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After Care
click here for a list of many many helpful tips, tricks and tutorials... Once you get your computer home, there are a few things you should do. Make sure you can
get online. If you can do all of these things, then you have most likely connected everything correctly. If you can't, turn everything off. (EVERYTHING!) and also unplug any cable modems or routers you may have. let them all sit for a minute or two while you double check your all of your connections. The turn things on again in this order: Plug in your cable
modem or DSL modem. Wait 1 minute. If your computer was reloaded from scratch while it was in our shop, you may need to re-install some software for your printer or other devices, as well as any programs you didn't bring in for us to install. If you are having trouble getting things back up and running, give us a call. We may be able to help over the phone or schedule a follow up onsite at a reduced rate to get you going again. Only You Can Prevent Spyware, Viruses, and Adware! That's right. We put some tools on your computer to help you, but they only help if you remember a few simple rules.
When your computer left our shop we made sure you had up to date virus protection as well as made sure all security settings were properly set in the Windows Firewall. We also installed all available Windows updates. Last but not least, we installed an alternate web browser called Firefox. Why is Firefox a better choice than Internet Explorer? One of the main reasons is it blocks most popups, the source for almost all of the adware on a computer. It also doesn’t have as many security holes as Internet Explorer. Now there are certain web sites that don’t work with anything but IE, like Windows Update for example, so let me assure you that by switching web browsers, you can still use IE when you need to, what I am saying is use it for only what you have to use it for and browse with something else the rest of the time. For an extremely detailed list of all known browsers and the history behind them, go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers There are many commercial products available that claim to block spyware or clean it, some free and some sold for money, but in general they don’t work very well and there are none at the moment that we recommend all by itself. Why? Because YOU let spyware on your system! Mostly by mistake, or they trick you by sneaking it on your computer when you download free programs. Also there are also many PopUp ad’s that claim you have spyware, when in reality you don’t. In many cases, these programs, and others you buy online that claim to clean your computer, actually install more spyware! Whenever you click on a popup, or install a “free” game, install a file sharing program or download a poker playing game or “free” toolbar, in most cases you are giving them permission to use your computer as a billboard. Read the licensing agreement, if you can, and you will see what I mean. No one can protect you from yourself. But by using a different browser, such as Firefox, you block most of the offers that might trick you into letting adware, spyware or any other ware onto your system. To be fair, some of these programs do a good job of keeping spyware and adware off your system, or at least notifying you of changes made to certain settings, once it is already clean. But they do a terrible job of cleaning. Why? Because spyware and adware programmers are getting very smart. They know what people use to clean spyware and they know how these cleaning and removal programs work! And they build features into their software that fool these programs, or disable them. (See part 2. The methods the techs use to clean spyware) Plus there are many different kinds of spyware and adware. When you clean your house, you don’t use hand soap, do you? No, you use different kinds of soap and different kinds of tools depending on whether you are cleaning dirt, dust or grease carpet or hardwood, your car or your cat. At Chipheds, we clean thousands of virus, spyware and adware files every day! What do we use? If there was a product out there that did it all, you would think we would have used it by now. But the truth is we use up to 4 software utilities (all available for free), plus we go in manually and delete files, registry entries and startup files that still get missed! Then we let the customer know where the malware came from so they can avoid re-infection. But if you use the above tips, you will eliminate the need to clean malware by avoiding it in the first place!
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