| 1. Broadband has been available in the village for over a year now. The cheapest place I have found that offers the best service is www.eclipse.co.uk . These guys will give you a full 1Mbs link for about £13 + VAT per month. Download limit is 1Gb per month, but you can purchase more bandwidth. This is fine for the average user. For the more experienced user or the games player then the Flex option is better. 1Mbs per second with no limits for £30 +VAT. |
| 2. Security. Update your computer on a regular basis. visit www.microsoft.com for more info. If you are on broadband, turn on Automatic Updates. |
| 3. Use Anti-Virus software. I can recommend AVG - www.grisoft.com for an excellent and FREE item of software. It installs and updates itself. Once it is there you do not have to worry about updates. |
| 4. If you use broadband, use a firewall. You wouldn't leave your house unlocked and go out, so why do the same to your PC? Two I would recommend are - www.zonealarm.com and www.agnitum.com BOTH of these can be downloaded for free. You only need to run ONE of these. Windows XP has it's own built in firewall, but the security experts generally think it's not as good as a professional version. |
| 5. I can also recommend using Microsoft Messenger if your on broadband. Helps people stay in touch, and other people can provide IT help and support almost instantly. If your on dial up, you can still use it to chat etc. |
| 6. Clear out your old junk and other files. Empty you Recycle Bin once per week and Defragment your hard drive once per month. This will help to keep your PC working smoothly. |
| 7. Microsoft has just released a new item of software that finds and removes the annoying adds that occasionally pop up etc. You can find it as www.microsoft.com. It does a pretty decent job of getting rid of the spyware stuff, and it is free. |
| 8. Make sure you back up your hard drive! If your not sure how to go about it, ask me! |
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If you are on Dial Up and do not wish to spend the money downloading the files mentioned above (and they are very large files some of them!), drop me a line and I will burn them onto a CD and pop it round for you.Click through to help raise funds for the Church. It doesn't sot you a penny more!!! |
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