5 Tips to keep your computer safe

5 Tips to keep your computer safe

Following these 5 tips to keep your computer safe will go a long way. Although they may be inconvenient at times, it is certainly better than putting your computer at risk to being compromised. Getting your computer compromised by something like Ransomware will be extremely costly.

1. Install security software (aka Antivirus)
This is a very simple way to keep your computer safe. You just got to install the software and usually no other configurations are needed. A good free one is avast which you can get here

2. Avoid torrents or cracked software
Torrents have legitimate uses but are generally used for downloading of pirated contents. Pirated or cracked content software are very risky because there is a great motivation for them to infect the files – if they release the pirated or cracked content for free, they are essentially wasting their efforts cracking that software, which by the way is very very tough to do.

3. Secure software settings
Virus and malware can come through exploits found in various software. For example, there have been past cases of users gerting compromised through microsoft word, adobe flash player, and so on

4. Install security patches or updates
Don’t brush off that notification on the bottom right corner of your screen. It may be an important patch or update. Alternatively, click the flag icon bottom right corner of your taskbar and you will see the critical events at the moment.

5. Backups
Lastly, while keeping your computer safe is important and should be your priority, there is no guarantee it will be compromised one day. It is therefore vital that you make regular backups of whatever documents you deem critical. A 1TB external hard drive goes for less than a $60 these days so it is definitely worth it. Alternatively, use cloud storage solutions such as google drive. Better yet, use both.