This link will help you troubleshoot your machine for issues with your computer freezing up while on the internet. These suggestions are more for an advanced user so if you would like assistance then email me. If you live in the Hiram, Dallas, Villa Rica, or Douglasville area then I can come out to your machine and help you out.

80-90% of all the computer problems that I encounter with machines seem to all have the same fix when it comes to minor errors and issues. The most common fix when troubleshooting your own machine is to reboot. Yes, that does sound like the typical tech support response when tech support doesn’t want to talk to you anymore but that is because it is the most common fix for PC errors. Typically I tell my customers that rebooting weekly in Windows Vista is all that is needed. In Windows XP and earlier I would suggest rebooting at least 2 times a week and sometimes more if the installation is over 2-3 years old.

While reading through some forums I found a website that compares anti virus software. So if you are not in the Dallas, GA area then check out the anti virus software that is compared on that site. Right now the top rated anti virus software is BitDefender. Like Trend Micro (see my page on Self Help Services) BitDefender has a free online scanner. I will warn that you should not rely on free online virus scanners as your virus protection. Every PC that is connected to the internet needs realtime virus protection.

Be carefull what you install on your PC or laptop when you are surfing online. When you visit a website and you receive the dropdown installation bar read the bar to make sure it looks and sounds like legitimate software. One easy way to tell if the software you are installing is suspicious is if it tries to get you to install a new toolbar in your internet explorer. If you notice a new toolbar in your internet explorer that is not the yahoo, msn, or google toolbar then refer to my page about self help services on spyware and virus removal.

A former manager of mine had two sayings about saving your data, “Save often and frequently,” and ”Always have a backup of a backup of a backup.” Yes, it is redundant, but only to get the message across. There is nothing worse than the feeling of losing all of your pictures, music, documents, etc…  It is of the utmost importance to have either a second hard drive or a flash drive that you can back up your data on. Storage is becoming cheaper by the day. An internal 1 terabyte (~1000 GB) hard drive goes for $80 on www.newegg.com. I purchased a 2 GB flash drive from Microcenter for $7 a few weeks ago. There are many options to backing up your files. It will be way more expensive to pay someone to recover the data than it will be to purchase more disk space.

If you live in the areas of Dallas, Hiram, Villa Rica, or Douglasville then you should be able to find a back up hard drive at Wal Mart, Best Buy, or any local computer parts store with a store front.

As a continuation of preventive maintenance, it is also very important to be updating your Operating System software. I suggest using the Automatic Updates that comes on every Windows machine. For Windows Vista it is automatically turned on and is pretty hard to figure out how to turn it off. However, for Windows XP you may need to manually turn it on. To do that click on your Start menu->right click My Computer->Properties->select the Automatic Updates tab->select the Automatic option and click apply. A yellow shield will show up in your notification area. Double click it and use the express settings. After it downloads and installs the updates you may be prompted to reboot. Please note that if you are prompted to reboot it means that some updates will not take effect until you reboot meaning your PC may still be venerable to malicious software. So, please reboot when prompted.

Good computer help can be hard to come by. That is why you should know how to keep your computer working at the best performance that it can. Let me show what good pc help is all about! I am located in the surrounding Douglasville, Villa Rica, Hiram and Dallas areas so if you live around there send me an email with your pc questions.

I can’t stress enough the importance of preventive PC maintenance. My first customer brought me their laptop and the amount and type of spyware on the machine lent it irreparable.

For anti spyware preventive maintenance I would strongly suggest Windows Defender or Spybot. Both are free and are realtime monitoring applications.