Data Protection Solutions for Home and Small Businesses

Computers, whether they are laptops or desktops have made our lives easier in many ways - most households and businesses could not function without one or at the least would be less efficient. What is more important is the data created in using these systems. Whether its your personal data such as household finances, mp3's, pictures, and videos or if you are a small medium businesss (SMB), it's your CRM data, Financial Data, Projects data, and host of other proprietary information - all these things took time to collect and create. This data in most cases are invaluable and irreplaceable.

Jona Tech offers and recommends several data protection strategies for the home and SMB markets. Some of the steps can apply to both the home and small medium business (SMB) markets while are other data protection steps are unique to either environments.

What do typical households us their computers for?

E-Mail
Web Surfing & Downloads Data Protection
Multi-Media - MP3, Home Video, iPod files
Business Productivity Applications - Office Org, MS Office, etc.
Game Playing

STEP ONE:

All the above contribute to decreasing your PC's performance over time. So STEP 1 in protecting your data is making sure you're computer is optimized for the best performance - you have to make sure it's clean. Keeping the registry is a subtask of this first step. If you recall when you first power up a new computer how fast it boots up and logs you in, this is because you have not put the computer's registry through installs and uninstalls of applications and programs. Often times, you don't realize that the software you install leaves behinds remnants of itself in the registry and overtime the registry gets filled and cluttered with "junk". This slows down your computer since it has more registry folders, sections, and keys to go through before it finds the right one it needs to run or start an application. Sometimes, folders and paths, may not even exist on the computer!

There are many tools that you can use for this but Jona Tech after trying, recommends using PC Tool's Registry Mechanic. Beside slowing down your computer, other signs that you need to clean your computer's registry are:

-- Error messages constanly being displayed by Windows
-- Computer often crashes - Blue Screen of Death, Freezing and have to perform hard reboot
-- Slow bootups -- Applications no longer run.

Registry Mechanic is a very inexpensive program to purchase with a cost of less than $30.00 . PC Tools provides FREE version of this tool with some limitations until you purchase and register it. You can tryout
Registry Mechanic FREE Scan.

In addition to cleaning and optimizing your PC's registry, the hard drive should be defragmented regularly. No 3rd party tool is needed for a hard drive defragment as it is provided by Microsoft. This program is located in the following menu for Windows XP: Start/All Programs/Accesories/Systems Tools.

Why defragment your hard drive?

As you create,modify, and erase files on your hard drive, applications installed on your hard drive become fragmented meaning they are scattered in different sectors of your storage device. This causes the head of your hard drive to move over larger areas of your drive and more often slowing down your computer. By defragmenting your hard drive, application code is arranged in contiguous sectors minizing the "jumping" around of your hard drive head. You sometimes notice this when you here you hard drive "crunch" all the time. For more information on deframenting your windows hard drive, Click Here.

If you want to learn more about the Windows Registry, you can go to wikipedia and earch on "Windows Registry" or you can Click Here and we'll take you there.