PC Tips Tweaks and Maintenance

Cleaning a PC is a necessary and simple process and should be done at least every three months.

NOTE: Before starting any physical cleaning procedures remove all power cables from your PC. Disconnect all cables from peripheral devices. Of course you will want to put them all back later so labeling them before removing them is a very good idea

Do NOT spray anything directly onto the case. Instead, moisten a lint-free towel with isopropyl alcohol (some will tell you Windex and other things are ok, I prefer to only use isopropyl alcohol when cleaning PC’s just in case it gets on something it should not), and wipe down the front and sides of the case, taking care to avoid moving parts such as CD/DVD ROM drawers, Floppy drive doors, etc.

NOTE: Before opening your PC make sure you are properly grounded. You should be able to purchase a wrist grounding strap for around $5.00.

To determine if your PC needs internal cleaning, look at the back of your PC; you should see a grated hole covering a fan. If this is clogged with dust, dirt, hair etc, your PC needs internal cleaning.

Buildup of dust and dirt inside your case can hinder system performance and even kill your PC. Fans and heat sinks are very prone to getting clogged with dust causing fans to slow or stop and air can’t pass through and keep things cool resulting in overheating and burn out.

Attention smokers: smoke makes dust sticky; which makes the PC more susceptible to soft shorts. Smoke also seems to accelerate the aging process of certain parts and definitely gums up your moving parts faster.

NOTE: DO NOT SPRAY COMPRESSED AIR INTO YOUR PC

You always want to blow dust and grime OUT of your PC. If you blow dust into the case, there is more dust piling up on your expensive internal components. Internal dust and other grime (hair, tobacco tar, etc) can cause overheating and eventually will lead to component failure.

Use caution when using compressed air, as air pressure applied to certain areas of the PC can cause damage. For example, forced air applied to a free-spinning fan can damage the fan bearings, causing it to slow or stop spinning. When cleaning a fan with compressed air, block the blades with a small screwdriver or similar object while cleaning to keep it still.

Holding a vacuum just outside the PC (do NOT use a vacuum inside or on your PC) while using compressed air to blow the dust out will cut down on your clean up.

Once you have the dust removed take a paper towel or a clean coffee filter and wipe down the inside of the case. Only the case should be wiped down and nowhere else. Do NOT wipe down any internal components.

Now your PC is Clean, you Need to Know How to Prevent Dust:

You can not stop dust from entering your PC. However you can minimize the amount getting in.

First, keep your case elevated. Cases sitting on floors, especially on rugs or carpeting suck in more dust.

Second, keep your pets away from your PC. If you have a cat or a dog you will get hair in the system, so try to limit it by keeping the pets away

Third, keep the area around your PC clear of clutter and wipe away dust regularly.

Fourth, do not smoke around your computer, it will shorten your PC’s life and your own for that matter.

If you are purchasing a new computer ask for a case with reusable filters. If you have an older PC buy filters that you can place over the front vents. They don’t catch all the dust but they do a good job of keeping a lot out. Most filters are washable and can be reused.

Cleaning the Monitor

Turn the monitor off and remove the power cord before cleaning. Do NOT spray cleaners directly onto the monitor. If liquid enters the vents in the monitor it will get on the internal monitor components and can cause damage. Spray the cleaner on to a towel then wipe down the monitor.

Cleaning the Keyboard, Mouse, Scanner

As with all the procedures above, make sure the PC and device you are cleaning are turned off while cleaning. The keyboard should be cleaned like the monitor and case exterior – spray cleaner onto a towel and wipe it down, do NOT spray cleaner directly on the components. An additional step prior to wiping is to use a small nylon brush and loosen the dirt between the keys then turn the keyboard over and gently shake it to let loose dirt drop out or use a proper gentle PC vacuum.

A mouse may need to be internally cleaned if performance is spotty or erratic. Turn the mouse over and look at the bottom. You should see small pads you can clean with q-tips and isopropyl alcohol. If dirt has accumulated around the light, gently remove it and clean with q-tips and rubbing alcohol. If you have an older mouse with an internal ball, dust and other materials will accumulate on the rollers or the ball itself. The ball is usually held in with a removable plate. Once the ball has been removed, blow out any foreign material and inspect the rollers. If they have dirt accumulated on them it can be removed using tweezers for large accumulation and a q-tip and isopropyl alcohol for the smaller particles. Be careful to only touch the rollers lightly and use the rubbing alcohol sparingly. The ball should be cleaned with a lint-free towel and rubbing alcohol. Do NOT use any cleaner with abrasives for any PC component cleaning. Reassemble the mouse and it should return to normal operation.

Scanners should have the glass surface cleaned occasionally - perform a visual check when you are using the scanner. Foreign objects, dust and other contaminants can be detrimental to your image quality. Smudges from fingertips, specks of white-out, traces of printer or pen ink from scanned originals can all cause imperfections in your scans. Clean the glass surface with a lint-free towel and glass cleaner, and the exterior with isopropyl alcohol.

Do not let you inkjet cartridges dry out.

If you are going on a vacation for an extended period the ink cartridge left in you printer may dry out. It is similar to leaving the lid off paint tins; eventually the ink will thicken and dry blocking the print-heads. Remove ink cartridges before you leave, being sure you follow the instructions provided in your printer manual. Wrap the cartridges in plastic wrap then place them in a Zip-Lock plastic bag and leave in a cool dark place. This should help keep them from drying out and they can be re-installed once you return. Use your maintenance software when you do re-install them to clean and prime the heads again. It is a good idea to print in color and black at least once in 2-3 weeks (some cartridges will dry out sooner than others). If the cartridge is already dried out, do not use it to print, it can damage the print head.

If you do suffer from Clogged Printer Heads:

In some occasions it is impossible to avoid clogged inkjet cartridges. On many occasions, those cartridges with built in print heads can be unblocked by the following steps:

Water Based Ink Cartridges:

Remove the cartridge; according to the instructions in your printer manual. Take the cartridge to a work area that will not matter if you spill ink (a utility sink is a good place). Fold a few sheets of paper towel and dampen them with warm water > do not use tap water… use bottled water. Take the blocked printer cartridge and dab the printer heads into the moist paper towel. Let it soak for a few minutes. This should result in the warm water being drawn into the printer heads assisting the clearance of old dried/thick ink. You need to dissolve and clean up any old residue and ink before re-installation. Once you see all colors showing on the damp paper towel then it should be OK to try the cartridge back in your printer. Make sure you dry the printer heads off with a clean paper towel sheet before re-installing the cartridge. You may have to repeat this process a number of times if your cartridge is badly blocked.

Pigment / Oil Based Ink Cartridges:

For oil based inks follow the same instructions above but use isopropyl alcohol instead of warm water.

Cleaning My Printer?

Most people are unaware that they have to maintain their printers on a regular basis to ensure consistent print quality. On most printer models you will notice that when you change ink cartridges or when you first turn your printer on the printer goes through what is known as a Print Head Cleaning and Alignment Procedure. For the life of your printer this will happen hundreds of times. You may not have noticed that while this automatic head cleaning and alignment is taking place that old ink and paper residue is being dumped into a holding bin usually a small plastic container situated towards the right hand side of the printer under the lid. This is where your printer head sits while parked and not in use. If this Ink Dump Area gets over loaded, instead of cleaning your printer cartridges it can clog them with old ink and paper dust, with a sticky residue this can damage the print head and result poor quality prints or even completely blocking the print heads.

Therefore you must maintain your printer by cleaning the Print Dump Container and the Cartridge Parking area. You should have detailed instructions in your printer manual. Basically you can use a cotton swab and some Isopropyl alcohol. Make sure that you remove as much old ink as you can.

NOTE: before doing this type of maintenance make sure that you disconnect the power and you are working in an environment suitable for the job in hand.

* If you’re only going to print a couple of dozen photos, don’t do it yourself as it’s more economical to drop off your memory card or CD at a shop.

* Stick with brand name ink. Yes, it will cost more than the no-name ink, but it will last longer produce better quality photos. To give your prints the professional look, and to increase their life, be sure to also buy premium photo paper. Cheap ink has been known to dry directly on the printer heads which can cause performance problems and damage the heads.

* Replacement cartridges for ink are a good idea to keep on hand IF you make sure they’re in a sealed container or ‘zip-lock’ bag so no air can prematurely dry it up. NEVER open a cartridge box/bag until you are ready to install it in your printer.

* If you’re printing an article from a Web site, look for the ‘Print’ button on the page as it should reduce the amount of graphics and banner advertising around the article itself. If it does not have one, select the text you want to print and paste it into a standard word processor and print from there.

* Try to practice ’selective printing’ – decide what you really need on paper and what you can keep in digital format. If you look through your photos, you’ll probably realize you didn’t need to print them all and might even find some you want to discard. The same can be said of most documents.

* When your printer informs you it’s time to replace the cartridge – you can ignore the warning for a while. You probably have enough ink to last for quite a few prints. When you begin to see the black text fading or the colour just isn’t right in a photo, then change it.

* Before you print a photo, document or page from a Web site, select ‘Print Preview’ from the File tab to see what it will look like when printed so that you can catch mistakes before wasting ink.

What is “Phishing”?

It is like fishing in the sense that criminals send out mass emails “bait” hoping someone bites. The bait is an e-mail out falsely claiming to be a legitimate organization like a bank, credit card company, online payment service, or any service, company or website they think people will trust in an attempt to trick people into giving private information that can be used for identity theft, theft from your bank, online account, etc. The e-mail will direct the unsuspecting person to visit a Web site where they are asked to update personal information, such as user names, passwords, credit card information, and bank account numbers, which the legitimate organization already has. This Web site, however, is spoofed and was set up only to steal information.

Link manipulation/spoofing

Most methods of phishing use some form of technical deception designed to make a link in an email (and the spoofed website it leads to) appear to belong to the spoofed organization. Misspelled URLs or the use of sub-domains are common tricks used by phishers. Another common trick is to make the anchor text for a link appear to be a valid URL when the link actually goes to the spoofed site.

Website forgery/spoofing

Some phishing scams use JavaScript to alter the address bar to make it seem legitimate. This is done by placing a picture of the legitimate company’s URL over the address bar, or by closing the original address bar and opening a new one containing the legitimate URL.

In another method of phishing that is quite popular, an attacker uses a trusted website’s own scripts against the victim. These types of attacks (cross-site scripting) are particularly nasty, because they direct the user to sign in at their bank or service’s own web page, where everything from the web address to the security certificates appears correct. This attack is very hard to spot as it is the link to the website is crafted to carry out the attack.

Damage caused by phishing - The damage ranges from loss of access to email and other online accounts to loss of money, investments, etc. Phishing is becoming more popular, because of the number of unsuspecting people who are easily tricked into divulging information to phishers. The collected information includes credit card numbers, social security numbers, and mothers’ maiden names. It is also possible that identity thieves can add more information to what they have gained through phishing simply by accessing public records. Once this information is acquired, the phishers may use a person’s details to create fake accounts in a victim’s name, ruin a victim’s credit, or even prevent victims from accessing their own accounts. As you can surmise the result can be a destroyed life. That is why it is extremely important everyone learns to recognize phishing and avoid being caught.

Recognizing Phishing and test your Phishing IQ

To help people learn more about phishing and to improve their ability to recognize it there are sites with information and tests you can take.

Microsoft: Recognize phishing scams and fraudulent e-mails

SonicWALL Phishing IQ Test

MailFrontier Phishing IQ Test

Netriplex Phishing Test

The best advice is to learn to recognize phishing and spoofing. Please check and use the sites above. The next best is to use a browser and email program that help you to recognize phishing and spoofing. Browsers and email programs are adding some protection. I recommend using Firefox for your browser and install an anti-phishing and anti-spoofing add-on. Once you have installed Firefox go to tools, add-ons, hit “get extensions” and search for the add-ons you want. Use Thunderbird for your email. Both are free and both are more secure than the Microsoft products. Get them here:

Mozilla Products

Forwarding Emails: Do Your Homework!

Every day I see email forwarded by someone trying to warn me of some new threat or with some “interesting news”. unfortunately most of these types of forwarded emails are false. In most cases it is harmless forwarding of emails with the only drawback being extra junk in your inbox and floating around the Internet.

In other cases, these emails themselves are a threat. Some emails will inform you of a “threat” and give you steps to take to “fix” your computer or “remove” the threat. Following the “advice” in these emails can cause problems in some cases.

Please do NOT forward these types of emails or follow the instructions in them without first doing your homework.

Do a search on the “information” you received. Below are a few good links to sites with information on hoaxes, myths and real threats.

There are many sites that will help you find the truth about the emails you get, I like these ones.

TruthOrFiction.com

The Truth or Fiction site lists emails and topics and gives you “Truth” or“Fiction” information from their research. It can be quite amusing to just browse some of the information they have.

This site is well organized so you can select topics or just do a simple search.

F-Secure

F-Secure is a European based international computer security company. The information and tools available are very useful for your security.

Hoax Alphabetical listing

Hoax Search

Learn to maintain your computer!

How? Who do you trust? Where do you start?

To be completely honest, my grandfather told me 3 words when I was young “Trust no one”. Smart old man. So I asked what about Grandma? His answer was listen to your Grandma, she has experience. He also said “learn so you can check it yourself”.

So let’s get right down to it. Who do you trust: someone with experience - but learn and check it yourself. You should be able to verify what you learn.

Now, I will add something to that:

Trust yourself. Get the tools and learn. Take advice from someone with experience and use and expand upon that advice. If the advice is good, you can prove it and you know you can get more advice from the same source.

I know you are tired of shelling out money. So am I.

I hate spending money; especially with no guarantees.

So here is the first step:

Download the “PC Tips Tweaks and Maintenance Free Edition” guide.

Read it - Print it - TRY it.

If it helps you - SHARE it. Most of the tools referred to in it are also free.

You only lose time if you don’t like it.

If you do like it and want more, come back here and get the “PC Tips Tweaks and Maintenance Pro Edition”. With it you will be able to handle many of the most common problems plaguing computer users and have the ability to help others.

The good thing about this process is that you will already have used my FREE document in order to evaluate my assistance.

As I said, I taught and wrote myself out of business. This information WILL help you to manage your computer on your own without needing a computer geek to overcharge you.

Most people don’t have the time or the knowledge to properly test software and end up just trusting what they get or whatever they see advertised most. Both of these are very big computing mistakes.

Trusting what you get:

The software that comes “bundled” with your computer is usually the cheap junk that the hardware company made great deals to promote or is crippled or time limited in some way.

Buying what you see advertised most:

You get a big name, but do you get the best product? The answer is a flat and honest NO. The big names are often bloated software written by lazy programmers just showing up to work for their 9 to 5 pay. You will find hacks to all of them on the net and a novice can bypass your big name security. These big companies don’t care if you get a virus, they make money off it and that is enough. If you get a virus that your antivirus did not detect because it is not updated often enough what do you do? Will the company help you free of charge to clean up your computer? No chance! You call some computer store or computer geek and pay to get it cleaned up and then put the same piece of junk software back on that let the virus in. The problem with stores and computer geeks is they know they have you over a barrel. What do you know? What guarantee do you have they won’t just wipe your computer tossing all your data using a simple restore disk and charge you excessively?

Another problem with the big name bloatware is that they seem to think they know more than the guys who wrote your operating system and the guys who write the virus, spyware, etc. This is a very big problem as they will try to take over certain aspects of the operating system causing problems and major slow downs due to being complete resource hogs. Thinking you know more than the malicious software creators is extremely dangerous as you only have your 9 to 5 teams but the malicious software writers are in huge unknown numbers that grow daily.

What about the smaller guy you see advertising his product advertised on the net? The ones who give you a “free” scan? Don’t waste your time, I have tested many of them and most miss important problems and give false negatives and then use scare tactics to get you to buy. How many times have you seen: “You are at RISK, you have ___ problems and they MUST be fixed ASAP, click here to activate/purchase, etc” or some similar thing? Ignore these sharks; they just want your money.

You must be tired of shelling out money for a computer, the operating system, the internet, the software…

Do you think Bill Gates cares that you keep spending money because his programmers wrote an OS that has too many holes and is bloated and crashes when you sneeze? Not a chance! Have you ever read any of the EULA (End User License Agreement)? You have NO guarantees! You are the one who is giving guarantees – not to copy, reverse compile, etc. If you use the software and it crashes your computer, scraps your data, burns your house down and kills your dog, it is your problem.

So now you have the straight bad news. What can you do about it?

Next: Learn to maintain your computer!

Microsoft Windows is the most used operating system in the world.

It is also the most attacked and one of the most vulnerable and troublesome operating systems.

I have been a computer consultant for over 15 years. I have been using computers since before MS DOS and got on the Internet when it was only government, schools and geeks.

I have made quite a lot of money supporting users of Microsoft products, right from DOS up through Windows XP – I suggest avoiding Vista if you can, but that is another article.

Over the years of supporting home users and businesses I have found that most problems can be avoided with simple instructions, free software and a little time regularly following the instructions.

To be honest I taught and wrote myself out of business. Many of my old clients no longer need any help, and just contact me for updates and advice on new purchases. They no longer experience the problems that plague most users.

Why am I telling you this? Do I have a big ego and need to show off?

I’ll answer the second question first. No ego involved, I don’t care what people think of me. I do what I think is right and let people deal with it however they want.

Now, to the first question: Why?

I think people should be able to use their computers without slow downs, constant crashing, worrying about this virus, that spyware, etc.

Next: Lack of Information Will Hurt You

Most people will be sending regular jokes and tricks, but others will be sending a virus or other malware.

Be sure to upgrade your antivirus before you do anything else and remember to practice safe email habits.

- Do NOT open any emails from unknown senders.

- Never save or open an attachment from a suspicious email.
Specifically, never save or open any .ZIP, .SCR, .EXE, .BAT, .COM or even .JPG or .GIF files from such emails. These files can carry a dangerous payload and can be faked (the true nature and extension are hidden).

It’s time to “Cut The Cord” on your expensive Computer Geek, and learn how to maintain your own PC!

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