Computers, like people need a bit of tender loving care every now and again, a chance to repair any damage that may have been done in the past.Unfortunately, unlike humans whose immune system automatically repairs any damage, machines tend to need a bit of a push in order to fix themselves.

What I’m going to write now isn’t something that should be done optionally; the stuff I am about to write should be stamped in big writing on the side of every computer case manufactured for all users to read!

These are very basic tools, but failure to run them can often result in data loss, slow performance and random crashes, just 10 minutes every couple of weeks can keep your computer in good working order.

Unfortunately not all of what I cover here will be available for everybody, for example … Read the rest

One thing I have always taken for granted when writing this series of articles is that the majority of people reading it have a slight idea of what the Internet consists of and where it came from, however a comment down the pub last week, ‘So who owns the Internet, anyway’ prompted me to do a sharp rethink.Because of this, I will spend this week doing a brief history lesson.We’ll look back at where the Internet came from, how it’s grown and so for which the reason why nobody actually owns it.

During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the USA was facing the fact that a Nuclear war against the … Read the rest

This week I’m going to cover an area which needs really more than one article to do the subject matter any justice; chatting on the Internet.I have little doubt that many of you would have used e-mail in the past to communicate to other Internet users, but what if you could communicate directly to the person concerned and they could reply to you immediately?This is the service that Internet chat provides, and to kick off we will look at the most primitive, yet also one of the most complex ways of doing this, a technology known as Internet Relay Chat (IRC).As just mentioned, this area is a fair bit more difficult … Read the rest

Once again I find myself answering the many issues that readers have regarding Internet security, or more accurately the apparent lack of it.To recap, so far we have covered the topics of children accessing inappropriate material over the Internet and the possibility of virus infection though the means of file downloads and e-mail attachments.This week we will be looking at the questions surrounding using your credit or debit card to order goods and services online.

When you consider the fact that there are an estimated 350 million people on the Internet all able to order goods by credit card it makes you wonder how we can be sure that the credit … Read the rest