One other thing that hasn't been mentioned. Make sure you consistently run Microsoft Update so that the latest OS patches, and patches for other Microsoft applications are always up to date.


>Hi all,
>
>I do some work on the side for a couple of clients and this past week I got a nasty virus on my laptop (only have one computer). I took it to a guy that fixes computers and he has to reformat the drive and luckily I did some manual backups onto an external drive a couple of weeks ago but still need to get into the computer to retrieve some newer files which the guy fixing the laptop will do. This is going to cost me a lot of time and be a MAJOR headache, so it kind of woke me up that I should have been more professional in terms of keeping my work secure and organized.
>
>Basically my question is what is the best way to keep my work secure and organized.
>
>This is what I think I would like:
>
>- Have 2 laptops, 1 STRICTLY for work, 1 for personal
>
>- Work laptop (XP Professional)
> * Have a good antivirus (any recommendations?) and the latest updates
> * Set my account not to have installations priviledges? (when I need to install something log in as administrator)
> * Have some type of software that can automatically save my data to an external hard drive:
> ---- What software/method do you guys recommend?
> ---- Maybe online backup?
> * Have some sort of image of my computer in the case my hard drive dies I can get another computer and install this image and be up and running. This is the software that must be in the image among others:
> ---- VFP 9 SP2
> ---- SQL Server 2000
> ---- SQL Server 2005 Express
> ---- Visual SourceSafe
>
>- Personal Laptop (Windows 7 Professional - 64 bit)
> ---- Probably install VFP 9 and SQL Server as an emergency measure
>
>I do have a router and is password protected.
>
>I'm getting my data out of my infected computer, I'm getting of course my development folder for my projects, the sql server data files, my visual sourcesafe files, My documents folder. What else should I be thinking about? Any other issues when I need to put these back into my cleaned/reformatted computer?
>
>Thanks!
>
>
>(On a second note, unfortunately the guy that's fixing the computer doesn't seem to good at doing that, while I was trying to get rid of all the malware/virus I ran a boot antivirus CD (Avira) and set it to rename a file if it couldn't fix it, so after doing that now I can't log in, after loggin it automatically logs me off. I saw a few solutions on the net for that, he spent 10 minutes looking into that and said he had to reformat everything, seems such a short time to give up on fixing this problem)