Executives often want to know what steps to take when they purchase a new computer.

1. You may want to have a qualified IT professional help you reinstall the Windows 7 operating system without all the extra programs that come installed with the computer these days. Often, those programs are only for a 30 day free trial and the extra bloat just bogs down your whole computer. I like having a clean computer from the beginning.
2. Install a quality anti-virus program. If you are going to connect to the office, let a qualified IT professional from the office set up your client to the enterprise anti-virus / anti-malware / software firewall package they use.

   If the machine is strictly for your own personal use, you may choose to use Kaspersky, McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro, or whatever your qualified IT professional is most familiar with using.

   Caution—there are many “download” programs on the internet that are really viruses so purchasing the boxed copy if often your best bet.

   Additionally, get the whole suite including the software firewall—not just anti-virus. Be sure to choose “update” before installing when prompted during the installation process since the CD will be older than the current version.

   You may need to edit settings for specific programs you “know are ok” if the firewall marks them as suspicious and restricts their activity. Just make sure you don’t accidentally enable a “bad” program to damage your computer.Schedule automatic full system scans daily—or at least weekly. They can happen during the night if you don’t want the scan to slow your computer down.

   Keep an eye on the automatic updates to be sure they are being applied as soon as they are released.

3. Backup. If you take time to understand it, image backup is the “way to go” for primary backups. Be sure to apply the updates regularly. Products include Ghost, True Image from www.acronis.com and ShadowProtect Desktop.

   As with any backup software, it is important to enable encryption of the media. That way, if anyone ever gets your backup drive, they won’t be able to read any of the private information without your password.

   After installing your image backup software on your new computer, always perform a backup and restore. This is “less dangerous to test” on a new computer since you do not have lots of your important data on the machine yet.

   I like the “Lights out Restore” option that works with many computers so you don’t need the product CD to boot if your computer crashes as long as the primary part of the hard drive still functions. Be sure to test Lights Out Restore before you actually need it since this feature does not always work with every computer.

   You may have at least 2 backup drives and alternate using them each time you backup.

   Additionally, you may also choose to augment your image backups to your USB drives with an online service such as www.sosonlinebackup.com in case you lose your laptop and your backup drives.

4. If you plan to give away your old computer, you will want to erase all of your data from the hard drive. It is best for a qualified IT professional to do this for you. Please read these helpful tips if you would rather do it yourself.
5. I also strongly encourage you to enable the full disk encryption on the laptop—hopefully it comes with that capability—Most computers do these days. You may want the help of a qualified IT professional to help you configure this option.
6. Regularly apply your Microsoft Patches—just be sure to use the “Check for Updates” option in Windows 7 instead of ever responding to an e-mail telling you to “get this update.” The e-mail is bogus and the “update” it refers to is most likely a virus.

   Microsoft normally releases patches on the second Tuesday of every month—and sometimes during the middle of the month. Note that the “automatic updates” setting is not always reliable—so checking manually is a good idea.

   Always have a good image backup before installing patches You always have a good backup anyway—right?

7. Computer manufacturers offer a way to get updates to their utilities and drivers too. The main computer manufacturer patches to get are the ones that say they are a “critical security update.”
   Be sure to make backups before installing the patches – I’ve had manufacturer patches mess up my computer but was always able to restore back to where I was before. Applications need to be up to date as well.

The care and feeding of a new computer these days can be involved, and the more solid a foundation you start with, the longer your computer will serve you well.

Please post your comments on this blog.

Will viruses and other malware contribute to injuries and deaths? Imagine diagnostic imaging machines, like X-rays and CAT Scanners, exposing patients to too much radiation due to a virus. Traffic lights not functioning properly, especially on a highway with high speed limits, could lead to a horrible crash.  Emergency services may already be delayed in their response due to computer malfunctions. The airline industry has plenty to worry about. What if trains fail to stop and crash into another train or the end of the line?

Apparently the Spanair diagnostic computer does not connect to the Internet so the infection likely came from an infected USB device, CD-ROM, or some other form of removable media.

Just last month, control systems manufacturer Siemens, who manufactures control systems, warned that malware called Stuxnet is spreading through infected USB devices to penetrate industrial control systems. I wonder if there are any control systems at nuclear power plants infected yet.

More and more regulations and laws are forcing organizations to wake up to the fact that IT security is very important.

Business executives and IT professionals alike must realize:Viruses and other malware do not necessarily make themselves obvious for the simple reason that, if you know a computer is infected, you are likely to have a qualified IT professional fix the problem.

• Anti-virus programs do not always catch all viruses
• Firewalls are not perfect either
• End users can, accidentally or on purpose, bypass some of the best security you set up

How many more people will need to die, how much more money will be lost, before people become aware of the importance of IT security?

Please post your comments on this blog.

The main idea behind many of the technologies today has two parts:

First, users can have icons on their desktop, click on an icon, and the user is able to work.

Second, it is irrelevant to that user whether that program they launched is:

• Installed on their own PC
• Being pushed down to their PC from a server
• Running on a server on their corporate network
• Being provided by a different company over the Internet.

It is up to the IT professionals to handle the details—the users just have the information and tools they need to take care of your clients and their needs.

Running applications in the cloud normally refers to applications that run through the Internet. Executives sometimes call their internal servers their own personal cloud, and who am I to argue? This especially makes sense to them when their servers are at a data center in a different location than the offices where the users work.

Read more about the pros and cons of computing in the cloud. Please post your comments on this blog.

It is beneficial, every year or so, to have someone in your organization shop around for data service rates for your business.

Most of my clients report findings such as, “We now have twice the data rate for one half the price!”

If you have not shopped around lately, now is a great time to do so! Remember to call telephone companies, cable services, fiber providers, and even fixed wireless if it is available in your area.

If you have multiple locations, you may even find that an MPLS solution, where the telephone company handles much of the traffic routing between locations, is a good option for your organization.

After you save money at the office, have your users check their homes as well. I just upgraded our home to a new provider for half the price that is providing two thirds of a T3’s speed for downstream data—speeds I’d only dreamed of before. The Internet is a whole new experience at these speeds! Remember too that commercial service to your business will cost more than residential service to homes, as well as often provide much faster upstream connections than residential services.

Please post your findings on the blog.

First of all, read this short blog post about full disk encryption:
http://www.fosterinstitute.com/blog/laptop-data.html.

Next, if you haven’t already, notify at least one of these agencies:

• Equifax www.equifax.com 1-800-685-1111
• Experian www.experian.com 1-888-397-3742
• TransUnion www.transunion.com 1-800-916-8800

I’d suggest you consider signing up with one of them for their monitoring service such as Equifax ID Patrol or Experian ProtectMyID.

The other main step I would take is to log into your banking sites and set up “alerts” that send you a text message or e-mail you DAILY a message of all charges and other activity on the account. Some banks even allow alerts in real time as the activity occurs. That way you can keep a really close eye on things and, if anything looks out of the ordinary, call your bank ASAP.

If you are protecting any of your accounts with a “mother’s maiden name” as a secret word for when you phone in, change that code too—it is too easy to figure out.

The FTC offers even more detailed advice here:
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/idtheft/idt07.shtm.

To keep your Mac and still get support for your Windows at work, get VMware Fusion http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/ (what I use), Parallels http://www.parallels.com/, or Boot Camp http://www.apple.com/support/bootcamp/ , and run Windows at the office. Then your IT professionals can support your “Windows” laptop (even though you have a Mac) and you can enjoy running Apple OS X for everything else.  Then you can “have the best of both worlds.”  This solution works for many people.

Please be sure to remember to run Windows anti-virus and all your patches and updates on both Microsoft and Apple operating systems, and all of your applications on both operating systems as well. This includes all your adobe reader updates, flash updates, iTunes patches, Office patches, Java patches if you install Java, browser patches like Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer, etc.

Find information about:

Mac updates: http://www.fosterinstitute.com/blog/update-your-mac.html

Windows updates: http://www.fosterinstitute.com/blog/update-your-pc.html

Application updates: http://www.fosterinstitute.com/blog/useful-utility.html

As inexpensive as monitors are these days, consider treating yourself and your most productive employees to dual monitor systems. Even if you just try a few users first for a trial, you may find why many organizations swear they will never go back to single monitors for their users again.

Of course, the best way is to have a qualified IT security professional do this for you. Still, if you want to do it yourself, here is an answer:

For this step especially, having the help of a qualified IT professional is important. If you choose to do it on your own, realizing that this isn’t as secure as totally destroying all the data on the hard drive it provides some good security and is easier to accomplish on your own, I suggest these steps:

a) Use Windows Explorer to delete all your files that you know of from the computer. This really doesn’t delete the files from someone who is very interested in getting your data, but it helps. Optionally, you can go ahead and use SDelete as described in step c to delete the files and/or overwrite them with several passes to scour them from the drive (see below).

b) Run the “Reset the computer to factory conditions” CD that originally came with your laptop. This installs the operating system to “factory new” conditions for the person you are giving the laptop to.

c) Go to www.sysinternals.com (you’ll be redirected to a Microsoft page) and download the file utility called SDelete. Unzip the file and then review the license terms. Then run SDelete from a DOS prompt using the -z parameter to overwrite any unused space to destroy the data that is “erased” but not erased. You can choose the number of passes based on how much time you have. The first pass is crucial and that will run fastest. So, the command line entry at the C:\>  prompt is:

SDelete -z

If you want more passes, and are willing to wait, you can use

SDelete -p 5 -z

Substitute a different number besides 5 if you want a different number of passes. Remember that the files the “new installation of Windows” only overwrote with one pass as SDelete with the -z parameter is only overwriting free space. If you have more than one partition, you’ll want to be sure they are all cleaned.

d) Do your friend a favor if you want to and go to www.Microsoft.com and choose “security and updates” and run “Microsoft Update” in “Express” Mode until there are no more patches.

1) If you didn’t buy XP with the laptop, you may want to go buy a copy and install XP Pro instead of Vista but you may have some drive issues to deal with (or not). Again, an IT professional could do this part for you if you want. If you are doing “normal” tasks such as typing letters, browsing the Internet, and exchanging e-mail, you may be fine with Vista. If you are going to use your computer heavily for diverse tasks or use a lot of peripherals, many people have found staying with XP Professional is a better choice for now until Vista is more widely adopted and supported.

2) The executive writes, “I am considering Norton 360 for both security and “tune up” tools. Your thoughts?”

If you are going to connect to the office, let the IT department give you a client to the corporate anti-virus package. If the machine is strictly for your own personal use, one good choice is Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 for use on up to 3 PCs http://www.kaspersky.com/

Get the Internet Security Suite – not just anti-virus. I suggest going to buy the boxed version in the store rather than downloading the program. This is for security and also for ease of installation if you ever need to install again. Be sure to choose “update” before installing when prompted during the installation process since the CD will be older than the current version.

If you want to, during the installation turn off the anti-spam and the parental controls unless you need them.

You may need to edit settings for specific programs you “know are ok” if the firewall marks them as suspicious and restricts their activity. Just make sure you don’t accidentally enable a “bad” program to damage your computer.

Schedule automatic full system scans daily – or at least weekly. They can happen during the night if you don’t want the scan to slow your computer down.

Keep an eye on the automatic updates to be sure they are being applied as soon as they are released.

3) The executive writes, “Backup…I plan to continue using Norton Ghost (at your suggestion) with a Maxtor hard drive…still a good choice?”

Yes, Ghost is great. Image backup is the “way to go” for primary backups. Be sure to apply the updates regularly. There are other programs besides Ghost that work well such as True Image from www.acronis.com and ShadowProtect Desktop.

As with any backup software, it is important to enable encryption of the media. That way, if anyone ever gets your backup drive, they won’t be able to read any of the private information without your password.

After installing your image backup software on your new computer, always perform a backup and restore. This is “less dangerous to test” on a new computer since you do not have lots of your important data on the machine yet.

I like the “Lights out Restore” option that works with many computers so you don’t need the Ghost CD to boot if your computer crashes. Be sure to test Lights Out Restore before you actually need it since this feature does not always work with every computer.

You may have at least 2 backup drives and alternate using them each time you backup.

Additionally, you may also choose to augment Ghost with an online service such as www.sosonlinebackup.com in case you lose your laptop and your backup drives.

4) Lastly, he asks, “I need to erase my old hard drive before I give my old PC to a friend. Best way to do this?”

This is such a big answer, I’m saving it for next week’s blog. Stay tuned! Here are some more important tips:

5) I also strongly encourage you to enable the full disk encryption on the laptop – hopefully it comes with that capability – Most computers do these days. You may want the help of a qualified IT professional to help you configure this option.

6) Regularly go to www.Microsoft.com and choose “security and updates” and run “Microsoft Update” in “Express” Mode until there are no more patches.

Microsoft normally releases patches on the second Tuesday of every month – and sometimes during the middle of the month. Note that the “automatic updates” setting is not always reliable – so checking manually is a good idea.

Always have a good image backup before installing patches You always have a good backup anyway – right?

7) Computer manufacturers offer a way to get updates to their utilities and drivers too. The main computer manufacturer patches to get are the ones that say they are a “critical security update.”

Be sure to make backups before installing the patches – I’ve had manufacturer patches mess up my computer but was always able to restore back to where I was before.

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