[Cafe] Fwd: Article for messenger

[Gareth Coleman]

Yup thanks for the suggestions - agree with all of them apart from last one
- personally I would tend to agree with somecoolpc's point that when overrun
windows update will often not work or at least be very slow. However it
would make more sense to put it up a bit so that installing firefox comes
after. Revised body text follows; any more comments or improvements please
keep them coming.

Also any concrete ideas as to what to do with the money? Once we have a bank
account we get both the original grant (£5K) and then new one (£1k).

Much love

Gareth

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 because they are 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 use 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.

We then start to protect against future problems by installing Firefox web
browser, as an alternative to internet explorer - 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.

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=320 words)

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