Nebulane

Make a (ghost) image of your PC and save time when formating

nebulane — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:16:57 +0000

Are you in the situation of having to format your PC, we recommend that you make a ghost image of your hard drive when you have finished formatting and installing all necessary drivers, programs, etc.

This means that in the future you can just paste your image back to your PC in case of damage, virus, or due to the PC having become sluggish or anything else. An image is a file with everything on your PC at any given time – in this case just after formatting. It is much faster to load the ghost image, rather than having to install everything again. Moreover, it installs and updates by itself. Nebulane recommend Norton Ghost for this

Avoid censorship on the internet – change DNS provider

nebulane — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 19:18:18 +0000

When you write for instance google.com, your DNS provider translates it to eg. 74.125.229.48. Unfortunately, there are some providers that are full of trickery and direct you to other pages than desired. Or even worse, they exercise censorship. This can be simply and easily avoided by changing the DNS provider. PC Doctors recommend Google as a DNS provider.

Installing various programs at a time

nebulane — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:55:53 +0000

When buying a new PC or after formatting it, you want to install all the small programs that you use on a daily basis. Instead of having to find, download, install, say no to various toolbar’s for each program, it can be done with a few clicks, thanks to a useful website called www.ninite.com. Tick off the programs you want to install, download and run the program, then it will take care of the rest.

Antivirus for smartphones

nebulane — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:51:20 +0000

So far, the major of antivirus providers have not had a strong focus on antivirus for mobile phones, which is strange, as more and more people are using their smartphone or tablet as their secondary workstation.

But there are solutions. One of them is ESET Mobile Antivirus, which you can download from http://www.eset.com/us/home/mobile-antivirus. They offer a 30-day trial so you can see if it’s a solution for you and your company. Another provider is Kaspersky: http://www.kaspersky.com/trials?chapter=171229147. Here is a 7-day trial period.

You should be aware of what operating system your device is running, because there are different mobile antiviruses to Android, Symbian, Windows, etc.

Monitoring and surveillance

nebulane — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:42:09 +0000

As part of your safety policies, it is recommended to set up surveillance on your servers so that you can follow the trends in consumption/load/performance etc.
This is done both to ensure that you have the correct setup and that you have the necessary equipment. Monitoring can be used to proactively avoid future deficiencies and thereby minimize downtime and/or data loss.

Additionally you can also monitor erroneous login, time of login, and much more to close any security holes.

Flashing BIOS – why and how.

admin — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 21:34:57 +0000

Flashing BIOS is one of the most dangerous things you can do with a computer; therefor it’s strongly recommended to leave this to professionals.
Why do it then? Well, as with everything else in IT, there are updates and new versions of BIOS. Sometimes it may even be the last resort in effort to try saving a computer.
In order to flash BIOS, you’ll need the following: Flash-tool from the manufacturer of the BIOS-chip and the latest version of BIOS. How you do it, varies from manufacturer to manufacturer so be sure always to check the manual.