3 Things To Do Today To Protect Your PC

Video Transcript

Heather: Now he is going to break down the things that you need to do today, to protect yourself from viruses, hackers and thieves — really important information.

Male: Well it is Tech Tuesday, and today we’re talking about protecting your home computer from viruses, hackers and online criminals. Ryan Eldridge from callnerds.com, the co-founder, is with us here. And the first thing we want to talk, you’ve got three basic steps that everybody should be doing. The first one is something that I always kind of ignore, and that is update, right?

Ryan: Yeah.

Male: You’ve got to update when there is one available.

Ryan: We’ve got to update our operating system. Windows 10 just finally finished its free roll out, so now you have to pay for it. So, everybody’s kind of complaining, “I don’t want to go to Windows 10. I’m happy with 7,” or, “I’m happy with 8” or whatever. But the thing is, if you’re running an older operating system you are vulnerable to viruses and spyware. These guys have had years to just practice what they want to do to your operating system and just damage it, and get in there and do stuff. So, update your operating system.

And today it happens to be the rollout of the new Windows 10 anniversary edition. It’s kind of fancy speak for their first service pack. We always say, tell everybody, “Just hold off on installing a new operating system until their first service pack comes out.” But now that the new anniversary edition is out, its adding some new functionality, its adding new security software updates to it. So you even have new things like, Cortana is going to be a little bit better, there’s a better Start menu where it’s going to be a little more intuitive. When you click on an item, like a news item in the Start menu, it will take you directly to the story rather than just opening the news app. There’s a new integration for the stylists, Windows Ink, so all kinds of new stuff.

Male: Right.

Ryan: And they promise they’re not going to break anything. I know that’s one of the things we’re always worried about as we get a new operating system. Our new update, it’s going to break something, or we’re not going to be used to using it, and everything’s going to move around. Well, Windows 10 is supposed to unify their ecosystem and make it just a little easier for you to get around from your phone, to your Xbox, to your PC.

Male: Right, so the idea that what I do is I ignore it and I don’t do it because I want to be safe, that’s actually the wrong thing because I am not protecting myself. Number two, what’s number two?

Ryan: Number two, well, update your anti-virus. A lot of us buy a brand new PC and we get some freeware on there. We’ve got Norton or McAfee or something, and we think we’re protected. Well, about 90 days after we open up the PC that expires, and we are no longer being protected.

Male: So that does work, because I think I’m wasting my money with this Norton or this McAfee or this and that.

Ryan: Yeah, Windows has its own version. This like Windows Defender or something like that, and it’s okay, or Microsoft Security Essentials, something like that. It’s okay, but it’s not as good as a dedicated antivirus system. We use Webroot in our company and it is awesome because it is looking at not just the names of files that get infected, its looking at the behavior of the virus itself. And so, even if the world doesn’t know that it’s a virus yet it can go in and attack it and remove it, and it just keeps you a lot safer. And it doesn’t take a lot of space, there’s not a lot of time for scanning, it’s just an awesome little product.

Male: All right. Number three, our last tip for the day?

Ryan: Yeah, Lastly you want to back-up your system. We are always being told, “Back-up, back-up back-up,” and then we never do it.

Male: Yes

Ryan: And you want to really have three basic back-ups. You want to have iCloud, or some kind of cloud back-up. There I go, I switched to Apple, but some kind of Apple… I am going to mess up. Some kind of cloud back-up, but also some kind of back-up that you have near your computer like an…

Together: External drive.

Ryan: External hard drive, or something like that. And you want to make sure that it’s versioning, because if you just back-up everything on your system, you are going to be backing-up files you don’t need, and all kinds of stuff. What you want to do is find which version….

Male: …find what you want and put it on a [inaudible 0:03:21.4] drive or something like that.

Ryan: Yeah, and you want it versioned because that way if you get infected you can go back to the day before your infection, and you’re back to normal. You don’t have to go through this whole restore period.

Male: All right.

Ryan: It makes sense?

Male: It makes perfect sense. Now I need to go do it. All right, Ryan Eldridge from nerds on call, Thank you.

Ryan: You’re welcome.

Male: Heather?