How small business owners are abusing their PCs
How SOHOs are abusing their PCs
My e-mail to Deep Tech was straightforward: “You must see a lot of kludged-up PCs and networks. Do you have a personal Top 3 User Errors list?”
Did he ever.
Regular readers are familiar with Deep Tech. By day, he’s an IT professional at a local business, where his support duties include many teleworkers. By night, he provides community tech support. The guy is worth his weight in gold: reasonable fees, fast response, encyclopedic knowledge. I’m not sure I would have gotten my wireless network running without him (see column).
Here’s his list of common oversights.
Backups
Most people simply don’t do backups. Deep Tech asks about backups during each house call, and the response is almost always a sheepish, “What? Me, back up data?” That data puts a roof over your head and buys shoes for the kids, does it not? Back it up. With inexpensive Web-storage options available that let you automate backups, there’s no excuse not to.
Deep Tech also says, “SOHOs rarely test their backups, so when it hits the fan they are flying blind or are in serious trouble.”
Spyware
Spyware generally piggybacks its way onto your hard drive with free downloads or when you visit adult Web sites. Boy, does Deep Tech detest spyware. “Johnny’s child has to go out, browse the Web and download games,” he says. “Soon the computer is unusable – it’s slow, or hundreds of pop-ups come up every hour.” More than once, he’s made an emergency visit to a small business person’s home to find the PC rendered unusable by spyware the owner didn’t know existed.
Fortunately, there are several good software applications that detect and delete spyware. Deep Tech recommended Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition 1.05; I run it once a month and inevitably find a few dozen spyware programs on my own PC.
Also consider this advice: “Someone asked me a few days ago about letting her son install some games on her new computer – the computer she just purchased for her business,” Deep Tech says. “I asked, ‘If you were a professional truck driver, would you let your son take the truck out for a drive?’ ” PCs and wireless networking gear are cheap; maybe the time is right to get a second computer for family use.
File-sharing
If you don’t already know that peer-to-peer file-sharing opens you up to all manner of problems, consider yourself warned. The one that really sticks in Deep Tech’s craw is Kazaa. “The default setting is to use all (oh yes, I mean all) available bandwidth,” he says. “It could suck the life out of a T-1 in 30 seconds. At his day job, he says, a single rogue Kazaa user once “caused 90% of my users to call the help desk and complain that the network was slow.” When Deep Tech identified the culprit, he says, “I threatened physical harm.” He’s joking. I think.
File sharing can damage more than just network performance. It can leave you open to viruses and other attacks, and if you’re illegally swapping copyrighted materials, there’s legal liability as well.
Are you guilty of any mistakes on Deep Tech’s list? Got any horror stories to share, or personal pet peeves to warn your fellow small-business owners of? Let me know.
