Our Computers – A Place to Keep Our Stuff
The late comedian George Carlin had a routine about “Stuff,” noting that houses are just a place to keep our stuff, and as soon as we got too much stuff, we needed to move into a bigger house or rent a storage space for our stuff. That is the perfect description of a computer; they are a place to keep our stuff, and when we get too much stuff, it’s time to find more space for our stuff.
All too often, we keep accumulating more stuff in our computers and not always protecting it correctly. We pack stuff in our computers as densely as possible and hope that no one from the outside tries to take our “Good Stuff ” by trying to protect it with free antivirus software that typically doesn’t get the virus definitions updated regularly enough to keep the newest malware from attacking our stuff.
Sometimes, we try to be “green” and we turn off our computers at night when they would normally go into sleep mode. Our computers have a relatively active night life during sleep mode doing things like virus updates, virus scans, defragmenting the hard drive, and doing “stuff ” backups…uh, I mean data backups.
You backup your stuff, right?
For many businesses, the stuff kept on our computers can be mission critical, and yet, many of us that have a small business don’t back up our stuff. If the new virus gets by our free anti-virus and we haven’t backed up our stuff, the price of stuff just went up. You may have to pay a computer service technician for several hours to sort through our stuff and root out the virus. That assumes the virus will cooperate with the technician in its removal. The loss of our stuff is the worst case scenario; the technician may work several hours trying to save your stuff, only to lose the battle, finally asking you for your system disks to reformat your hard drive.
You now have a clean reformatted hard drive, but no stuff, so you lose even more productivity trying to reproduce your stuff.
Wait a second. You do have system disks, right?
Terry Anderson is the President of Fast-teks On-Site Computer Services Of Central Iowa is your small business technology department. He can be reached at #515-276-3278 or tanderson@fastteks.com His website is: http://local.fastteks.com/335