The newer model reviewed here now has a reinforced front zip, meaning it should last longer. Ready to go right now? We judge antivirus software by three things: how much malware and viruses a program can detect, how good it is at getting them out of there without a trace or secondary issues, and how much memory and power they take up. Even if we’re not doing anything particularly shady or questionable, viruses get in: That’s what they’re made for. How much you make determines how well you’re able to prevent getting sick, and the people who are most likely to get Covid often also have the hardest time getting vaccinated. If you have the time and the budget to do it, add an extra non-weekend day. While expensive solutions like water-cooling kits and phase-change units (imagine a high-end deep freeze for your machine) aren’t necessary for the average computer, you can easily install extra fans for components inside the machine that are getting too excited for their own good. While it’s easy to declutter your desk or work area, it’s also important to remember this tip if your tower lives under your desk, or in a special cubby, because the hot air in those situations can build up and recycle itself, getting hotter and hotter inside the space.
Defrag. Whenever you change, move, copy or delete a file, your computer usually does the minimum work necessary to give you the desired result. A defrag utility will go hunting through the wilds of your free space, collecting those random shadows and getting rid of them for good. 120-volt AC power, oscillating at 60 Hz, but often that’s not exactly what it’s getting. They’re easy to spot: There’s going to be one on the CPU, one inside the power supply, and probably another one on the front or side of the case itself. What these terms refer to is the wilderness of digital energy inside your computer’s memory drives, which are naturally a lot less tidy than you might expect. But if your needs are different — if you have lots of data or media you want to keep to yourself, protect, or otherwise maintain access to regardless of equipment failure — you really should listen to your IT guy and back that stuff up. If you’ve ever cracked a case open and looked at the fans inside, you won’t have forgotten that grungy sight.
Just turn the computer off, take it outside, and clear those fans out with some canned air before deciding whether to upgrade. Which leads us to the most helpful way to be proactive here: by cleaning and/or replacing the fans that keep everything working. It’s a brute-force way of checking disks for errors, and it’s the kind of thing you don’t think about until about five minutes too late. One easy way to remember your backup system — which is to say, remember to actually use it — is to remember that World Backup Day comes just before April Fool’s Day, and that’s no mistake. That means there’s no switchover time, like you’d imagine with a generator or other backup. It’s not that we’re being walled off from that knowledge at all — they’re our machines, we should know how to work with them, and the information is readily available — but it can sometimes feel like an episode of “House” in there: Change one thing over here, and suddenly it’s going haywire in a completely different area. The most popular ones are self-updating, meaning they’re always learning new red-flags and ways of locating and immunizing against threats, they include utilities like those listed above so you can clean house all from one location (very satisfying), and they include task schedulers that can make all of these things happen while you’re asleep!
That means bits and pieces of files are left around in the empty spaces, not useful but also not gone, meaning your “free” space isn’t technically free. There are some great free programs on the market that excel in all three areas. The same goes for common software programs. Most of the free antivirus software we’ll be looking at comes bundled with analogues of the other two — as well as a version of the very helpful task scheduler we’ll talk about later — so we’ll focus there, but here are some definitions for the layman. While external hard drives have become easy to come by, there are plenty of services that provide storage, free or for a price, that can sync your data easily and seamlessly, so that you never have to worry about another crash or disaster. I have spent that last eight years traveling around the world and know a thing or two about footwear.
