LG

hi guy's. Well i thought i would share some good news it starts with my mother who finally bought herself her very first computer system she bought an Accer laptop built-in: wifi os: Windows 7 home premium,4 gb of ram,500 gb hard built-in:web cam drive personal firewall antivirus i think norton any suggestions

Congratulations!

LG Product Pro, i'll tell my mom what you said she'll be happy. She goes online April 6, 2010 my dad bought her a wireless router modem from comcast for sharing the same internet service but different ip address

LG Product Pro, my mother is now online this morning she locked up her pc some how i told her to reset it you know cntrol alt del at the same time do you have any suggestions i could give her like a better personal firewall like windows firewall um should she leave automatic updates turned on 24/7 she said thank you for the congratulations

I'd leave the updates on, I like to make sure I'm up to date... As far as Personal Firewalls, I don't know what to recommend there some really good choices out there, just read User reviews and some of what the "Experts" say.

Posted by LG Product Pro on 09 Apr 2010 09:33 AM:

I'd leave the updates on, I like to make sure I'm up to date... As far as Personal Firewalls, I don't know what to recommend there some really good choices out there, just read User reviews and some of what the "Experts" say.

LG Product Pro, Thanks a bunch

i'll tell my mother to leave updates turned on should she enable Windows firewall as well so that way she'll be safe

I recently helped my mother-in-law get on line @ age 67 w/ very little computer expierance. My best advice ( and this comes from being it admin at work for 15 years) is that the internet is a BAD place and you won't be able to protect your computer and be 100% safe. It is best to keep good backups of your data and a few times a year image or backup the entire hard drive. Install a good internet security suite (I can't really reccomend specific software as there are so many. No security software is perfect, the best protection is pratice safe computing techniques. The best way to learn is to learn from mistakes; although this can be frustrating for the administrator of the computer. I use a free program, G4U - http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ to clone or image my systems to an external usb hard drive. The process is very easy and takes only20 to 30 minutes for an 80 GB hard drive (more than enough for the system partition).
HTH - Roy

Roy, my mom has a 500gb how can she make a backup of that

As a simple solution just go the BestBuy or other and get an external drive with backup software already installed. There anre many such devices available with a one touch backup solution already configured. If you want more control and are savy enough continue reading.

G4U works by copying the drive byte for byte to annother device. If you use the diskcopy function it will require you to have a target drive at least as large as the source drive. The diskcopy function will create an exact copy of the drive including all partitions. I recommend creating multiple partitions on a drive to help organize the data and programs. I would recommend a 60 - 80 GB system partition which should be large enough for the operation system and the programs installed.

I would also create different partitions for dirrerent data types: music, video, pictures, personal documents & professional/work documents. I would size these partitions appropriately for the amount of data you wish to use for each catagory. You may have other catagories as well; I have a P drive for general programs, a G drive for games, a M drive for music, a F drive for files, a W drive for work, & a S drive for the swap space - windows paging file. Smaller partitions allow for smaller sector size which will waste less drive space for many small files.

The seperate partition for the swap space helps system performance and helps the system drive from be becomming as fragmented. The swap partition should be be near the center of the drive (one of the first partitions) for the best performance (best if it is the first partition on a separate drive form the OS.

G4U can also copy partitions only (copypart) wich allows you to only backup what you need. I recommend alternating between two different system partition backups. This allows you to fall back to a previous backup if you get a nasty virus or a botched program uninstall. I would do a system backup on a quarterly interval or more often if you install programs or change configuration often. I would backup other data more often perferably daily or weekly depending upon how important the data is and how often data is added.

G4U by is designed to run from a bootable disk or CD (it is very small in size and will fit on a credit card sized CD). I want to eventually create a single usb backup drive. I want to create a small bootable partition for G4U. I would then have multiple other partition: 2 for sys backups, and one each for all the other data partitions (you don't need to backup the swap partition). I then want to write a simple menued script in perl or other linux compatable scripting language (G4U is based on Free BSD). This script would allow me to simplly choos the type of backup I want to perform. Using this model the script would use the copypart function to backup or restore partitions. This is an outine of the menu structure:
B1 - Backup - OS - 1
B2 - Backup - OS - 2
BF - Backup - Files
BG - Backup - Games
BM - Backup - Music
BP - Backup - Programs
BW - Backup - Work
R1 - Restore - OS - 1
R2 - Restore - OS - 2
... you get the idea.
I would set this script to auto-run when the system is booted from the G4U partition on the external usb backup drive.

Good Strategy! Backups are critical... I have a Boot CD with my Backup app installed and I have two different USB drives that I alternate backing up to every other day...