Maintaining Your Computer

The most common computer problems you may encounter living in the Kimberley environment are caused by lightning, power surges, dust, moisture, insects and the extreme temperatures throughout the wet season. We recommend having a PC check-up and clean at least once a year, just as you would get your car serviced, however there are a number of simple things you can do to ensure your PC or Notebook is running smoothly and trouble free.

Backing up your important data to CD, DVD, External hard drive, USB flash drive or your choice of media is thoroughly recommended. The hard drive in your computer which stores all of your information is a moving part and will eventually fail. Decreasing the life of your hard drive are shock, dust, humidity, power spikes and lack of ventilation (overheating).

Keeping your computer virus, trojan and spyware free is important as soon as your computer is connected to the internet. Some simple precautions to improve security are as follows..

• Keep Microsoft Windows up to date. You can download updates at www.microsoft.com
• Install and keep up to date a trusted virus software. We recommend and use Symantec's Norton Antivirus. More information on Symantec's range of products are available at  www.symantec.com. If you do receive a virus via email that your antivirus software detects, look up the virus name and see if there are any other steps you have to do to completely remove the virus. Most antivirus software is good at identifying the virus but sometimes cannot remove the virus properly without user intervention
• Install a software firewall. Firewall software prevents "hackers" from the internet obtaining information from your computer. Windows XP has a firewall built in and has recently been greatly improved with Service Pack 2, however Norton Internet Security includes a much more effective and customizable firewall and is also available at www.symantec.com
• Install, regularly update and run spyware removal software such as Ad-aware and Spybot. Removal software can be found from sites such as www.download.com. Spyware can cause your system to run slow, send information from your computer to other people and make advertisements pop up on your screen.
• Try not to open any unrecognizable emails or visit web pages which you think may contain spyware.
• Always be sure you read the finer details about any software you install on your computer as it may contain spyware or other unwanted software. Downloading and installing pirated and illegal software more often than not contains trojans and bugs which are likely to cause more problems than its worth. We thoroughly recommend  genuine software for your own peace of mind.
• Please find some useful tools in the Eclipse Toolkit directory on your hard drive located in the Eclipse Toolkit. There are some very useful freeware and shareware programs to assist in trouble free computing which have been hand picked by our technicians. You can access the Toolkit at any time either through this interface, or by navigating to the "EclipseToolkit" folder in your C:\ drive.