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Selecting a Quality Surge Suppressor or UPS

There are hundreds of outlet strips available for less than $10, even as low as $2 or $3. Except in very rare instances, these provide little or no protection. When selecting a surge suppressor and/or UPS, there are many things to consider.
For both UPSs and surge suppressors:

• The needed number of regular outlets and, for transformers, widely spaced outlets.
• The necessary specifications. For an instructive article, go to howstuffworks.com/ surge-protector.htm.
• For UPSs only:
• The amount of time you need the system to continue to run after the power fails.
• Add up the total wattage of the computer, monitor, and other essential peripherals, and make sure the UPS is designed to work with at least that amount of wattage.
• In most UPSs, some outlets have battery backup and some have surge suppression only. Make sure that you have enough backed-up outlets to serve your purposes.

Lightning Protection

It is nearly impossible to protect against a direct lightning strike. By having a good computer grade surge protector installed between all equipment and the outlets including the telephone and network connections, you will minimize your risk of loss. If you are going to be leaving the computer equipment unused for an extended period, it is safest to unplug everything from the outlets, thus eliminating the risk altogether.

על ידי : Book-PC Repair and Maintenance: A Practical Guide

Overview of Viruses and Other Hazardous Programs

Unfortunately, there are many conscience-free people out there with nothing better to do than write and circulate programs designed to harm computer data, software, and even hardware. Many of today’s computer problems come from viruses and could have been prevented by proper use of good antivirus software. The virus situation is so bad that any unprotected computer that has been connected to the Internet for a while is likely to have some kind of virus. Simply avoiding opening e-mails from unknown senders and not opening attachments is nowhere near enough. Besides that, people who do delete such messages and attachments probably end up deleting important messages and attachments. Yet many people either don’t install antivirus software or never update the program they have. People need to realize that, to be effective, antivirus software needs a file written to deal with nearly every different virus. Virus developers are at work 24/7. That is why antivirus program developers offer “pattern updates” from their Web sites as often as several times a week. Most of these programs offer some type of automatic updates they check to make sure programs are up to date every day the user logs on to the Web, and prompt the user to accept the update if available. Just follow the instructions supplied with the program.
The program will also prompt the user to scan for viruses regularly. In fact, any prompts from antivirus programs should be heeded as soon as possible. This doesn’t mean that you should let a program start a routine scan or some other time-consuming process while you’re in the middle of an important task, but you should let it scan as soon as you’re finished.
If the program finds a virus, it will probably attempt to clean, quarantine, or delete the file(s) and prompt you to scan the entire system for additional infection. This should be done as soon as possible to avoid further contamination. These programs also offer virus encyclopedias both in their user interface and on their Web pages. If the program tells you it cannot effectively deal with the virus, search your program’s encyclopedia for instructions and follow them if possible. If your program’s encyclopedia doesn’t have helpful information, you can search the encyclopedia of one of its competitors.
If you have a spare computer with a good virus scanning program, a great way to scan for viruses is by removing the hard drive to be scanned and connecting it to the spare as an additional hard drive. For ease in connection, the spare should have a hard drive cable connected by itself to the secondary IDE controller, and a power connector, both coming out of a space on the front of the computer. Find something stable to prop up the hard drive and run the virus scan. There are several advantages to doing it this way. First, you know that no files will be in use on the scanned hard drive. Error messages are much less likely and rebooting is unnecessary to clean infected files. Use 2000 or XP so that Windows will recognize any file system. A computer like this is also good for backing up data. Figure 2.23 shows an example of such a spare computer.
Sometimes, virus scan programs report infected files in the hidden _Restore folder in Me, 2000, or XP, but cannot clean or delete the files. While the file can be safely deleted in DOS in Me, it might not be possible to delete the individual file in 2000 or XP. It is easier to disable System Restore, reboot the computer, and re- enable System Restore to delete the entire _Restore folder.

Figure 2.23: A computer dedicated to virus scanning and data backup.