We have all had the joy of opening a search engine such as Google, typing in a keyword or two and coming back with millions of results. It would take the square root of eternity to work through the results. There are easy ways to better refine the results you receive. For the purpose of this article I will use Google as the search engine but the rules apply to all of the various sites.

Now more than ever it is important for us to keep our computers up to date to ensure we keep the nasty part of the internet at bay. There are several areas which you need to keep as up to date as possible.

An all to familiar question we receive is something to the effect of “My computer is infected with ABC virus. How do I remove it?”. There are some good websites and tools available to help users remove viruses on their own and avoid expensive trips to the computer repair shop. Now I am not saying that you will be able to remove all viruses but you will be able to make a better determination on what needs to be done before you have to take it into the shop.

With the amount of options hackers have to enter our computers these days it is essential that you ensure that you are as secure as possible. One area that we often do not secure enough is our wireless routers. There are several easy steps that you can take to ensure that your router is reasonably secure.

Almost all routers use a webpage to configure their settings. For the most part they use a default address of 192.168.0.1 . The usual administrator username is simply “admin”. But I would consult the documentation for the unit to make sure before starting these steps. The first thing to do is to make sure to change the default administrator password on the laptop. By default most routers come either with no password set or the password is simply the word “password”. I would recommend using a password of at least 6 characters that is made up of both numbers and letters.

How can I fix a damaged hard disk so it will work again?

 This question is becoming more and more popular with people upgrading computers and moving drives/information from one computer to another. This can be an expensive repair if you end up using a company to recover the data. But a good way to prevent this issue from arising is to perform regular maintenance on your hard drive(s). Also creating a regular backup of your data allows you to retain your data even when the hard drive fails.

Hello to all Dotto Tech viewers. I would like to welcome you to my blog. In my blog I plan to answer some of the frequently asked questions I have received from viewers. I am also open to submissions of questions that people would like answers to. Please keep in mind though that I will only be answering questions that a number of people have asked. The fist one that I would like to address is the age old one of “What should I look for when buying a computer”? Today, more than ever, this is not an easy question to answer due to the large number of choices on the market today.