PC Maintenance and Security

For this assignment, we were to view at least three videos on PC Maintenance and Security via Atomic Learning.

The first video I watched was “Typical Problems on Today’s Personal Computers”.  The whole video surprised me because I was thinking it would be about typical hardware fixes, but it was regarding disorganization, malware, spam, loss of privacy and intrusions from outsiders.  This video was pretty vague about “how” to do any of these procedures and indicated it would be covered in other sessions.  According to this video, all of these things are easy to take care of.

The second video was regarding “Active X”.  Active X is a catch-all term given to a variety of programming tools developed by Microsoft.  It was designed to allow web browsers to auto-launch and work with program files over the internet, however, this same tool is what has caused so many security breaches with Windows.  Care really needs to be taken to only use the Active X tools that are needed.

The third video was on how to “Set up search preferences in Google”.  This allows users to blocks web pages containing explicit text and images.  This would be really useful in the classroom setting – especially at elementary level.  I will definitely keep this in mind to teach students and educators to prevent “surprises” during internet searches.  I knew about this feature, but have not used it in quite some time.  It was nice to review this feature again.