Though GCG doesn’t do as many house jobs as when we started 15 years ago, there are still some IT tips that are current for when the clocks change.
A great password tip is to add a character like +#!,&* to your passwords every time the clock changes. If you think you are the special one who will use the same password for the rest of your life and never be compromised, think again.
At our offices, once a year we bring in a special vacuum cleaner and clean the dust from the servers. It’s a great idea to designate time to do this twice a year, though to fully admit it, as we have grown we have not been as religious with this practice. Nevertheless, it’s good advice: take a microfiber cloth and use the spray specifically for electronic devices. Don’t use Windex, which leaves permanent streaks. Sorry, Mom, this is one thing Windex can’t clean.
Laptops and I are embarrassingly messy, to say the worst. I work really late at night, and I am on the phone constantly. We are blessed to have an office in Amsterdam, and I am still getting used to starting work at 5:00 a.m. and hearing yawns at 7 p.m. I have an adorable, lovable 4-year-old Dachshund mix who gets very jealous when I am on the phone. Seeing is believing.
My dog, Lolly, who all my engineers know by name, has pulled out and chewed my switch, switch cords, network cards, USB.. Then this is my bad: I left water during my flu week, and my dog went to grab it. BAM! Water on my laptop. Usually I have foodstuff and crumbs like everyone else, though every Sunday a.m., I clean all that off from top to bottom. Another good tip is to clean your laptop very intensively when the clock changes.
I have an OCD habit of unplugging and plugging in my home router (which is the stock Verizon one). Most IT professionals are not as high tech as you think. Though I do have government grade WiFi, that’s only because the company gave the access points to me for free. When the clocks change, it’s a good time to proactively unplug all your devices and plug them back in. That’s right. Reboot is a real thing, not just IT laziness.
If you are not running an anti-virus every day, you should. Download Malwarebytes and ninite.com and run scans.
These are free programs, though at GCG we pay for the full versions and have these two apps installed on every PC we manage. CCleaner and Defraggler are also great apps to use for keeping your PC running smoothly. CCleaner will delete all the temp files, history, passwords that should not be saved and some other features. Defraggler is an amazing Defrag program, though if you have a solid state drive, only run the optimize section. With the paid version you can schedule these two programs to run daily, weekly or monthly. It’s good to run these, if you don’t run them often, when the clocks change.
Lastly, and I really hope you will not be waiting to do this until the next clock change, our office gets about 10 frantic calls a year that people’s hard drives just died. “But my PC is new,” everyone yells, and all of their data is gone. The same clients have never done a backup, or they did it one time on an external hard drive covered with dust. At this point, there are so many good cheap backup cloud programs like Google Backup and Sync, Carbonite and Mozy (These I would recommend for homes only), and offices should be paying a managed service provider to back up their files. There is too much ransomware around to not do this.
Something to try, as my company does every New Year’s Eve: See if you can recover your critical files. Clients might be saving files for years and never realize they missed their critical files but grabbed junk they didn’t need. This does happen very often. Quick backup tip: most programs can’t be backed up anyway, and if they can you usually can download these apps from the software company you purchased them from.
(This is not an IT tip, but they also say to swap out your batteries on your smoke detectors when the clocks change. This is something I do, and it’s worth the five minutes. Otherwise you will hear that chirp on Shabbos and won’t be able to do anything about it.
By Shneur Garb
Shneur Garb is the CEO of The Garb IT Consulting Group. Email him at [email protected].
