“I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.” ~ Isaac Asimov

Like the late, great Mr. Asimov said, we shouldn’t worry about computers taking over but be more concerned when they fail us and take all our important files with them. A computer’s hard drive is the central storage within the system and its failure will bring all practical functions to a complete halt.

If your PC is experiencing any of the following signs of impeding doom then you must run (not walk) and grab CDs to burn backups of all your essential data.

Sign 1 – You hear high-pitched whining, loud clicking or grinding noises coming from the drive

A normally operating drive will make a smooth “whirling” sound as is spins up or down. But if a drive has a grinding or clicking sounds (the Read/Write heads scraping too close to the magnetic platters), then your drive is sick and is on the way out.

Sign 2 – You see the infamous “Blue Screen of Death”, repeatedly

BSODs (Blue Screens of Death) are actually called “Stop” errors and they only appear when your Windows system is experiencing severe software or hardware issues. Often BSODs can cured with a careful “Repair Install” of the Windows operating system or by removal of a bad device driver. But if these software fast fixes don’t seem stick, then your hard drive is usually on its last legs

Sign 3 – Your computer keeps re-booting on its own

I admit, I have only seen this problem a few times in my 18+ year career and in all instances it was due to hardware issues. Once it was a dust covered motherboard, and another time an overheating processor. But all the other times it was due to bad drives.

Sign 4 – Your system keeps having frequent freezes or hang ups

You are working along just fine, and then suddenly everything comes to a halt. The program freezes up on you. Your mouse and keyboard seem to stop responding. The only solution is to reboot.

Sign 5 – Error message: hard drive is not formatted

This a fun message that you will get when you start up your machine. You maybe able to restart and get it to boot into Windows a few more times but this error is “fur-sure” sign that you drive is very close to death. And by the way don’t try to format the drive! You will lose all your data.

Sign 6 – Error message: boot drive or device not found or drive cannot be accessed

This is another favorite of mine. You can check the CD/DVD trays or the floppy drive to make sure no stray disks are stuck inside. You can also check the BIOS to make sure the system is booting from the hard drive first. If all these tests are no-good, then the drive is a goner.

Sign 7 – Errors: Operating system not found or Missing Operating System

This is a bad one. Even the Microsoft technical support knowledgebase has only got a few causes for this error message. Basically your PC can no longer detect the hard drive or the drive is too severely damaged to read (DOA).

What to do if your drive has any of these symptoms:

1)First, listen up, if possible, BACKUP YOUR FILES NOW!

2)Create a boot disk and run Windows Scandisk and set it to automatically fix errors. If it finds more than a few bad sectors then see the point above

3)If possible download and use a hard drive diagnostic program. All the major hard drive manufacturers have free utilities on their websites. Repair what you can and see point 1.

The revolutionary JAWS program for Windows is helping folks who have visual impairments use computers more independently than ever before. The exciting new JAWS for Windows program actually states the names of icons on the computer audibly. This is great news for the blind and visually impaired who, in the past, had to rely upon the assistance of others to use a computer. JAWS can also assist folks to create and even edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in the Microsoft Office Suite of PowerPoint, Excel, and Word.

This amazing technology allows visual impaired folks to not only access the internet but also help open up a whole new world of independent computer usage. They can access social networking sites such as Facebook, Hi5, and MySpace. And many people are now having a much easier time using computers more efficiently for work or other activities.

Software such as JAWS along with powerful hardware like NAS Storage and really help to level the playing field for the visually impaired as well as people who are otherwise challenged. Very exciting news, and with the ongoing advancements in computer technology, many of us can only dream about what else is yet to come our way in the world of computers.

Will computers someday take over the world? Probably not. But they are certainly helping to make it a much easier, more productive and enjoyable place to live. Nowadays, we are able to communicate with folks across the globe with just the click of a mouse. Computers are not only improving the world we live in but bringing it closer together as well.

It is said that a computer can make our lives easier and help us get things done that we ordinarily would have to leave to someone else. I agree that they certainly have their benefits but in one respect I completely disagree that they do us good. When it comes to using a system that is under performing and one that is plagued by crashes and instability nothing can be more frustrating or anti-productive.

Let’s look at what can be done to speed up the operation of your computer and also make the system more stable and less susceptible to crashes and running errors. If your computer is running on Windows there is this wonderful thing called a Registry and this is used to store information that is important to the operation of your computer. It contains things like the setup information, user preferences and hardware and software configurations.

When your system is first set up this registry should be complete and error free but after time the registry can become a real mess which slows your machine down and can cause instabilities in the operating system. The way these errors are introduced are many and varied, things like poorly written software being downloaded, removing of programs can leave behind defunct files that only serve to slow the system down and corrupted software can make a real mess of the registry, just to name a few.

If you want to restore your system back to optimal speed you could of course re-format your hard drive. For anyone that has been down this road you will know what a pain in the neck this can be. Downloading everything to an external drive, sorting through everything, hoping that you uploaded everything you need, the list goes on.

What you can do easily and effectively is use a registry cleaning program. These programs take away the hassle of re-formatting your computer and can do the same job in much less time. Most programs offer a free scan of your system which will identify any problem areas that you can then have repaired by the software with a minimum of fuss and less down time for your computer. Try the free scan out and I’m sure you will be surprised or shocked at how many registry errors your system is trying to operate with!

Computer forensics is becoming a popular profession among law enforcement, government intelligence and corporate security professionals. As the profession demands extraordinary skills and an investigative instinct, basic training is necessary.

This high quality computer forensic training is available through renowned universities and colleges for which conditions apply with regard to personal history and citizenship.

The universities provide customized training designed to meet the specific needs of a law enforcement or intelligence agency. Expert faculty, who are retired personnel from major federal law enforcement agencies, trains professionals. They are internationally recognized for demonstrated expertise in the field.

An intensive 45 hours laboratory course is designed to equip government and corporate investigators with skills needed to safely locate and secure the computer evidence at search sites, as well as off-site analysis.

With the help of challenging group exercises and written examinations, forensic concepts and procedural skills are reinforced. An optional, online, 9-hour seminar is also available, primarily on hacker and child pornography.

Forensic examiners are provided with an essential understanding of federal and state computer laws by the newly introduced 5-day Computer Forensics Legal Issues course.

A special one-day non-examiner laboratory first responder course has been designed to introduce the examiner assistants to concepts and skills needed at the computer search. An 8-hour non-laboratory seminar, called Computer Forensics Program Manager is available for individual, responsible for supervising computer forensics operations. The course also provides an overview of essential computer forensics concepts and procedures, personnel staffing and equipment alternatives. The Program Manager seminar is inclusive of a 4-hour terrorist threat multimedia briefing.

A 6-day Computer Forensics Advanced course is designed using Linux to safely and effectively analyze Windows systems, including Windows 9.x. ME, XP and 2000 Professional. The program also includes a computer forensics technical report-writing laboratory. As the courses are no more restricted to fulltime government employees or a selected group of corporate security investigators, they are becoming popular among law enforcement, government intelligence, and corporate security professionals.

Computer can be used more and more frequently over the years. Most of us depend on the internet to connect with the world by using computer. We used to get news from newspaper and radio broadcasts, but now with the development of technology, we can get the latest news in seconds when it is being uploaded.

Nowadays, computers are mostly used for work and leisure. Therefore, it is so frustrated that your PC becomes slow, crashing or freezing when you are using them. And you don’t know how to fix this problem on your own. If you are looking for the ways about how to increase computer speed, you get the right place to know them.

How to increase computer speed?

If you don’t want to buy a new PC and you don’t want to upgrade you hardware devices, you can follow the common tips below to make your computer run faster.

Over time, you may have installed and uninstalled programs into your PC. The data of these programs is disorganized around your Windows and eats up a lot of resources of your machine. Therefore, your laptop has to speed so much time trying to find the data which is required for different tasks. In this case, what can you do?

Obviously, you can clean up the data of the programs to free up your computer. To handle this job, you can run the disk defragmenter of your System Tool in Windows to defragment your data and rearrange them neatly on your Windows. Now, your computer will work faster by doing this operating.

There may be many traces of the programs on your laptop. These files are invalid and outdated. Thus, you need to clean up them. To increase computer speed, you can use the Disk Cleanup function to remove files that you don’t need. Just follow the step-by-step instructions: Simple click Start> Click Programs> Click Accessories> Click System Tools> Click Disk Cleanup. You will know which files you want to clean up and especially temporary internet files are safe to be removed.

In order to increase computer speed, you should check out the list of installed programs. And you need to think about which ones you need and don’t need. And then, you uninstall the ones you don’t need. The unnecessary applications running on the background can steal your precious RAM and CPU resources so that this can cause your computer to run slowly. Thus, to handle this problem, you can use the Add/Remove Programs utility of Control Panel.

When we begin our computer journey and jump aboard the internet we are told we need to buy anti-virus security software. Often a trial program will be packaged with your new computer that is set to expire a short time later. Then the program will ask for payment to keep you protected. The most common two programs that come preinstalled on new computers are: Norton and McAfee. While both of these programs are well respected by many users they are also quite pricey.  

There is no doubt that you need antivirus software on your computer, but there are some effective products out there completely free that compare to those high priced programs. Yes, you read that right. Free antivirus software products that are just as superior as the expensive well known brands. 

As the internet evolves and so will the types of threats. There are now more problems and ways to infect your computer than ever. This is a trend likely to continue. Our job as an internet user is to become familiar with common threat types and keep our computer systems protected from them.

There are many types of security issues. These problems can come in many flavors and change rapidly so including them in this editorial would prove pointless. In a short time from now the threats could be much different than they are today. Trying to keep up with those details would be a full time job. Not to worry, we do not need to be security experts to stay safe.

There are some common wide based categories that most threats fall under. Knowing this we can learn how to protect ourselves from each category rather than each threat individually.  The most common areas that need to be addresses are as follows:

Microsoft vulnerabilities

These are exploits to the code inside your Windows, IE browser and Office products. The way to keep these risks to a minimum is by keeping your Windows up to date using the Windows update service. I keep my Windows updates on automatic and they are downloaded and installed as released. This is free to Windows owners and can be found in your control panel.

Viruses

These come in many types. From worms to trojans they can cause huge problems on the users system. This is where free antivirus software can keep you protected. At the time of this writing, AVG, AVIRA and AVAST are three of the top place award winners for free antivirus software. I have used all three and settled with Avast as my protection software of choice. I also trust it enough to install it on the computers I assemble for clients.

Spyware and Malware

Items that fall into this category can vary from – chaotic as viruses or simple tracking cookies from an advertiser wanting to see where you came from or where you left to. These buggers can sneak in from website graphics and invisible code often with no warning at all. While Avast is one of the better anti-virus programs to also guard from spyware, it is not truly the software’s purpose.

Again there are free choices for spyware protection that work just as well as the high priced alternatives! One feature that is harder to get in the free spyware software is “real time protection”. I use Spyware Terminator which does offer real time protection and seems to be doing a great job on my Vista work machine. You can do a search for “free spyware protection” and look for review sites that evaluate several different programs available to choose from.

A frequent trick used by many *not so nice* software companies is to force a pop up that looks like a System Message announcing the user’s computer is infected by a virus. The box offers only one button, a link to remove the infection. This is actually a link that leads the clicker to a website that cleverly requests payment to solve the problem. Many times there is no virus other than the one asking you to pay to remove it!

With all these free protection tools available for personal use it is frustrating to see so many people who are lead to believe that they must pay for safety. We may not be able to stop viruses and other malicious codes on the internet but we can do our part to protect ourselves and thanks to a few great companies out there, we can do it for free.

I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to remember a day whenever we did not have computers in our home. We use the computer for almost everything, from getting news about events that are taking place in our area to checking the weather, and even doing research for a variety of different topics. The problem is, the computer can also be a very frustrating piece of equipment that we have, especially whenever it is giving us a problem.

There are a number of different things that can go wrong with a computer, but one of the most common is for the Windows registry to become corrupted. Many of us have become familiar with the registry, not because we go in and change things on the inside but because it is something that is constantly running in the background. As a matter of fact, it regulates almost every aspect of our computer.

Very few of us are technical enough to go inside and fix the Windows registry on our own. As a matter of fact, making a simple mistake inside of the Windows registry can make your computer completely useless and it will not even start under these circumstances. That is why many of us tend to stay far away from the Windows registry and won’t even change a single file on the inside.

As a result of this, many of us will unplug our computer and take it in, in order to be repaired at the computer store. We may also pay somebody to come out and fix the computer inside of our home. Either way, it is either going to cost you a lot of money to get the problem fixed in your computer or it is going to take you a lot of time. In some instances, it may take both.

You might be surprised to learn that the way that your computer would be fixed at the store is also available to you at home. You can download the program off of the Internet that will be used by the professionals and run it on your computer yourself. There are a number of these registry cleaners that are available, but we would suggest that you try Registry Winner. It receives good marks and is able to take care of problems automatically.

After an initial scan, you will find out everything that is going wrong with your computer and what you can do in order to fix it. You can then allow Registry Winner to take care of the problem automatically. Of course, you can take control of the process to a certain extent but it would be a better idea just to allow it to fix problems for you.

After the scan and cleanse has taken place, you will commonly notice that your computer is running much faster and much more smoothly as a result. Continue to run this program periodically or allow it to run in the background permanently. In this way, you will be able to keep your computer running smoothly for the long term.

Removing unnecessary things from your own PC is often very useful to improve its general performance. In the following paragraphs you will see several kinds of these unexpected stuff that should be recognized before conducting any action. Simply put, this article is about hints to find them.

There are generally two sorts of such items: those that are available in the form of data files and those that are classified as executable programs. The unwanted software may be either totally set up in the normal way employing some sort of installer or simply saved in a common folder.

Some varieties of unexpected things that are usually found on a personal computer are cache files, internet temporary files, unwanted installed programs as well as programs that come with harmful code like spyware or trojans. There are programs that need to be clicked on to function, while others can run on auto-pilot when triggered by a particular activity.

To remove unwanted files, just recognize, locate and then remove them, then empty the trash can. Having said that, bear in mind that in the event that security is the main concern, removing files directly as discussed above may not be able to appropriately eliminate all footprints.

As you know, Windows make use of cache files in order to enhance the execution of repeating processes. Although cache files are not dangerous, after some time they may get larger and larger, and in the end make a difference to the performance of your computer.

Very much alike cache files, Windows uses temporary files to provide finer functionality of various installed applications. For illustration, there are actually files that come with.tmp extension that will be generated whenever programs such as Microsoft Word are being used.

Throughout the use of web browsers such as Internet Explorer, temporary files will also be produced. In addition remember that Windows also creates temporary files in the course of software installation, including various operations. These kinds of files are actually created for the purpose of recovery in the event something unexpected occurs.

If you want to remove an application installed utilizing the Windows installer, just use the Add/Remove Programs utility provided. A number of software also come with their own uninstaller. In these instances, it is recommended to make use of the feature as the first choice. In some cases either the uninstaller featured by the program or the built-in Add/Remove program utility is unable to carry out their main function. At such conditions alternative removal methods may be utilized.

Removing spyware or viruses is known as the most confusing activity compared with all the methods discussed above. In reality, the very first problem is determining whether or not such problem really does exist. Many indicators regarding malware infection are: unreliable performance of your system, intrusive pop-ups as well as browser hijacking.

Ultimately, it is always a sensible practice to carry out a thorough examination to find harmful programs on a regular basis and also perform other routine maintenance like disc clean up. The use of utilities such as CCleaner, antispyware and not to be neglected a trusted spam blocking software must also be considered.

Okay, so you want to know how to fix errors on your computer. In this article I am going to give you some simple tips that will help you sort out some common computer problems. I am going to be talking about viruses, your hard disk, your Windows boot CD, and the Windows registry.

Scan For Viruses

Viruses are such a common and damaging threat, that there is simply no excuse for not having an anti-virus program installed on your computer. If you already have an anti-virus program, then make sure it is set to auto-protect, and that you give your computer a full scan at least once a week.

If you don’t already have an anti-virus program, then you must get one immediately. If you cannot afford to buy one, then there are a number of free alternatives available. Simply type “free antivirus” into a search engine such as Google, Yahoo or Bing, and you will be able to find a free one to download.

Clean Your Hard Disk

Over time our hard disks get clogged up with files and can become really slow. One thing you can do to remedy this is to delete files. You can do this by using the Disk Cleanup tool built into Windows (Go to Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Cleanup).

Another thing you must do is to defragment your hard disk. You can do this by using the Disk Defragmenter tool which can be found in the same location as the Disk Cleanup tool.

It’s also worth running the Disk Check tool, which can be accessed by going to My Computer, right clicking on your hard drive and selecting the Tools tab.

Windows Boot CD

Sometimes problems can develop with the Windows operating system itself. If you think this might be the case, you could try booting your computer via the Windows CD. This contains diagnostic utilities which can help to fix problems with the operating system. Or if all else fails, you may even have to resort to reinstalling Windows from scratch.

Perform Registry Scan

Old age creeps up on us all and we slow down. It happens with computers to but for much different reasons. Your computer has become slow. After ignoring the problem for some time you finally realise that you must do something about it. But you don,t know what the problem is. How can you solve this problem>?

Nearly always your registry is the problem. All windows computers since Windows 95 have a registry. It is a database which the operating system uses to run the computer and run the programs you are using. The more the computer is used,the more data is compiled in this database. Hence as the computer ages the registry can become very large and bloated with a huge load of data. Much of this data can be outdated,no longer used. A lot more is parts of programs which were never completely uninstalled and partial programs which you tried to install without success. Spyware which some unknown villain installed on your machine, miscellaneous scraps of data from many sources are also clogging your registry.

What I have for you is a simple way to get rid of all this unwanted junk in your registry. A program known as a registry cleaner will automatically run a free scan of your computer and determine what the problems are. You will receive a report on these problems free of charge. You can then decide what you want to do. You can go into the registry and manually remove the excess material yourself. A function called regedit is installed on all windows computers. You can edit the registry yourself using this. It is very easy to do. Just look at the list of registry entries and delete the ones you want to get rid of. It is that simple.

If you do not have enough knowledge to do this job,the registry cleaner application can do it for you,for a reasonable fee. Be very careful if you want to do it yourself. The registry is the heart of your computer and contains a lot of essential items which must not be removed. To remove some of these may disable the computer or prevent some programs from running. Unless you have enough computer know how to know what is necessary and what is not do not attempt to remove entries from your registry. Instead use the registry cleaner application which will do the job properly and safely.

A registry cleaner application will first backup your registry so that it can be restored if necessary. It will then systematically go through the registry and remove all unnecessary files,useless shortcuts,unused drivers, and many more items including spyware. It will make your registry clean and efficient again and totally tune it up. Your computer will be galloping along and as good as new.

Your first step is to get a free scan of your computer to determine what the problems are. There are many registry cleaner applications available on the internet. We have tried most of them. There is a good,better and best although they all do the job. We found one that topped them all in ease of use,safety and performance.