If One is Good…Two Must Be Better

If you’re like most business people, you have a common password that’s used on both your business and personal computers. Your password is likely to be something containing items such as your street address, birthday, school, family name, etc. which an easily accessible, password-stealing program could identify in just minutes.

To avoid being a victim of cyber criminals, security experts at the University of California, Davis, suggest having two passwords. One would be an easy password that could be used where not much security is needed. The second password would be more intricate and used for banking and other security-sensitive matters. Here are some tips to beef up security:

· Never use a proper name or a word that appears in a dictionary of any language.

· Use at least eight characters including upper and lower case, numbers, and symbols.

· Try using the first letters of words in a quote, phrase, or title.

· Change an element of the password at least quarterly.

Using Microsoft Word’s Research Pane

The Research Pane in Microsoft Word is designed to help you find information from research books or internet research sites. For example, the Research Pane has a dictionary, a thesaurus, a translation dictionary, an encyclopedia and other reference resources.

Although we’ll be showing you how use the Research Pane in Word 2007, it’s available in previous versions of Word as well.

To get started, just highlight a word and right click it. From the menu that appears, select “Look Up” as follows:
The Research Pane appears on the right side of the document. It uses the highlighted word and display results from the encyclopedia and thesaurus.

There are several options on this pane; you can limit the results to just one reference source or you can perform additional actions. For instance, a drop down menu appears when you select a synonym allowing you to quickly insert the word in your document. You can also quickly look up the word in the dictionary.

Another convenient feature is the translation module shown below:

The selected word will appear translated at the bottom. If you want, you can click the green arrow and translate the entire document from one language into another. Just change the “From” and “To” languages as needed.

If needed, you can add or remove research resources by clicking on the Research options link at the bottom of the pane. This allows you to add a dictionary, thesaurus or encyclopedia in another language. You can also add search or financial sites.

If the Research Pane doesn’t work on your computer, give us a call.

Do I Still Need To Defragment My Hard Drive?

The short answer is yes!

For those of you who have never heard of this, we’ll explain. Over time, the files on your PC’s hard drive become fragmented. This happens because the information that makes up a file is not stored in just one place.

It’s sort of like organizing the clothes in your closet. Everything is easier to find when it’s organized.

Since one portion of a file may be at the beginning of your drive and the remainder could be at the end, the time your PC takes to load the information takes longer. Since a slower PC wastes time, you want to defragment your drive.

It’s actually easy to do; just open My Computer, right click your “C” drive and select Properties. Click on the Tools tab and click on the Deframent Now button.

You should do this at least once a month for all of the PCs in your office to help keep them in top running shape.

If you want your PC housekeeping taken care of for you, give us a call at (949) 481-1232. This is just one of the chores our Sentinel Business Services plan handles while you sleep.

Expired or No Antivirus Software?

In the last few weeks, we’ve seen several instances where PCs and even servers have expired antivirus software or no antivirus software installed at all.

When we’ve asked the businesses why, they’ve told us that they thought it wasn’t necessary any more. They thought they just needed a firewall.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case—especially on a server. A firewall is just part of a complete security plan for your business.

Antivirus software is inexpensive now, usually much less than $50 per PC to keep things current and up to date. When faced with the risk of compromising the privacy of your client’s information or lengthy down time to clean up a security breach, why gamble?

“Phishing” Still A Big Problem

A while back, we wrote about “phishing”. It’s a carefully crafted email message or website designed to steal personal information.

One of our clients just had a close call with a phishing attempt. The email message claimed that the business domain (“dot-com”) name was about to expire and needed to be renewed. Actually, that was not the case.

Thankfully, our client asked us to check their domain name account as they could not find their sign on credentials. When we reviewed their account, we realized a renewal was not needed and the email message was a fraudulent attempt to gain the log on information.

Phishing attempts always use odd looking web addresses that belong to the fraudsters. Legitimate companies use their own web address in all of their correspondence.

So, how can you tell what’s OK? Actually, it’s easy. Hold your mouse over the link and if you see an odd web address, don’t click the link. Go to the company’s site directly and save yourself a lot of trouble.