Case – 13 Pounds – $80

Everything needs to start with a frame. Something that will hold everything that is to come. Something that is sturdy, and does what it is made to do. In this case we are looking for something that is, essentially, geared towards lanning. Thermaltake has been creating excellent products for years, and this is one of those excellent products. Thermaltake’s LANBOX Lite is perfect to show off to your friends, and also perfect for the traveling PC gamer. From Thermaltake, a company that has remarkable cooling products, you can only imagine that amount of vents and fans that are correctly placed to keep your precious hardware cool and keep you above the rest of the pack when it comes to performance. Sporting a cool side window and some sleek blue LED fans, your friends will rival you and your rig, no doubt about it.

Power Supply – 4 Pounds – $90

Powering the beast we are about to create will be a Corsair CMPSU-650TX, definitely perfect for our build. The 650watt output is great to power all of the fans for cooling, and of course all of the processing power and graphical power needed to jump ahead of the competition. Also we have all the power on one 12V rail which will keep it from ending with an early demise. With it’s nice color scheme of black and gold, it will look like it belonged inside our Thermaltake LANBOX, and have more than enough power to shred the competition.

Motherboard – 1 Pounds – $120

This motherboard is rated quite highly among the microATX form factor motherboards, and it is obvious to see why. This board takes full advantage of the new Core i7 and i5 processors from Intel, and because of that they will keep you multitasking like never before. Play multiple games at the same time if you want! Some gamers call that hotboxing, I call that purely extreme. With this motherboard you can have a maximum of 16GB of memory installed, not like that would really be necessary for our type of build, but it certainly is nice knowing you have the room to upgrade. With a whopping 10, yes TEN, USB 2.0 ports in the back of this beast, you will always have room for all of your gadgets to hook up at your LAN station. You have as many hoola-girls you want, as long as you save room for your favorite mouse and keyboard, of course!

Processor – Really Light – $195

This is probably the lightest part of our lightweight lanning beast, and also the most expensive. You might think that with a gaming computer the videocard is going to be the most expensive, but to get the most out of your computer you don’t want it to bottleneck at the processor. New games are coming out with multiprocessor capabilities, which means that it will take full advantage of your brand new processor. The Intel Core i5-750 running at 2.66Ghz is remarkable, quad core meaning you have more processing power than you can handle. You will be able to quickly switch your computers focus and of course, this is just another one of those components that will put you ahead of your friends, and probably even further ahead of your enemies.

Video Card – 2 Pounds – $135

This is the part you have been waiting for, I am sure. The BFG Tech GeForce 9800GTX+ video card is all the power you will need. Lot’s of guides will tell you to go all out and spend more money then you will need to, but this is supposed to be a lanning machine! If you need more power than this I suggest you take a step back and stay at home. This puppy will do just what you need, with high clock rates and great overall power, you need not worry about framerate lag with this bad boy. You will be able to run almost all of your games at high resolution and max your settings out. What more do you need? This will keep you up to date for quite some time, and you aren’t spending $300-$500, making upgrades possible without emptying your pockets fully.

Memory – Really Light – $105

G.SKILL has been an up and comer for quite some time now, which is great. I love seeing companies like this come up and break forward to become one of the top memory companies around. This one doesn’t change anything, with two 2GB modules, you have a total of 4gb of memory to again, keep you from bottle necking and keep your computer from running out of power. Since your motherboard has a maximum of 16GB of memory you could always buy two of these packs, netting you a total of 8GB of memory for only around $200. And I mean, with a description attention-getter like this, why wouldn’t you want this for a LAN box? Pwn the competition and frag your enemies with fast DDR3 1600 SDRAM at a price point that lets you upgrade on a budget.

Hard Drive – 1 Pound – $160

This was a really tough decision for me, not because of the part itself, but because of the cost to space available ratio. I suppose that we aren’t really trying to keep our costs extremely low in this post, but I always like to try to work on a budget. My goal for this bad boy was to stick under a grand, and so far I am pretty sure we are under that.

We have here a 150GB hard drive. Yep, only 150GB. Why so low? Because we are going for speed here. This is a 10,000RPM hard drive from Western Digital, aptly named the VelociRaptor. The 10,000RPM is 25% faster than the standard harddrive, which makes the cost of this drive go up as high as it is for the amount of space capable. This speed, for instance, will make your game load 25% faster than your friends game if he has the exact same parts besides the hard drive, and with all the parts we have picked out so far you will be guaranteed to finish first 100% percent of the time, and kick your friends butts without a doubt.

If, however, you need some more space for other things like music or videos, then you could always spend a few more dollars, for another Western Digital drive, such as the Caviar Blue, which will give you 640GB more space for only $70.

DVD Drive – 1 Pounds – $26

LITE-ON is great, and a DVD drive may seem like any other DVD drive, but sometimes you just need to know about the manufacturer before you purchase, and LITE-ON is one of those where you just know. This drive will read any disc, and play any disc, with some speed behind it. It also burns discs if you need to, but all we would really need this for is to install our games and maybe to throw in a CD once in a while. This will get the job done for only $26.

Summary – 22 Pounds – $900

Twenty-two pounds. All of this power and under than 30 pounds? I’d say that is worth it! Topping at $890, plus a hundred or so depending if you want to beef up your memory, I would say that having a 2.66Ghz Quad core with 4gigs of ram and a kickass video card to boot will teach your friends and enemies a lesson! And of course you will have a sleek and stylish case from Thermaltake to let them know that you really mean business. This installation will also be incredibly easy due to the fact that inside the case, everything is done with cages and thumb screws. You might not even need to own a screwdriver to get this one fully put together! I did not include prices for the operating system, or games, but for a good copy of Windows 7 Home Premium from NewEgg you will still barely be breaking the $1,100 mark. For this kind of cash, if you are a true gamer and your computer keeps freezing up and crashing in the midst of every important, explosive battle it’s worth it.

It’s time to upgrade folks, you gonna do it?

UPDATE: I have asked NewEgg for the opportunity to have a full build log with the above hardware. Hopefully I will be able to show you guys exactly what everything does and give you bench marks and actually weigh it when it is all put together! Just waiting for a response from them, can’t wait!

This is what my little home setup looks like, from the top down is my Comcast Cable Modem, my Linksys Router, and my Comcast Telephony Modem. I need the two modems from Comcast due to the fact that the one on the top is DOCSIS 3.0 capable, and the one on the bottom is older and deoesnt have the speed o the new one.

One of the first reasons I can think of as to why your internet would seem to randomly stop working is because your modem has lost connection to the router, for various reasons. It could be because the router is older and has simply lost connection due to age, or maybe because there is no Keep alive feature enabled. There also might be some more underlying problems that are hard to troubleshoot, but let’s just say it lost it’s connection. Generally speaking.

The first thing you should do is restart your modem. It might be tough because sometimes your modem might have a battery backup or some way of staying on when the power is out. A lot of times there is a little hole in the back that may or may not be labeled Reset. It is normally quite simple to do, just find a nail or a pen or something like that and hold in the reset button for ten to fifteen seconds. All of the lights on the front of the modem will flash on and off for a minute or so, but that is totally normal so don’t worry!

Afterwords, check your email! If it is working, then you can stop right here. If you still don’t have your email (or any internet, for that matter) then you need to move on to your router.

Back of my setup, sorry about the blurriness!

This is the back of my setup, same thing as before. Sorry about the blurriness, I’m not a professional photographer thats for sure. If you are moving on to the router now, you want to pull out the black power adapter that will be on either the farthest left or the farthest right side of the router. Again lets go for the ten to fifteen second rule, just leave it out for a bit and let it cool its jets. Then just plug it back in and let it start up. It has to start up kind of like a computer does, but there is no power button it just turns itself on automatically.

After that, hopefully everything is working. It should be working just as normal and you should be reconnected to the internet like it normally is when it is in good working quality.

The last final thing to try, is just to make sure it isn’t in Standby mode. Lately some modem manufacturers have been installing something called Standby Mode which is, at least to me, 100% useless. I suppose it is made to save power, or maybe quickly cut you off from the internet if you did something bad and don’t want to be traced. But it seems that most of the time it is the darn Standby button that just makes people want to call me! Often it is something as silly as one of the kids accidentally pushed it, or they say it was an accident, who knows! Just push that button, give it a few seconds, and try your luck online. If it STILL doesn’t work, call your local computer guru to get this solved because it obviously isn’t anything hardware related, so you might have a virus or some spyware stopping you from getting in.

There's a computer in one of these doors!

Computer’s get hot, really hot. You always need to be thinking about that when it comes to placement of your computer inside a desk, under a desk, or on top of a desk. Think about what you are placing your computer next to when you place it, and if you are feeling like you might need some change in your life and you are going to be moving your desk around, you need to think about your computer’s lifespan.

Just as much as cable ties will clean up the area behind your computer that you will never actually see, making your computer visible all the time will help out it’s lifetime a whole lot. This may be a rather confusing sentence if you don’t understand the preface behind it, what I am trying to say is that a computer needs some air to breathe, and every day I run into a computer that is stashed, almost pushed aside into a nice wooden desk, with absolutely no fresh air getting to it!

It’s sad, really. Computer engineers spend a lot of time working on a computer’s looks as well as how well a computer actually runs. I guess that they might not be considered “engineers” per se, but more or less artists. Often times computer cases are displayed as artwork, and several of them are actually displayed to be only as artwork, and not even as a functional computer. So get your computer out of the closet and let it take in a deep breath of fresh air.

I keep saying give it some fresh air because a few times this past month I have ran into computers that are literally melting their parts inside due to the amount of heat that is building up inside of them. Now a days, most computers come built in with a temperature monitor that you might not even know about. Your computer’s temperature is kind of like your bodies internal temperature, but it can get a little bit hotter than what you run at. Computer’s should rarely, if ever run over 150 degrees farenheit. That is pushing it’s limits, and by “computers” I mean the processor of the computer. From time to time I find my computer’s video card rising higher than that, but that is only if I am playing a very graphic intensive video game.

I am sure you are asking your computer “When is he going to tell us how to see our computer’s temperature?”, here’s the time. There is a great application by a company that I have actually spoke about in the past, Piriform. This application is called Speccy, and it basically shows all of your computers internals.. and their temperatures, too! It is very simple, a quick install, and it lays out what everything is and what temperature everything is as well. Sadly the temperatures are in Celsius, but that shouldn’t be much of a problem with a swift search of Google. Speccy is a lightweight program from a great company, and if you are curious about your systems temperatures then you should definitely give it a try.

If you think you’re computer is running too hot, then you should probably shut it down, take all of the plugs out of the back of it, and maybe move it out into the open air. A lot of times people use a home made refrigerator modifcation to try to get their computer a little bit cooler, or even make a computer case entirely out of fans, maybe you could try the same thing?

Give it a shot, let me know if you did.

A client of mine recently purchased some software from a company named “iolo“, which up until just a few days ago I really havnt heard of at all! The client told me that if I was so inclined I could use that software, knowing already that I had my own tools of the trade that I lie to use on regular occasions. The client said go ahead and use it, I havn’t had a chance to yet since I just bought it.. etc etc.

I used it.

I used it last in the laundry list of tools I use to scan for spyware, viruses, rootkits, bad hard drive sectors, all of that stuff and more. You’ll never guess what came up when I used the System Mechanic.. it found MORE things wrong! It actually fixed a hard drive problem that I wasn’t quite sure about, and I am not scared to say that I wasn’t sure about something in a computer, I am honest, so shoot me.

This software from iolo was purchased from Best Buy for $50, and I can honestly say that if I had known the software worked as well as it did, I might have tried it first. Granted I did use it last and it didn’t find all too much wrong, it seemed relatively easy and extremely straight forward to use.

I am not saying that this software is the cure all for PC problems, but it seems to really actually know what it is doing! So I guess in the end, free, open-sourced software doesnt always reign supreme, and now that I know this I have my mind open to other suggestions.

The one drawback I noticed with iolo, is that it has an anual fee, which I hate because even though it is only about $20, if you get 5 of those $20 deals that makes it $100.. then those keep adding up and soon you are spending a fortune a year! It’s not that big of a problem or anything, just something you should always watch out for when purchasing software, check to see how much it will REALLY cost you, not how much it will cost you at the time of purchase, think further into the future.

Do you have any tool suggestions that will completely clean up a computer, maybe one like System Mechanic from iolo? Maybe one that is free and like iolo’s software? Let me and every one else in the world know in the comments box! Maybe you have that secret that everybody wants to know.. well share!

Backing up your computer can be a relatively simple task if you have the right software and the right media to back your data up on to. A few years back the suggested media of choice was a DVD, or even a DL-DVD. That was a few years back though, now a days we have much better replacements for it. Replacements such as thumb drives that can hold sometimes up to 32GB of data, or now we have tiny tiny external hard drives that connect to your computer simply with a USB connector. The hard drives can reach a terrabyte or two without a problem. Just check out your local retail store like TigerDirect or Fry’s Electronics.. or even Best Buy.. for a solution that is perfect for you.

A lot of times these type of hard drives come with an automatic built in backup utility, and lot of times these automatic backup utilities work wonderfully. But what if your external hard drive didn’t come with one? Well I have a great solution that I use from time to time on computer’s that I am worried I wont be able to get back to a stable running condition, such as a computer infected by the Virut.ce virus.

Fab’s AutoBackup

Fab’s AutoBackup is, quite simply, easy. It finds the type of files that you have on your computer, it even detects what version of your operating you are running, such as Windows XP or Windows Vista, and then it tells you (pretty much) which files you should backup. You can chose to backup your whole hard drive, your My Documents folder, or just about everything in between. It isn’t free, sadly, but at less than $8 (it’s 4.9EURO), it’s definitely worth the purchase if you are in the market for backup utilities. It get’s the job done and doesn’t take too long to do it.

I feel like I am running in circles with some people, they just don’t get the hint that every single day they are sending out malicious software that is encased in some sort of video or picture file. I tell them all the time and warn them that they are doing it, but of course they say “No way! It worked totally fine for me!” Of course it did, that’s exactly what it was meant to do, work totally fine and make you not even notice that you are infected by something that will probably get your identity stolen in the next few weeks.

It’s ironic when that person then calls me up a few days after I warn them, wondering what all these pop ups are doing all over their computer, why there are random advertisements for porn on their desktops that their children and wives are asking questions about, and what in the world “MyWay Web Search” is, and why it keeps showing up in their Add/Remove Programs without them ever adding the program.

These type of emails are very annoying, especially when the user sending them is absolutely sure that it doesn’t have any sort of malicious software attached to it. I suggest you take matters into your own hands and get some decent software that can track these type of things, because you probably shouldn’t trust the person that is sending them to you, unless you know for sure that the person who is sending you these files isn’t a complete moron.. ahem.

The worst kind of spam, is the kind you get from people who have no idea that they are sending it, and that they have a virus or some sort of spyware that they got from someone else who sent them a totally rare video of some sort of extremely surprised prairie dog in a Windows Media format. The type of spam that you get that wants you to buy something from Korea because it’s only about 56,179 Korean Won. Which is apparently a great deal.. or something.

Those type of links are just a scam, they are worse than spam because you really don’t know what you are getting, and for the most part it is probably going to be something that isn’t going to be worth the $50 you just paid for it, it will probably fall apart or maybe even burn your house down.

The moral of this story is that you really have to keep your friends close to you and make sure they know what is going on with their computer. If they don’t believe you, then you should probably send them an email saying “Look Fred, read this blog post it’s really important,” then you need to link them here. They will then realize that “Oh.. crap.. I’m ‘that guy’”. So you need to try to keep away from the emails from the friends that have those awesome videos that everyone has already seen, because really.. who cares about a prairie dog anyways?

Thankfully it really isn’t all that difficult to figure out which kind of memory you need. Throughout this short stub of an article I am going to be interchanging the terms RAM and memory, just letting you know before you get too confused. Pardon that interruption, I suppose I am just typing out my thoughts and this is just how my thought process tends to flow.

Now let me digress, figuring out what kind of ram that you need isn’t difficult at all! It only takes a few quick on spot on tips that get you pointed in the right direction. There are only 3 real things that you need to know, and all of the information can be found somewhere in your documentation for your motherboard, or you can just Google your motherboard’s name, and you will get the quickest response to what you desire, answers.

Googling a motherboard, for instance “M2NPV-VM”, which is an older Asus motherboard, will bring up a laundry list of items ranging from pricing to why someone’s particular motherboard is broken, to overclocking, to what you really want, specifications.

The spec’s are usually right on the first page of Google, so just pick one of the first few links and try to find out what memory is supported. Numbers that you want to look for can included any of these: DDR, DDR2, 800mhz, 433mhz,  PC4200, PC6000, and numerous other combinations of those numbers and letters.

DDR stands for ‘Double Data Rate’, most memory you buy now-a-days will be DDR2 or DDR3, DDR3 being the newest option to you. What DDR basically allows you to do is make you put in two sticks of memory that will act essentially at the same time, which creates much higher output. The new DDR3 memory is phenomenal, and will take place of DDR and DDR2 all together at some point in the near future, just like DDR2 wiped out the original DDR.

To me, that seemed like one huge run on sentence, wow.

The ‘mhz’ portion of the numbers is the speed that the memory runs at, the higher the number, the faster, more expensive the memory.

Lastly is the PC2-4200, PC2-6400, and similar. This number actually signifies the “Peak transfer rate”. The PTR is read in megabytes, so PC2-4200 runs 4200MBs per second, of data. Now that might seem like a pretty hefty load of data, but the 4200 is actually on the lower end of speed, and now DDR3 can actually run 12,800MBs per second, thats just about twelve and a half gigabytes per second! If you need some more information on any of these types of memory, Wikipedia has fantastic articles about them.

Anyways, once you find out the type of memory that your motherboard you need to find that type of memory at a retail store like TigerDirect or Fry’s Electronics, or even an online marketplace for computer related goods like NewEgg. All of those are great places and will help you find exactly what you need to get your computer running as well as it can.

Of course, if you want a memory upgrade just give me a call! Memory upgrades take a short amount of time and I will never try to oversell you on a certain type! Give me a call at (630)363-1738 and, if you are in the Naperville area, I can install and bring your memory to your door! Just let me know what you need it for and we can figure it out without any problem what so ever!

If you are, then you should probably stick around because you might not actually be the only one using your wireless network. A long time ago, before I decided to actually learn how a router worked and what exactly it was, my wireless network was 100% open. Anyone could join on and view what files I was sharing, anyone could use my internet and steal all of my bandwidth, but I never even thought twice about it, until it happened.

One fine faithful day I woke up to see random files of my neighbors in my My Pictures folder! Now.. that was kind of spooky because that means they got confused and accidentally put their pictures onto my computer. I don’t know what they were doing in there in the first place, but I knew that I didn’t want them in there ever again. This is when I began learning how to secure a network as tight as Fort Knox, well, at least kind of.

Lot’s of times third party firewalls like Comodo like to know what to allow and what to block when you first start up the software. That’s great and all, but when you chose “Allow Home Network” or whatever the case may be, if someone happens to drive by your apartment and notice your connection unsecured, then you are technically allowing that random person into your computer!

The step that I found to be the absolute best is “MAC Address Filtering”. A MAC address is the physical address of your computers network card. Every single device that has the possibility of connecting to the internet has a MAC address. Everything from a laptop, to an iPhone, to a Nintendo DSi. You can think of a MAC address as a fingerprint that is unique to your computer.

Most routers come with the option to allow only a specified list of MAC addresses, and that’s a good thing. Consult your routers user manual, or maybe look it up online if that is easier for you. By default this feature is disabled, because it takes a few extra steps in order to actually get it working correctly, and every time a new ‘trusted’ user comes to your home you need to add their MAC address to the list of allowed clients.

For most devices it is pretty easy, just navigate to the “About” section of the device (or similar) and find something that has to do with Network Connections. The MAC address can also sometimes be called a “Physical” address, or even a “hardware” address; it all really depends on what the developer of the product described it as.

On a PC it might seem difficult to find, but really it only takes a few steps:

1. Open the Start Menu
2. Click on ‘Run..’
3. In the dialog box, type ‘cmd’
4. A black box will pop up, in this box type ‘ipconfig /all’

After you get those quick steps out of the way, look for your network adapter, then right underneath it’s description it will say “Phsyical Address”. All of those numbers and letters jumbled up is your MAC address, and this is what you would put into the MAC filtering section of your wireless router. In the MAC filtering section of your router, you are going to want to type it out without any dashes or colons unless the router specifys that you have to, so this would work just fine: 0018F3C3A5B9. Or, you can type 00:18:F3:C3:A5:B9.

After you enabled this, you can enable WPA security keys but at this point it might seem trivial to do so, if you already have it enabled that’s fine, you can leave it enabled if you want, but you will always know that you have the added security of a pseudo-fingerprint from your device or computer.

So what about you? I know for a fact I have this, and I have almost 30 devices in my list of allowed.. how many do YOU have? Or even, how many WOULD you have?

It’s not everyday you find yourself having an extra computer and not knowing what to do with it, so since you have that opportunity you should probably grab it by the horns and make it worthwhile, there is a whole bunch of things you can do, and if you really want you can make it a learning experience and take the computer apart and try to put it back together again. If you don’t want to actually get into all that mess, then maybe do something like a full reformat, those are nice, and maybe then you wont even need that new computer anymore because you will realize that your old one is juts like brand new!

Lot’s of folks ask me what a reformat is, well if you think of it this way it is easy to understand, it’s basically like putting your entire computer into it’s own Recycle Bin, and then emptying the trash. Emptying your entire computer is the ultimate form of spring cleaning, it will make the computer run literally like it did when it was brand new, at least if there were no damages to the internals of the computer. Lot’s of times it is the final solution to a really bad virus but I try to stay far away from this kind of solution because you will be losing all of your pictures and documents and applications that are installed on the computers hard drive.

Sometime’s that data can be restored, just recently I recovered nearly one-thousand photos from a recently reformatted hard drive. Some companies can charge an awful lot for this type of service, but I stuck with my hourly rate and just worked it out as best as I could, the client was extremely happy. He would have lost all of his pictures that he had taken since 2007, and that included weddings, pictures of their new home, babies being born, all sorts of things.

Learning how to reformat a computer is relatively easy, and tutorials for such a thing can be found all over the internet. Microsoft has a guide in their knowledge base on How to partition and format a hard disk by using Windows XP Setup program, and that has all of the steps that you will need to get that done.

After words, you have a blank slate! The computer is a little dated, and you have your new Dell to work on so why not just make this old Dell something a little more useful than a paper weight or a book end? Best bet would be make it an external hard drive that is on your network, it would be the best way to store all of your photos and videos and all sorts of data. This is the type of thing that many companies do instead of having their users documents sit on their own computer, this is to cut down on liability and also increases the chance of data being saved if something bad were to happen, but that’s another story all together.

Making your computer a networked external pseudo-hard drive isn’t all that difficult. Most users can do it rather simply by dragging their networked folder into My Computer, and setting up something called a “Mapped Network Drive” these type of drives are basically a hard drive that is accessible by any computer on the network, and the best to use if you want to put photos and documents and other files on to a different computer in your network. Making a mapped network hard drive is also a very decent form of backing up your data, if you want to format your new computer for whatever reason you can put all of the files you want to save onto this new external hard drive, so then computer geeks like myself wont have to come in and recover all of your lost data!

There are several other things you can do with your old computer, so don’t throw it out just yet! Scavenge the internet, look for that special “tool” that you can use your older computer for, make it a small hobby so you have something to do in your free time, since it is your “old computer” you really don’t need to rush through this process, you have all the time in the world so just relax, have a soda, and find something new in your life, your old computer.

Do you want to learn how to do some other fun things with a computer? If you do let me know and maybe I will give you some ideas on how to get that accomplished!

A New Year’s resolution is a commitment that an individual makes to a project or the reforming of a habit, often a lifestyle change that is generally interpreted as advantageous. The name comes from the fact that these commitments normally go into effect on New Year’s Day. -Wikipedia

Now that I got the specific definition out of the way, let’s go with a few New Year’s resolutions for PC users, things that are computer related and things that don’t involve going to the gym, because who really wants to go to the gym anyways?

Security

Security on computers is rarely talked about anymore, everybody probably thinks that they are safe and sound and that they really don’t have anything to worry about behind their awesome router and awesome firewall, and their Windows 7. Sadly, that’s not always the truth and there are some people out in the world of the internet that will gladly destroy your entire life, for no reason. Please ignore the scare tactics, that’s not why I am writing this, and thankfully those type of things really don’t happen too often. It’s not a bad idea, however, to try to use some preventative medicine in these cases. There are several really great applications that you can use, but I will stick to the one’s that I know and love, I wont be telling you about random programs that I “think” are good, I’ll tell you about programs that I KNOW are good.

• AVG Free is a phenomenal Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware, since I installed Windows 7 back on that faithful day in October I have not had one problem what so ever with Spy ware, it has kept me clean as a whistle and probably even cleaner. I have not tried the full version of the software yet, but I can assume that if it’s any bit as good as the free version, it’s probably worth it. If you are paying hundreds of dollars a year for the competition, I suggest you save yourself a couple benjamins and go the free route, AVG Free.

• Another one of my favorites is Comodo Personal Firewall. Comodo has been fixing up their firewall all the time to make it one of the best on the market, and again, it’s 100% free, and just like AVG there is a paid version that offers more features, but for the regular home user it’s more than enough. At time’s it can get a bit naggy, for instance when installing some new software, or even when updating current software; but all that means is that it is doing it’s job, making sure that you know what you are doing. It also is a little bit annoying when you first install it, but at that time you are just training it, and usually after day two you barely even notice that it’s running, only when some crazy hacker tries to get into your computer to steal your Christmas pictures.

So there are two simple, free applications that can make the top of your new years resolution list and make your day easier in general. Both of these are worth the try, and if you need any help setting them up or making them work just let me know I’ll be glad to help!

Get rid of Adware, Spyware, and Malware

To further the protection of your Christmas photos, I suggest you get an up-to-date application to get rid of Adware, Spyware, and Malware. All are pretty much the same thing, they infect your computer and run in the background making your computer, and you, do pretty much everything you don’t want to do. My favorite would be Spybot Search & Destroy. It has been around for a long time now and I recommend it to everyone, it is always first on my list and has always gotten rid of what I wanted it to. It has a handy feature that will allow it to be the first application run on start-up, which will make sure it get’s rid of everything the first time, not the second or third.

Update Drivers

This is probably one of the simplest steps you can do, and honestly you might have been doing it all along without even noticing due to Windows Update being on top of things most of the time. Drivers are small “applications” that run in the background on start-up to make sure that certain things are working correctly, like the video card, processor (chip set), or even simpler things such as the mouse or keyboard. Usually the best place to check for updated drivers would be at the manufacturers website, such as Logitech for your mouse, keyboard, or even webcam drivers. Usually the first place to check for Video Card drivers would be at either nVidia’s website, or ATi’s (AMD) Website, if you aren’t sure which type of video card you have, you can check by going into your Control Panel, and looking under “Display”.

Clean out that dust

PLEASE don't let your computer look like this!!

If your computer looks anything like the one on the right, you should probably clean it. If your computer is still working and looks anything like the one on the right, I want to meet you. I would be a lot happier if you’re computer looked more like the one that was on the left, of course without the wires coming out of it and all that; at least it is clean. The best way to clean out the computer

This is hopefully what your computer kind of looks like!

I have found is taking it outside or in the garage or somewhere that you don’t mind blowing dust all over the place, because Compressed Air tends to do just that.. blow dust all over the place! If you don’t have any or don’t have any time to go and buy some, then you can GENTLY use a vacuum.. but I really do not like to give that sort of advice, mainly because if you break something off or something is loose, the vacuum might suck it up! If you are the LEAST BIT worried about doing any of this, just call me at (630) 363-1738 (if you are in the Naperville region of Illinois), I can help you out and get your computer all cleaned up without a problem. If you aren’t in that area, then I suggest finding your local computer guru and refer him to this article, he will know exactly what I am talking about.