How Basic Computer Information Helps

This blog has been started with the intent to help people everywhere that want basic computer information to have a place to come and find information. Also people would have a place to ask questions about the information. However when I got started working on ideas for the blog and even starting a couple posts on the blog it occurred to me that maybe people really did not see a point in knowing basic computer information. After that I decided that I would post some reasons it is important to learn as much of the basic information in this blog as a person can. So for this blog instead of teaching another part of computers I will be explaining why the information in this blog is so important to everyday computer users.

I decided for the information I would talk to a few people in the computer field and ask them what they considered important basic information and why. I went to a few classmates seeing as we have all been working on computers and networking for a couple of years and have been learning about all the things that could go wrong with the computer. I also went to the instructor over the basic computer information courses to see what his views were on what I should include in the blog. There is not a lot of basic information references on the internet so I am pretty much building this one from my knowledge and the knowledge of others. Out of all the things that we talked about there was two things that everyone brought up and agreed on as the biggest problems.

The first thing that I would like to explain is the importance of keeping the computer clean. This may not seem like a big deal to most but I will explain various problems that can be prevented from just cleaning the outside of the computer. The first thing to understand is what dust can do to the computer. Dust can cause your computer to catch fire for one thing and is probably the biggest reason of them all. There are also components in the computer that can be effected which are the power supply, the fans, the hard drive, and even the RAM, so as you can see the dust alone can destroy almost any part of the inside of the computer. Dust on the outside of the computer can cause the USB ports to stop working along with a DVD drive or media card reader. These are everyday problems that a lot of people have that can be prevented by just vacuuming off the computer when you vacuum the room the computer is in which is something that Instructor Greg Bell tries to make sure that every student understands on day one of class.

The next thing that we ran into a lot while working on people’s computers at school is the people would not run an antivirus or if they did it was never updated so the antivirus could not do its job the way it was supposed to. Making sure the antivirus is running and the automatic updates are turned on is another big step in keeping the computer running and also avoiding any problems. Some of the things that can go wrong if there is not an up-to-date antivirus running is the hard drive can be destroyed in a matter of minutes, and the BIOS, which is what tells your computer what to do and how to do it, can be destroyed. There is also the fact that antivirus helps keep malware off of the computer that can steal a person’s personal information. I had a person tell me “well I do not have any personal information saved on my computer so I have nothing to worry about”. Guess what that was just simply not true and in this day and age I would imagine that it is not true with anyone. Anytime someone signs up for an email account or even signs up for a social networking site the information that is typed in is saved somewhere on the hard drive of the computer. Also just because a person may log out of a bank account does not mean that account is safe because that information is also saved on the hard drive. If the antivirus is not running then there are also programs that can be secretly downloaded onto the computer that can follow every key stroke and watch every web site a person visits.

So as you can see those are two simple things that can be done to a computer to prevent most common computer problems. I would hope that if people did take something away from reading this blog that they would decide to do these two things. In the hardware software class at my college we fix computers for people the entire semester and judging by what problems came into that room this past semester at least 75% of the computers if not more that came in would not have needed to be there at all if these two things I just discussed would have been done on the computers. I will be covering how to keep the computers clean and the different choices of antivirus in another blog post in the coming weeks but for now I just wanted people to understand why my classmates, my instructor, and I feel that this is an important blog to have on the internet so that people can learn about taking care of their computers.

Works Cited

Bell, Greg. "How Basic Computer Information Helps." Personal interview. 14 Mar. 2013. Instructor of CIT, has an AAS in Information Systems, Currently work on a BS in Business Education Computer Information Technology, and does CIT work for a local business.

Brewster, James. "How Basic Computer Information Helps." Personal interview. 14 Mar. 2013. Currently working on a degree in Networking Technology.

"Computer Basics." GCFLearnFree.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2013. <http://www.gcflearnfree.org/computerbasics>.

Drew, Jessica. "The Benefits of Having Anti-virus Protection." - TopTenREVIEWS. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2013. <http://anti-virus-software-review.toptenreviews.com/the-benefits-of-having-anti-virus-protection.html>.

Gillespie, Christopher. "How Basic Computer Information Helps." Personal interview. 14 Mar. 2013. Currently working on a degree in Networking Technology with minors in Computers and Internet Security.

"How To Check Your PC Avast Anti-Virus If Its Active Or Secured." AllSEOTech. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2013. <http://allseotech.com/2012/11/05/how-to-check-your-pc-avast-anti-virus-if-its-active-or-secured/>.

Ranck, Michelle. "How Basic Computer Information Helps." Personal interview. 14 Mar. 2013. AAS In Computer Information Technology, and continuing education in Networking Technology and Information System Security.