Whether you own a Mac, PC or a Linux-based machine, there are certain things you can do with your computer that can mess up its inner workings. They vary in degrees of severity, but for devices that are used by most people every day for hours, there are a surprising number of no-no’s that many people don’t even consider. Make sure you don’t get caught out.
Not Using a Firewall
Firewalls sound a bit archaic because it’s been a while since they were new – surely hackers don’t even attempt hacks that get caught out by firewalls right? Wrong – many people plug their computers straight into their modems without realizing that they aren’t using a firewall. People take them for granted; perhaps because they are built into many routers or pre-installed on computers. But if you don’t have that setting turned on, you will find your computer starting to slow down pretty soon due to viruses like bitcoin miners that completely sap your CPU.
Email Signatures
This will likely confuse many readers – how on earth can email signatures mess up anybody’s computer? The reasons are twofold – firstly, if you accept all email signatures, it is very possible for a piece of malicious javascript to be hidden in there. If you use a modern email service like Gmail, this won’t be an issue and will be picked up upon. However, more difficult to detect is an email signature that has a link to a virus – all you need to do is accidentally press an image and it can download all sorts of trojans, including ransomware.
Another problem that email signatures can cause is if you receive email signatures with images on them, or if you attach images to your own signature and you don’t really know what you’re doing. This is because most people don’t compress their images; and even if you do compress your signature image a lot, you will find it causes the email to multiply in size – up to a thousand times depending on the size of your image. The best way to avoid this is by using an email signature generator – check out the one offered on rocketseed.com; it is well optimized for professional use.
Simply Deleting and Reinstalling Data
When you save a file, data is saved in clusters. Clusters are best thought of as representing a physical location on your disk – if you save a file that is five clusters big, those clusters will be next to each other. If, however, you delete that file and then replace it with a much bigger file, those clusters will be rewritten and then your computer will save the remaining clusters at the next available free space. This effectively divides your data, meaning your computer needs to cut between locations to read the data stored there.
This gives your computer a lot more work than is necessary and can cause your computer to get increasingly slow requiring a computer tune-up. Luckily, there are defragmenters built into some computers, and if you don’t have one you can always download a third-party one.