I thought I would share some tips based on experiences as an IT professional. I hope you find this list helpful.

1. Add a sub account to your bank account, deposit only the money you will need for online purchases into it, then use that card–and only that card–for online transactions. Don’t trust online vendors with your main credit card #.  If you have been using your main card for transactions online, call your bank, report the card missing, get a new card number asap, and never again use your main card online.

2. Never save credit card numbers with online vendors. Always ensure they do not store your credit card number online. Also, NEVER email your social security number or any other private info  you don’t want to share with the world.

3. Don’t save user names and passwords to any websites on your computer. It may be a pain to type them in all the time, but you’ll have peace of mind knowing that if you PC ever gets stolen, no one will be able to impersonate you.

4. Don’t save files to your computer… ever. Always save files to a USB jump drive.. and back that jump drive up to another device on a weekly basis. This way if your computer melts down or gets stolen, you have lost nothing. If you do a lot of word processing, you may want to check out Google Documents as it has a built in word processor and you can store all your files online. In fact now you can even upload your Word docs to your Google account and store them there. You’ll always have access to your docs wherever you have internet access.

5. Back up all your important files to a device or share that is NOT always connected to your computer. External hard drives are not all they are cracked up to be. I recently lost 500GB of data from a Seagate Freeagent USB drive because it’s “master file table” became corrupt. Windows did not inform me of this, nor did I get any other indication anything was wrong.. until it was too late and files suddenly started disappearing. While there are tons of online solutions now (adrive, idrive, drop.io, etc etc) I still believe the most cost effective and reliable solution are jump drives. Walmart is the place to buy them.

6.Get a virus program and keep it running. Best freeware I have found so far is Avast. Highly recommended. Also download Malware Bytes and Spybot Search and Destroy and run them every week for good measure.

7. Find out what is going on in your computer. It’s your computer, you should know what it is up to! Windows 7 offers users the most intuitive way to monitor what your computer is up to. Just click START>Type in EVENTS in the search field>Select VIEW EVENT LOGS> Then in the screen that comes up under “Summary of administrative events” you can click and view errors, warnings, info, and other alerts. What you;re looking for is an excessive number of events in any given category. For instance in my warnings some event called SideBySide has errored like 500+ times. That is a problem. I then can go into Google and type “SideBySide errors” and read up on causes. I can then get a geek friend to tell me how to fix this error. Often times these types of errors can slow your computer down to a crawl.  I recently fixed one that increased my download speed by about 30kbs.

8. Never click on any extemporaneous offers when checking out of major website purchases. Check out this article on MSNBC today. Even legit companies like Amazon are working with shady spammers and marketing companies behind the scenes. I recently got signed up for some travel club to the tune of $100 per year without my permission. Bad news.

9. Use GMAIL for email. It’s secure, reliable and 99.9% spam free. Also, change your email password every week. Also, make all your passwords long and impossible to guess like  joe%sac#Mark

10. Terminate all file and print sharing at home. Make sure no computers in your home can access each other.  There are now hundreds upon thousands of worms and viruses whose sole mission is to proliferate across home networks and attack every computer on it. I have seen this happen multiple times now and it is almost always the source of slow internet connections and computers in a home network.

11. Bonus round: test your computer internet connection speed frequently. Run a test here: http://www.speedtest.net/. Is your upload and download speed consistent with what you are paying for ? Don’t know? Call your ISP and ask them. Ask them what plan you are on and then tell them your results.  Why is this important?  Because  many viruses and worms hijack computers and use them to launch denial of service attacks on other web sites and even to provide storage space. Furthermore, people routinely hack into their neighbors’ networks and use them to access the net. By finding out your internet connection speed, you can see if someone else is using your bandwidth. Example: I am paying for 2MBS internet connection. I noticed I could not get more than about 1.4MBS when downloading. I ran multiple virus tests and found my computer was infected and was being used for some purpose without my consent. After eradicating the virus, my download speeds are now exceeding 2MBS again.

I will post another ten in the near future.  Feel free to post your tips here for others as well.