[Cafe] Fwd: Article for messenger

[Gareth Coleman]

Hi everyone,

Good news about the money - also I've written a piece for the
messenger and sent it off to them today. Please feel free to comment.

Gareth

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gareth Coleman <shef.gareth at gmail.com>
Date: 03-Sep-2005 14:15
Subject: Article for messenger
To: messenger at burngraeve.net


Dear Lisa and all at the messenger, 
  
We spoke a while ago about the computer cafe having a column to give
advice and raise our profile. I have pleasure in including a draft
piece that could be the first in a series.
  
We have recently been awarded £1000 by the area panel and plan to use
some of the money for publicity; launch party, poster printing etc. It
would be great if we could co-ordinate our publicity plans as
obviously the messenger is one of the key ways to reach local people.
  
Please let us know how a piece like this might fit in to the paper,
feel free to ring me if you need to speak with me personally or email
the list to speak with us all. We were also thinking of wrining a
slightly different piece with a couple of examples of people who have
come to the cafe with problems and how we fixed them. We would
appreciate your advice on the sort of piece that would work best.
  
Yours 
  
Gareth Coleman 
 

PC help from the
Burngreave Computer Cafe 


We can help you solve all your computer problems FREE on Saturdays
12-3pm in the basement of the New Roots/Ashram shop, Spital Hill.

By far the most common sort of problem we encounter week in and week
out in the cafe is a computer overrun with unwanted programs. A lot of
this is related to internet activity, and can result in unwanted
pop-up boxes, your 'home-page' on the internet being hijacked, or your
computer running slowly or crashing. These problems are caused by
programs such as viruses and 'spyware' - software that secretly
installs itself in your computer.

 

In this, the first in a series of advice columns, we'll give an
overview of the way we go about cleaning up and then preventing your
computer getting clogged up again. We use a total of 6 different
programs to clean up and we'll go through each process in detail over
the coming months. We've chosen each program to be FREE as well as
effective.

 

In the cafe we start by using AVG - an anti-virus program that's free
for personal use. After using that to clean up any viruses we use two
spyware removal programs - Spybot and Ad-Aware.

 

We then start to protect against future problems by installing Firefox
- it is much less vulnerable to infection by spyware than Internet
Explorer. Last but not least is a firewall program - ZoneAlarm. This
protects against hackers and other attacks from the internet.

 

The final step is not a program as such, but a built in feature of
Windows called Windows Update. It connects with Microsoft's servers
and downloads security and other updates for your computer. It is very
important to do this regularly as bugs are discovered in Windows all
the time.

 

You can get more help and advice as well as links to download the
programs at burngreave.net - just click on the cafe link. And if it
all seems a bit daunting then pop down to the cafe one Saturday and
get some help over a cup of tea!

 

(body=325 words)

------------------------
Gareth Coleman
"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." Gandhi 

-- 
------------------------
Gareth Coleman
"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." Gandhi