I see Danny Burke at PC Magic once a month to fix any problems with my computer and help me get on with an Internet information products business.
Danny spends most of his week rescuing business owners who are having computer problems.
Last week I asked him for his advice to a business owner who was having computer problems. This is the advice he gave me:
Keep things simple on your computer. Don’t use it for games etc. Just use it for business. Danny discovers that half of his clients have caused their own problems with extras they’ve downloaded from the Internet, such as:
Additional toolbars for Internet Explorer.
Unnecessary utilities like internet speed boosters that rarely work.
Eye candy like wallpaper changers, animated cats, etc.
All most companies need is
A basic operating system
An email client
a web browser
an office suite
A firewall and antivirus system.
Do not download any old material from the Internet. The more stuff you put on your hard drive, the more likely you are to run into problems. Microsoft can’t verify the compatibility of all the different apps you can download.
Your first graphics package and another graphics package may fight over file extensions. Try to keep a pack. Similar problems occur with music and video players which shouldn’t be in a commercial system anyway unless you’re in that field.
Don’t upgrade unless you can name three good reasons to upgrade. After Danny gave me this advice, I rather guiltily attempted to upgrade my BT broadband service to the new BT Yahoo bundled broadband service.
Sure enough, as soon as I installed the new service, things started to go wrong. Things that had worked before (like links in emails) didn’t work anymore. I’m not blaming BT Yahoo. I had too much stuff on my computer! When I uninstalled the new service everything started working again.
Danny comments, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” When you upgrade, the file formats are sometimes different from previous versions of the software. This means you can’t go back to previous versions because they don’t recognize the new file format.
Don’t assume newer versions are better than older versions. All you have done is make the software producer rich!
Have a firewall and virus scanner and keep them up to date
Make a backup of your data. 90% of companies that experience a catastrophic data loss go bankrupt within two years. You must have two copies of important data and three copies of critical data stored in three different locations.
One copy must be in an off-site fire safe. This should be standard practice. Computers cannot be trusted. Sooner or later they will catch you! If you don’t back down, you’re an idiot and you deserve everything you get!
Today I received this message from the owner of an ezine:
Many of you feel me an announcement this week, that
I had saved it to my hard drive and I guess
than?
My computer crashed and I lost them all.
I have a backup computer, but no ads.
Please resubmit your ads so you can run them.
Friday’s edition.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
The ezine owner is obviously a good person, but he may lose customers who don’t have time to resubmit his ads. Nobody likes to repeat their efforts.
Perhaps your computer crashed because it had not only violated the backup rule, but also some of the other rules.
As a general principle, use your machine and do not play with it. Once it’s working, leave it alone!
Leave it alone!!!
