Technology Update

Bloomingdale Public Schools                            Volume 6 Issue 2           November 29, 2004

 

  1. Virus Problem: Many of you have experienced the flood of emails coming in during the last few days. You should not open these emails! They don’t necessarily indicate that your computer has a virus, but they may be bringing one into your system. Delete them from your account as soon as you can. There may be as many as 30 or 40 per day.

 

  1. We have had a tremendous amount of problems in the last month with spyware and other malicious code getting into our system. These programs clog up your machines and make them excruciatingly slow. I am not able to visit each machine on a regular basis. Here is a lit of some basic things you can do to help keep your machine useful to you.

 

    1. Older Microns should be turned off every night. Machines running windows XP should be left on each night but turned off on weekends. We do much of our automated updates and virus checks at night.
    2. Be sure you close all programs and log out of your computer before you leave for the day. Failure to close programs could result in data loss that will affect you!
    3. Clear your virus quarantine every week or so on XP computers. Instructions are on the website under technology. Click on Important Information. The second item down deals with quarantined viruses.
    4. Set up your btc email to capture spam.  Instructions are found on the Important Information page, the seventh link down.
    5. There are two spyware detection programs you should run. You will find them on the S drive in the virus info folder. They are aawsepersonal.exe and spybotsd13.exe.  Drag these to your desktop and run them from there. They might be a little tricky for some of you but please ask for help from one of your colleagues. I cannot get to each computer to do this. This should be done every other week or at least once a month.
    6. There is a good virus scanner at www.trendmicro.com. They allow for a free online scan. This virus scanner catches different viruses than the one we run here. If your computer seems buggy with lots of pop ups. It usually means that you should run this virus checker as well as both spyware programs listed in the previous section.

 

  1. If you want to have your bdalecards email forwarded to your yahoo account, there are instructions on how to do this on the Important Technology Information page.

 

  1. Many of the files and forms we are now making available on line use PDF format which means your computer should have Adobe Acrobat Reader on it. Please let me know if you are not able to open and read PDF files. To find out, just go to the News and Information, Teacher Help, Kresa section and try to open one of the PDF files listed there. Let me know if your computer will not do this.

 

  1. Please check the website for important information. Information is available under News and Information. Technology Information is available under the Technology section. Mr. Tuinstra’s schedule and project list is also available in the Technology section.