Computer Maintenance and Security: What a Learning Experience!

This week in class I learned about how to protect my computer. It is always a bit disheartening to hear all of the problems that others can cause for you because of greed or whatever the motive. I was surprised by how much I did not know about protecting my computer. I thought that just using different passwords and having an anti-virus program was enough, but there are so many more steps to protecting a computer.

One of the assignments this week was to watch Atomic Learning Videos about PC Maintenance and Security. I watched quite a few and learned so much. Below are comments and thoughts I had about three of those videos.

The first tutorial that I watched was "Showing the results of bad security and careless computing." It gave information about all of the potential problems that are out there if your computer is not properly protected. It also gave advice about what you need to install to protect your computer. One thing that I was surprised about was that you in fact do need both an anti-virus and anti-spyware. This may sound silly, but I sort of thought they were the same thing. This is something that my husband and I will certainly need to update on our computers.

The next tutorial I watched was called "Installing Roboform." I think this is a very interesting application. You can download Roboform and it will take any of the passwords that you've allowed your Internet server to remember and will maintain a list of them automatically. You do need a password to access this list it sounds like. I will definitely share information about this program with others as I have never heard of it before. It could be helpful because I do have different passwords and every now and then I find myself forgetting which password I used for a program, especially if it's a program I rarely use. For whatever reason, even when I ask Firefox to always remember the password, sometimes it does not. For this Roboform would provide great back up. However, I tend to be a little overly cautious and it would concern me that if someone ever hacked into Roboform's program, all of my passwords for all of my different programs, including sensitive information like banking, would be revealed. Maybe I'm just being a bit paranoid after having read about all the hackers and scams out there. Has anyone else ever used this program? What are your thoughts?

Since I was curious about Roboform after that introductory video, I decided to watch the next video in the series: "Managing your web passwords with Roboform." One interesting thing I learned from this is that you can still require that your master password from Roboform be used to access any of the sites, or not. Another neat option is that once you fill out your identity on Roboform it remembers it and can fill out other forms for you. That option was the most surprising to me because it showed me that it's not just the convenience of not having to remember passwords, but there's also the convenience of not having to fill out long forms every time a site asks for your identity information. It has definitely led me to re-think whether this would be a valuable tool for me or not. If there is anyone who has had personal experience with Roboform, I would be curious to hear your input. Is it a valuable time saver or could it just lead to more potential problems down the road?