About Us

 

Hi, my name's Paul. This web site has been created to help all the people we know who have needed some assistance with maintaining a safe home (and sometimes work) computer environment. Here's why.

I've worked on the software side of the computer industry for over twenty years now, including working as a systems manager for some interesting companies. Currently I work for the world's second largest software house. (That's a company which makes its living from writing and selling software.) My brother, Mark, also has many years of experience in this industry, and he currently works for the largest software company in the world. (I'll leave you to guess who that is if you're interested, but no prizes will be awarded.) While neither of us would claim to know everything there is to know about keeping PCs secure, we do know a lot and tend to do things by nature which we are encouraging you to do via this web site.

Both Mark and I have helped various people, mostly friends and family members get on-line and working safely, but we have realised that there is a problem - there are only two of us but there are more and more people whom we have helped who need reminders and instructions on how to maintain their computer environments and we cannot get around them all. We have had one upsetting case in particular. We bought, configured and installed two computers running Windows XP for a charity which we both feel strongly about. In fact the machines are used by two charities. Sounds good doesn't it? Imagine my surprise to hear from one of the charity workers a year or so later that he felt like throwing one of the PCs through the window! Why? Because it wasn't responding properly, was running very slowly etc. After a bit of diagnosis it turned out the machine had been infected with a virus. This seemed odd as we had left the machines with the Windows XP firewall active and anti-virus software running. Some questions later showed that they had inadvertently turned off the firewall, not updated the anti-virus software, not obtained any of the free updates from Microsoft nor had they backed anything up. All of these items had been demonstrated to them. What we didn't do was to write step by step instructions on the week to week management and care of these systems and so now they needed some work to sort them out.

It took me a few minutes to get past my negative thoughts on this and get back to my basic belief that computers are meant to help people, that they should be fun or at least pleasant to use whenever possible and that the issue here is the users not knowing how to maintain the systems they had. Thus was born the idea for "The Care And Feeding of Windows XP", later abbreviated to Care of Windows XP. (I thought the other a bit long to type, although I still like the name.)

This web site is the realisation of that idea and is intended to help anyone who isn't involved in the computer industry and who doesn't have enough time to learn all the theory and "ins and outs" of all the ways to manage the computers they are in charge of.

Simple Choices Only

It has been a deliberate decision to limit the choices we provide when recommending products on this site. The reason is that if someone is fairly in-experienced in the sort of things we talk about here, giving them lots of choices and expecting them to make an informed decision is perhaps unfair. We have therefore chosen to offer fewer recommendations but to ensure the ones made are for what we regard as top-notch products.

Support for this Web site

This web site is free for anyone to use. In order to help pay for the running and maintenance of the site we have opted for two ways to generate revenue. The first is that some suppliers will pay a fee for referrals which lead to sale of their products, e.g. Amazon. Should you choose to use some of the external links on this site and then buy the products, a referral fee will be paid to this site. In some cases we are able to offer you a discount on products just for using such a link, so it makes for a win-win situation. (None of the links would ever result in a higher cost to you.) The second way is by allowing Google to place appropriate adverts on the right hand side of the web pages. If you choose to click on them then Google will pay us a fee for the advertising. If you think you might be interested in advertised products please do use the links as you help support us.