Technical Support - Prevention is Better Than Cure

The best way to deal with the sloppy service you are bound to receive if you resort to a technical support phone call is to avoid that phone call altogether. The blunt truth is that technical support service, with unwilling companies and logistical hurdles galore, is not going to get better in the near future. Instead of leaving your computer system to the winds of fate and time, it is better and a lot easier to take matters into your own hands. Eventually, all computer software and hardware must be replaced but by taking care of your computer, you can reduce the chances of your computer system failing and increase its longevity. Taking care of computer is easy and cheap as most of the tools are available bundled with the operating system itself. Additional software that you might need is readily available free or very cheap online.

1. Always, always use an antivirus. Your computer, particularly if it is connected to the internet continuously through a broadband connection, is at risk of being infected by over one million malicious computer viruses. Computer viruses are essentially little bits of code that have found ways to get past or manipulate your computer security system. Once they are in your computer, they can wreck havoc. An antivirus is a must for any computer that is connected to the Internet. Even if the computer you use is rarely connected to the internet, it is at risk of being infected by flash-drives, floppies or practically any other external media. Free antivirus software is readily available online if you do not feel like shelling out money on one.

2. House-cleaning. Computers and humans and human life have a great deal in common. Because they were invented and designed by humans, they reflect a lot of human concepts. Computers, like homes, can become cluttered, particularly the hard-drives. Through intensive use, hard-drives will generally get fragmented, which means that a single file may be written across multiple locations on the disk. Although this poses no problem per se to the operation of the computer, it slows it down considerably as to read one file the hard disk must scan to several locations instead of being able to read in one line continuously. Regular defragmentation (the process of joining these fragments of data together on the disk) is a must. Defragmentation software exists natively on your operating system and need not be bought separately.

3. Backup. Never put all your eggs in one basket, someone said, and that principle holds all the more true in the cyber world. Always keep a backup of your important data in a separate location (i.e. on another computer or online; keeping a backup on the same computer is pointless). This way, in the event that your system goes through a catastrophic software crash, all you simply need to do is format (erase) the entire computer, reinstall the operating system and load your vital data back on. In many cases, a clean installation is a lot easier and takes less time than trying to diagnose the problem with a technical support staff.

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