LAPTOP SECURITY-HOW TO PROTECT YOUR COMPUTER

Securing your computer and the information that are contained are of great importance. Most of us store official document on their laptop while some others store non-official documents in their laptop, whatever case it might be you will agree with me that to secure our laptops is of great importance or even our desktop computer.
 The first thing to do to ensure that your laptop is secure is to have a good antivirus and antispyware installed on your laptop and always ensure that it is always up to-date. While installing the antivirus set it in such a way that it will automatically scan your computer and that it will automatically update itself when you are on the internet. Make sure that your computer is scanned at least thrice a week if not daily.
 External drives: - please do not put every external drive for example flash drive that you see on your laptop, whether that of your friends or whomever that owns it, but if it is compulsory that you put the flash drive in your laptop please scan it before you use it on your laptop to ensure that there are no viruses or worms. For your information flash drives are very good carriers of virus and worms, so avoid the use of different flash drives on your laptop.
 Wireless network:- if you use wireless network at home or office try as much as possible to ensure that you secure the connection by encrypting it. When encrypting your wireless network do not use 64-WEP encryption but rather use 128-WEP to encrypt your wireless connection. This will make it difficult for intruders to hack into your wireless network.
 Cookies:- when you visit a website, cookies of the website you visit are left in your browser, by the next time your are visiting the website they will be able to access your computer through the internet, so try to remove all necessary cookies from your computer, so as to prevent unauthorized access to your laptop.
 Spam messages:- do not open spam messages sent to your email address due to these message carry viruses and worms that can affect your laptop and don’t ever try to reply spam or scam messages sent to you because you will be confirming your email address for the spammers.
 Do not reply most messages sent to email address claiming to be yahoo support centre or Google support centre telling you to click on links that they put on the messages, that if you do not do so that your email address will be close, these messages are from people trying to get your password for your email address, so be warned.
 Encrypt your document with password so that people do not have access to them when they log on to your laptop, though this can be done in different ways but with Microsoft word 2007 it can be achieved easily.
 Do you know that somebody can have access to your to your administrator account just by logging on to Guest or any other account on your system? Well believe it or not this very much true, to avoid people access your private files from other accounts hide your folders and they will not be able to see your folders or files.