All Power Supplies Are Not Created Equal

The good folks over at tomshardware.com have an article about cheap power supplies and what happened during their testing process.  As the article is called Don't Be Surprised When Your Cheap PSU Blows Up you can probably guess the outcome, but it is well worth a read anyway.


My experience is if you stick with Antec, Silverstone or Thermaltake you should be fine.

Anti Virus

It's an sad fact that we need anti virus for our computer systems.  Virus and malware creators are becoming more sophisticated every day and Microsoft Windows systems are the most targeted.

They are the most targetted for the simple reason they present the largest group of users compared to the low percentage of Apple or domestic Linux users.

From time to time I've had people say to me they don't need anti virus as they are careful not to be infected.

The fact is you'll be infected from sources you have little control over, like email, PDF files, web sites, etc.

So you need to protect your computer against these threats.

Try to avoid the many web sites or popups that advertise unknown anti virus products as many are in fact virus or malware themselves and will cause many more problems.

The genuine free anti virus packages are an option but the experience of my customers with many of these products has been poor, essentially you get what you pay for.  If I had to recommend one, at the moment, I'd say the Microsoft Security Essentials is very good and also unobtrusive.

Currently I prefer either the Kaspersky range of products or those of Computer Associates (previously known as VET Anti Virus many moons ago).

Using one of these products (two anti virus products installed at the same is an extraordinarily bad idea) and safe internet habits should keep your computer infection free for as long as possible.

These are available directly from the linked web sites or from leading computer stockists.

Defragmentation

Defragmenting brings the information together on your hard drive that should be together but was separated due to normal operation.  This helps your operating system (eg. Windows etc)  gather the required information it requires as the internal mechanical parts of the hard drive don't have to travel as far, thus it should be faster.

Due to various reasons it is not possible to defragment every single piece of information on your hard drive but by performing this task on the bulk of the data obvious speed improvements can be observed in most cases.

Defragmentation - Frequency

I prefer to defragment (defrag) my computer at the start of each month, it probably doesn't need it quite that often but the start of the month is an easy date to remember.

My main computer still uses Windows XP so I need to start my defrags manually (some third party programs will let you set this to run automatically), if you use Windows Vista or 7 your defrags should happen automatically.

However they are only automatic when your version of Windows detects your machine is on but not currently being used, in some circumstances this may not be enough time for a proper defrag.

Hence why a monthly regime is a good thing to ensure a well defragmented computer hard drive.

Defragging your hard drive can take quite some time, half an hour to a couple of hours is typical so planning a good time for this procedure is important.

As always make sure you have a backup of your important data on another device (ie. not the same hard drive) before doing any operation on your hard drive.