Lock your computer

How do I lock my computer?

Best practice is to lock your computer when you are away from your desk. This is quick and easy and prevents unauthorised users from logging into to your computer:

Hold down the Ctrl Alt and Del keys on your keyboard to bring up Task Manager and choose Lock This Computer. Or, if you have a Windows key on your keyboard you can hold this down and press L.

Lost laptops

We keep hearing about data loss in the media, our staff carry information on their laptops. What can we do to protect our company?

One of the major challenges with losing data or having items stolen is the bad publicity. That’s at the start and then clients start to lose confidence and cancel contracts. Protecting your company’s data is essential if you hold anything about people; names, dates of birth, addresses, other personal or company information. It’s essential to do more than carry a laptop around in a supermarket plastic bag – that was the advice given by one major firm some years ago to ensure staff didn’t look as if they were carrying any valuables.

Most thefts of laptops are opportunistic. There are steps you can take to minimise the risk:

1 - Protect the data

• Ensure data is password protected; ideally encrypted so if the laptop is stolen, no one can hack into it without considerable effort.
  

2 - Organise a security policy with staff

• Agree where laptops can be left and when, i.e. if in a car they must be in a locked boot and kept out of sight.
• How they should be transported, i.e. in laptop bags, briefcases, large handbags or man bags or indeed plastic carrier bags!

3 - Prepare a plan

• It is also useful to have a plan of what do if it does go wrong and the worst happens.
• Rehearse with your staff what to do if they are confronted by someone wishing to take the laptop by force, you also need to think about their safety.
• Have statements prepared that can be issued to the media, if necessary.
• Have back-up copies of all the information available so that the loss of the laptop does not mean a serious interruption to the business.

Mail Goggles

New Service from Google Labs

Google Labs has developed a new feature for Google Mail users called Mail Goggles.

The idea is to help prevent people from sending emails they may later regret and that may never have been sent had they been either more awake or .... erm ... sober!

Mail Goggles asks users to complete a mini maths test before being allowed to send emails. The maths test only pops up when you log on to Google Mail early in the mornings or whenever you have set it to pop up in your mail settings.

To enable Mail Goggles log in to your Gmail account, click Settings and then Labs, choose enable on the Mail Goggles and click Save Changes.

To change the times when Mail Goggles pops up, visit the General Tab and the settings can be changed here. Has anyone used this? Did it stop you from sending your email?

ICT Excellence award shortlist

We're really pleased that Acutec has been nominated for the ICT Excellence Award for Most Improved Business. We're on the shortlist and the winners will be announced on 20 November 2008.

The Annual ICT Excellence Awards sponsored by the West Midlands ICT Cluster was established in 2005 with the aims of:

· Growing recognition of the ICT Cluster and capabilities within ICT companies in the West Midlands, potential customers in the West Midlands, the national ICT media, and the ICT industry nationally
· Building a sense of self-identity in the Cluster
· Promoting, celebrating and show-casing best-practice, innovation and achievement

Web or Content filtering

I need to block access to some websites for most of the day but make them available between 12.45pm and 1.45pm - how do I do this?

Blocking internet access to some or all sites in known as ‘Web or Content filtering’.

Web filtering is achieved by the use of a device on the network or software on a server which checks network traffic from computers destined for the internet. The Web Filter checks the traffic against it’s database of allowed and denied times of the day and allowed and denied websites and ultimately allows or denies the traffic. The computer user is notified that a website has been blocked if necessary. It is important to understand exactly what is required by a business from a Web Filter, your IT support company will be able to recommend the best solution to apply your policy.

Floppy disks

I need to access an old file that's on a floppy disk but I have a laptop and no floppy disk drive - any ideas?

Well you are going to have to find a PC with a floppy drive and copy the data onto a USB key or writeable CD or email the data to yourself. If you can’t find one and the data is important or perhaps you have a lot of floppies to copy you can buy external floppy drives that plug into a USB port. A quick search on http://www.google.co.uk/ found drives for around the £20 mark. If you have an IT support company looking after your systems they should be able to help and copy the data for you.

Confidential Data

What's the best way to destroy confidential data on a CD?

There are numerous ways of doing this but broadly you can break it, irretrievably damage the surface or we securely destroy our CDs by putting them into our office shredder – which is designed for the job - make sure yours is too before you try this.

If you have a lot of CDs to destroy then contact your IT support company – they will be able to have the CDs destroyed by a specialist organisation that will both destroy your data and ensure that the CD remains are correctly disposed off.

Emailing large files

I want to email a file but it's too big to attach - what can I do?

It is possible to make a file smaller. In Windows right click on the file and select ‘Send To’ .... ‘Compressed (zipped) Folder’. Windows will make a compressed copy of your file – you will spot it either by the filename changing to something.zip or having a folder icon with a zip on it. This file will usually be a lot smaller than your original and possibly small enough to email. This doesn’t work well for some media files like MP3 music or video as the data in these is already compressed but other file types can shrink to a fraction of their initial size.

When the file gets to its recipient they simply double-click on it and this will reveal the contents.

Your second option is to use an email account that has a bigger size limit – perhaps Hotmail or GoogleMail (Gmail) which will go up to 20Mb. Bear in mind that your recipient’s mailbox may also have a size restriction!

Thirdly, you can use a service for emailing large files such as http://www.yousendit.com/. This gets round the email size limit by not actually emailing the file. The process is simple – you specify the file and the recipient, the file is uploaded to a secure server and your recipient is sent a small email telling them the file is there and giving them a link to download it. Bear in mind that if you are on an ADSL link that the upload speed is usually much slower than the download speed you get when browsing and downloading files. A large file may take a while to upload.