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By Jerry Finkelstein

Thanks, Al, for your wonderful -- and fun -- presentation at our last Tuesday Club meeting. It was informative, you were direct and assured in your answers to questions from our members. And your presentation was so amiable that you looked like you were having a grand time yourself. We certainly enjoyed it too.

But. This column always has a but. It seems to me that a lot of your talk was preaching to the converted. So many of us know what we have to do, like always back up your system, like do not, repeat do not, open attachments from someone you don't know, but how many people really do these oft repeated do yourself a favor PC basics?

My nephew, a computer wiz, lost all 70 of his daughter's baby pictures when his computer crashed while installing a version of AOL. Did he have them backed up? Of course not. A dear friend of mine, a graphics artist, never backs up her work. She smirks sand says, " I know what I should but I'll
take the chance." And we all know those who spends days downloading stuff from virus-infected KaZaa.

How to keep the hackers from your PC door? Spyware, firewalls, virus busters are major concerns, and articles on them proliferate the world of PC magazines and are the subject of program presenters. I do wonder how many of the PC users, how many members of our Club, take them to heart. Do we all really keep our virus software up to date? Are we taking chances when we open an email attachment from Aunt Tillie that promises real results from the latest Viagra pill? Not all of us, I guess, do our gambling at the Casino.

Al, thanks for the presentation. We do need constant reminders on how not to self-destruct. One recent article suggests that spyware is already on our machines. Is there a way to wrap you up and get you in there too? Or, as I suspect you might say, I've grown up and I have to fight my own battles.

JF

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