Another big security issue for your Windows installation is keeping up with Microsoft’s security patches. You do this via the online “Windows Update” feature of Windows.
As the bad guys (or the good guys working for security companies) discover new ways to exploit the weaknesses in Windows, or the Internet itself, Microsoft figures out ways to protect against these vulnerabilities by making changes to Windows. Then Microsoft publishes them to everyone who subscribes to the free Windows Update service.
When a new vulnerability is discovered you need protection right away. That’s why you should setup automatic downloading of patches by using the Windows Update service. But, there’s a problem with these unsupervised automatic updates.
Microsoft has the bad habit of “slipstreaming” new products or major operating system revisions (“Service Packs”) in with their security updates. Remember, you don’t want to be an early adopter of new products, or Service Packs – you want to stay “off the “bleeding edge” and position yourself way back on the “leading edge”.
For example, Microsoft may automatically send you a new version of Internet Explorer, their web browser. But the new browsers almost always have serious bugs. You want to wait a month or three for these bugs to get squashed, before using the latest browser.
Happily, Microsoft provides a way to do “semi-automatic” Windows Updates to avoid this problem. You setup Windows Update as usual (e.g. from Control Panel or the Start button list). On Microsoft’s update page, you choose the option to automatically download all downloads – but to ask you before actually installing them. This auto download is good – it means when there’s a new update you don’t have to wait for it to download – it will download in the background, while you work.
When the new update is ready to install, you’ll see the usual yellow shield symbol in the System tray (where the clock is). The next trick it to click on that shield emblem – but don’t then select “Express Install” from the dialog box that appears. Instead, choose “Custom Install”. This lets you see a list of the updates before installing any. You can then cancel any that you don’t want.
My advice is to go ahead and install any Windows Update that mentions “security” in the description. Otherwise you are compromising your security. If there is a bug in a security patch and it gives you trouble (an extremely rare event in my experience), you can later remove only that patch, using the Control panel “Add/Remove” program tool (which has a different name in Vista).
Disk Defragmenter
This is another maintenance tool everyone needs. Hard Disk “fragmentation” happens like this: All your software files are actually broken up into small parts (each like a link in a chain). These small parts can be strung out all over your drive (wherever there happened to be an empty spot to put one). This is done because most of your files are too large to efficiently store all in one piece – that would leave lots of unusable spaces on your drive, spaces that no file could fit into.
So, the Windows file system breaks your files up into those small pieces and keeps track of where each of these “links” in the file “chain” is located, and how to join them back together when you need them. Now imagine your hard drive platter spinning around under the read/write heads. You can read or write all the links in your chain much faster if they are all contiguous. And you’ll get the slowest performance if the links are far away from each other (in terms of platter rotation time), since the hard drive will have to wait for the platter to make as much as a full revolution – besides moving the heads away from or toward the center of the platter to wherever the small data piece is.
When your data file parts are thoroughly scattered all over your drive platter(s), performance suffers a lot and your drive is said to be “fragmented”. This is another item in the long list (my list has 28 items) of things that slow down Windows. Very serious fragmentation even increases the chance that your files won’t be properly reconstructed by the file system, with missing or out-of-order links in that chain – data corruption.
The job of your defragmenter utility program is to move all the links in all your data file chains around so that they end up in nice contiguous groups – where they can be scooped up rapidly by the read heads with max efficiency and speed. And the defragmenter moves all the empty parts of you platters together into big empty stretches, so data writing speed also improves.
Some versions of Windows come with a slightly crippled defragmenter. That is, it works fine but is made so that it can’t be scheduled for automatic defragmentation. You have to remember to run it manually. This is a typical sales trick (there outta be a law) to get you to buy the “advanced” version of the defragmenter, which can be scheduled and has some other nice features.
Actually, I always buy the advanced version, so I’m sorry – I can’t tell you which versions of Windows might have versions of the defragmenter which must be run manually, and I don’t mean to frighten you. But you should certainly check yours out! There’s more than one way to get to your defragmenter. One is: [Start button > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Defragmenter]
The default defragmenting program that comes with Windows is “Diskeeper”. To find out if it is already protecting your drive, run it and do an “analysis” on your boot (C:) drive. After a while it will tell you whether it thinks you need to defrag and will present a report. If you want to decide for yourself, look in the report for the “% of fragments”. If it’s less than about 10%, you don’t really need to defrag. And that would mean that your defragmenter is already “taking care of business” and you don’t need to do anything more.
If your drive is heavily fragmented, be sure to do a defrag. Of course you’ll need to close any open programs before defraging. A full backup first would also be a good idea.
It might take as long as an hour (maybe even longer, if it’s a big drive) for a defrag process to complete. Don’t try to use your system during defragmentation – and be sure no one turns it off or restarts it!
If you did need to defrag, then you may have a defragmenter which can’t be scheduled. You can try to schedule it, to find out, by: [Start button > Control panel > Scheduled Tasks > Add Scheduled Task] If it won’t let you schedule periodic defrags, you’ll know you have a problem. You can either buy the advanced version of Diskeeper or be sure to manually defrag every month.
Please feel free to comment below…
‘Til next time…
_jim coe
Tags: anti-virus, defrag, defragment your drive, malware, Microsoft's patches, utility program, Windows update
