disaster when you could rid yourself of the worries from the start by making sure that no unwanted programs would be able to access your system. True, antivirus programs could cure and treat infected files. However, there are cases where files get corrupted beyond repair.

Backup

While antivirus programs are very effective in keeping your PC secured from unwanted intrusions, they are not 100% fool-proof. There will come a time when malware would be able to break through the wall and infect your system. When this happens, there’s pretty much nothing that you could do about it other than to resort and to restore the second or third copies of the files that got destroyed.

Since security suites are not a hundred percent reliable, you have to take another precautionary measure in order to ensure that you won’t lose the precious files in your hard drive. A very simple but efficient and practical solution to possible data loss is by backing up. This task or procedure is not complicated. Backing up data simply means making second copies thereof and saving them in another media.

Brainless Task

You don’t need a program in order to perform this task. However, doing it manually can be quite tedious, especially if you have thousands of files saved in your hard disk and scattered in different folders. This is the reason why there are several back up programs in the market despite the fact that the task simply involves dragging folders into the disk where you intend to save your data.

You don’t need a third party software if you’re using Windows Vista, though. Backing up in Vista is an effortless task. Its back up feature takes care of everything from file selection to file destination. All you have to do in the process is to change the disks or drives whenever they’re already full. It’s as simple as that.

Save Often

Back up regularly. Take note that you’re adding new files or modifying existing ones everyday. The file that you’ve saved a month ago might already be entirely different from the one that you have right now. Make sure that the media where you’re going to save the file is reliable. DVD disks, as well as external hard drives, are among the dependable storage devices. Flash drives could also be viable alternatives. However, data could be easily erased therein.

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Many hesitate to invest in antivirus and system tool programs because they cost money. They contend and complain that they have already spent a fortune on important and indispensable applications, such as the operating system, spreadsheet, and word-processing software. However, the misconception as to the dispensability of security suites and other applications that keep your PC in tip top shape has rudely awakened many who fell victim to malware.

Sure, some may contend that they could easily reformat their hard drive and just reinstall all their applications. This would save you from spending a few bucks on security apps, but it will definitely not save you from headaches and from wasting precious time in bringing back everything you’ve previously got in your PC. You might be able to install the programs back, but what about the more important ones – the paper that that you’ve worked on for weeks, or those pictures of your family that you cherish.

Sooner or later, you’ll forget to back up your important files. And when lady luck turns on you, you might end up facing a malware attack without any kind of protection during that time when you forgot to make a copy of all the valuables that you have inside your hard drive. Don’t wait for this to happen. What’s a few bucks for an antivirus or for a registry cleaner. Those few dollars could go a very long way in securing your priceless possessions that are stored inside your computer.

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Have you read PC World’s take on the various external hard drives in the market? It featured ten of the best, ranking them based on speed, price, and reliability.

External hard drives are great devices for back ups. In fact, it seems that it had already pushed the tape drive on the brink of extinction. If manufacturers would further improve on the peripheral’s reliability and portability, it might send many external back up products or solutions to the museum!

It’s still not a good alternative to the internal hard drive as far as using it as a primary storage device is concerned, though. Some are even questioning its practicability as a back up option. Many users are using DVD disks as secondary repositories of their data. While DVDs pale in comparison to external hard drives in terms of size, the former is believed to be more reliable in maintaining the integrity of the files burned to it. It is also more practical since many of the data files that are saved on back up devices are not that big, even collectively. Applications need not be saved since they can be reinstalled using the set up disks.

Despite the doubts that are being cast upon it, external hard drives are still great storage or back up devices. While it would seem too impractical to use it to create a mirror image of your primary storage device, such a move would definitely be very rewarding when the internal hard disk crashes due to viruses or problems with the system registry. While others would be spending a day reformatting and reinstalling programs after a crash, those who took a snapshot of their primary hard drive using their external hard drive could continue on with their tasks as if nothing had happened.

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