HP's 1001TU Mini Notebook (Netbook)

In order to have a safe online experience you need to know these things. If you don’t know what they are – research them or ask someone how you can set these up on your computer. If you don’t know these things – you could really suffer serious financial or other harm because of your ignorance. Use  this holiday season to get up to speed on these!

Here are 6 things that you should know and know well, if you use a computer:

1. Passwords – “babysuzie” is not a good password, someone could figure that out after a 1-day effort. Would it be worth it for a hacker to spend 12 hours trying to figure out your email or Paypal account password? Sure it would.

Change your password to something like “e67YiIkL7r103bRiZ8″. Use the maximum characters allowed. Use special characters like “{];_” and others if you’re allowed. Some password fields allow spaces even. Use them! All contribute to greater security.

Now, will you remember that password? Never. That’s the idea. Nobody will ever remember it or guess it. You’ll need to set up a word document (also password protected) with your passwords to every account you have. I have one such document that is about 4 pages long. On it is everything important I have. I hide that file in a directory on my computer that is named something meaningless like “/network/2/’ and name it something like “texts.doc” so it’s not likely to attract any attention even if someone stole my computer. I don’t have recent documents list active so nobody would know I was accessing it recently. At least not through that feature.

Next crucial part… Signing into your accounts, whatever they are. Open that Word doc and copy the password and paste it into the password form field. Never type out your password because keyloggers can grab it.

You might think your passwords are unguessable. Unless they look like the example I gave you’re probably wrong.

2. Never Lose Another Word in Your Computer – Keyloggers are infamous because hackers try to install them on your system so they’ll grab whatever you type on your keyboard and send it by hidden email to the thief. First, research the negative aspects of keyloggers. Then, read this article I wrote a few months back:

Keylogger Article >

A keylogger can help you immeasurably by keeping track of every single thing you type on the computer. Find a keylogger program for free, or buying it if necessary.

Here’s a link to the one I use:

http://www.tucows.com/preview/301938

Not sure you’ll find one anymore, but there used to be an adapter that went between your keyboard cable and the computer that could log all your keystrokes. The software keyloggers or these hard keyloggers will both do the job.

3. Email Dangers – Never ever, ever click on a link that was sent to you in email to sign into any account you have. Not EBay, not PayPal, not your bank, not your credit card statement, not your email account, not any account.

What you see in the email – the link, can be whatever someone wants it to look like. A link that says “Ebay Secure Login” can lead to http://175.133.1.202 which might be a server set up to record all login information you enter on their fake form that is copied EXACTLY like the company you have an account with.

4. Your Accounts – I mentioned about choosing good passwords and how to copy/paste your password instead of typing it. There’s more. Every time you sign into your email, Paypal, Ebay, or any other account that means anything – that your money or personal information is connected to in some way you should do this…

a.) Open a new browser, not a new tab, a new browser. I use FireFox 3, and I hope by now you do too.

b.) Type “https://www.google.com/ig” for your Google personal homepage or whatever account you are signing into. If you are signing into a secure page – you’ll have the “https://” and not just “http://”. Even Gmail, Google’s email program has an option where you can login securely under https any time you use email. You can enable it in “Settings” on the bottom of the first tab that shows. It looks like this:

Secure email at Gmail with https option.

c.) The padlock is locked. When the padlock is locked you have a secure connection between your computer and the server that’s dishing out the page your looking at. It means that the server has a valid security certificate for their site and that the site you’re looking at is the official site. Here’s what the padlock looks like in FireFox browser. This is at the bottom edge of the screen…

5. Back Ups – When a computer hard drive fails or is infected by a malicious virus that ends up destroying some or all of your work you’ve slaved over for years in some cases, it’s not a happy moment in your life.

Yesterday my small notebook started a grinding noise in the hard drive. Today it’s not booting. Luckily I didn’t have much on that computer at all. I’d not backed up what I did have and lost a few things. If this would happen to my other computer I have a ton of backups that should replace everything lost except this morning’s files.

Small USB 2.0 flash drives are finally large enough and fast enough to be useful. They’re able to backup 4-8GB or more one one of these tiny and lightweight drives. I suggest you get a couple of them and back up your data in duplicate or triplicate. I have most of my important data backed up on DVD’s, and external hard drive, and these small USB drives. If losing something you created will be devastating – backup!

Use the USB drives to backup the files you created that day and do it before you shut off your computer. There are automated programs that back up your data and there are RAID configurations you can set up so you always can replace your data in case of a hard drive failure.

6. Anti-Virus Program – You need one. You need a good one. AVG offers a free virus scanner with updates which works well except you’ll need to pay for other functions it doesn’t give away free. Norton is the ultimate anti-virus program but has been known as a resource hog in the past. The 2009 version is supposed to use less system resources and have a smaller “footprint”. I strongly suggest buying Symantec’s Norton 360 v2.0 computer protection package to protect your computer, and your life really. It’s a great investment – insurance for your online and offline life. If someone steals your identity you’ll wish you had spent the money to get it today.

The most expensive Norton Antivirus protection is just $79.99:

Norton 360 v2.0

Stops viruses, spyware and more

Online identity protection

Automated backup and restore

PC tune-up and maintenance

I don’t make any money from this – just recommending you get it if you don’t already have comprehensive virus, spyware, identity protection and automated PC backups and restoration.

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