Anything as complex and powerful as a computer inevitably comes with a few booby traps. Armed with a computer and an Internet connection, you can get into all kinds of trouble.
It’s no surprise that companies like DriveSavers do a thriving business recovering files from hard drives that have crashed. And not much of a surprise that DriveSavers employs a former suicide-hotline counselor.
It’s not so difficult to avoid letting your computer ruin your whole day. You just need to be aware of where the mines are buried.
How to delete an entire document with one keystroke
You may remember from here that once you’ve highlighted some text, typing anything replaces it.
That’s supposed to be a convenience. It saves you the step of pressing Delete or Backspace before typing the replacement text.
It’s also a Black Pit of Hell for people who select text accidentally and then keep typing. Suddenly a whole lot of great work and effort is lost—in the blink of an eye.
Especially if what you selected was everything—the entire document. Select all, type one single key, and your entire 70-page term paper is vaporized.
You do, however, have a safety net: the Undo command. As soon as you discover what you’ve done, press Ctrl+Z (that’s 
-Z on the Mac). More than once, if necessary, to bring back the text you deleted.
How to have your identity stolen and your life complicated
It’s one of the most common scams on the Internet, and thousands of people fall for it every day. It works like this:
You get an e-mail from a big company—maybe Apple, PayPal, Yahoo, or your bank. It reports that there’s a problem with your account. You click the link to see what’s up. You go to the company’s Web site, you log in—and the damage is done. You’ve just given the bad guys your name and password. Your account now belongs to them.
The e-mail was fake. (Sometimes, bad spelling or grammar or typography gives you a clue.)
The Web site it opened also was fake. It was designed to look exactly like your bank’s Web site (or PayPal, or Apple, or whatever). When you “logged in” with your name and password, the bad guys intercepted it.
This scam is known as phishing (because they’re “fishing” for your information, get it?). Don’t fall for it. Real banks and companies never send e-mails like that—only crooks.
If you ever wonder if there really is a problem with your bank, PayPal, or Apple account, don’t click the link in the e-mail. Instead, open your Web browser yourself. Go to the company’s Web site the usual way (not by clicking a link in an e-mail). Then log in normally.
In most e-mail programs, furthermore, you can see if the link is fishy—by pointing to it without clicking. If you see that the link doesn’t match the underlying Web address, as shown here, don’t click.
How to drown in spam
Spam is junk mail. Unsolicited e-mail. It’s among the most hated forms of advertising. About 70 percent of all e-mail on the Internet is spam.
There’s no cure for spam once you start getting it. It is possible, though, to avoid getting into the spammers’ address books in the first place.
Here’s the main thing: Don’t ever post your main e-mail address online—into a Web site that requests it, for example. Set up a different e-mail account and use that address for online shopping, Web site and software registration, and comment posting. Otherwise, your e-mail address will be sold, along with millions of others, on massive lists that wind up in the hands of spammers.
Bonus tip: You can sign up for a temporary, 10-minute e-mail address for use on Web store forms; see here.
Even then, whenever you fill out a form online, look for checkboxes requesting permission for the company to send you e-mail or to share your e-mail address with its “partners.” Just say no.
If your spam problem is already out of control, and you don’t want to start fresh with a new e-mail account, buy an antispam program like SpamAssassin (Windows) or SpamSieve (Mac). These programs aren’t perfect, but they reduce the flood by quite a bit.
How to humiliate yourself in front of everyone
Every e-mail program has two buttons that let you reply to a message. One says Reply. The other says Reply All.
Reply sends your answer back to one person: whoever sent the message. Reply All sends your response to everyone who got the message in the first place. That could include a couple of other people. It could include dozens of other people. It could include your entire company.
Everyone—everyone—will, at some point in life, make the horrible mistake of clicking Reply All by accident.
Why is that horrible? Because often, you intended your reply only for the person who wrote the original note. “OH, I can’t stand that guy!” you might say, unaware that “that guy” is among the people getting your reply.
There’s no Undo when you send an e-mail. If you click Reply All accidentally, only one feature can spare you from humiliation or firing: writing up a quick, heartfelt apology—and clicking Send.
How to let a virus take down your PC
If it weren’t for the doggone Internet, computers would be a lot of fun.
But no, we’ve managed to interconnect all our computers via the Internet. We’ve given the bad guys a way to enter our machines, install viruses, set up remote hacking tools, feed us spyware, and otherwise turn our lives into an endless troubleshooting session.
But here’s the surprise: They can’t do it without your help.
They can’t just shove a virus onto your PC. They can only set traps for you. You are the one who clicks the link, falls for the fake ad, or opens the file that winds up installing the spyware or the virus.
If you have a Windows PC, you should also have an antivirus program, like the free ones described here.
But even then, you can take steps to avoid malware. (Malware is any kind of software that’s designed to gum up or take over your PC.)
Often, the bad guys set their honeypot traps in exactly the kinds of places you might expect: Web sites that offer illegal access to pirated music, movies, and software. Porn sites. Ads on the Web, and in e-mail, that offer deals that are too good to be true.
Sometimes, when you’re on the Web, a “Virus found!” message appears. You’re supposed to think that it’s your antivirus software at work—but actually, it’s a trick. If you click anything in the ad, you install the bad software behind the scenes.
With e-mail, don’t open file attachments from somebody you don’t know; e-mail attachments are a very common way of getting yourself infected.
Furthermore, don’t open any attachment from someone you do know unless you are expecting it. (Your friends’ computers might be infected by software that blasts out e-mail without their knowledge.)
A clear-headed lecture about passwords
For years, the most commonly chosen password in the world was, believe it or not, the word password.
Fortunately, people are getting smarter. As of 2014, password was no longer the No. 1 most used password.
The new No. 1 password? 123456. Good job, America.
The usual advice is “Make up a different, complicated password for every Web site—letters, numbers, punctuation, no recognizable words. And change every password every 30 days.”
Yeah, sounds great. Except nobody would do that. Nobody could do that.
So here’s some more reasonable advice.
• Use a different password for every important site. Your bank, your e-mail account, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon. If the villains manage to get one of your passwords, at least they won’t be able to get into all of your accounts.
It’s not nearly as critical to use different passwords for all your other sites: news sites, sports sites, blogs, and so on. (What are the bad guys gonna do—see which sports teams you follow?)
• Make up a password you can remember—using the first letters of a sentence. For example, the password iwih25md looks impossible for a hacker to guess—and impossible for you to memorize. But actually, it stands for I wish I had 25 million dollars. You can remember that, can’t you?
Here’s another trick for using a different password for every site without having to become a national memory champion: Change the password for each site by one letter, corresponding to the name of the Web site. For Twitter, “iwih25mdt,”; for Citibank, “iwih25mdc.”
• Install a password manager. The best solution to the too-many-passwords problem, really, is to install a password-management program like Dashlane (free) or OnePass. Or turn on the iCloud Keychain feature for Apple phones, tablets, and computers. These programs fill in your passwords automatically. So you can have a different, complex password for every site you visit—without your having to memorize anything at all!
(These programs can also store your credit-card details, so you don’t have to type all that stuff out every time you buy something.)
Set up an automatic backup system—today
You want to hear an incredible statistic?
Guess how many people have complete, up-to-date backups (safety copies) of everything on their computers.
Four percent.
The rest of us are just tempting fate. Every hard drive in every computer will someday fail if it runs long enough. Where will your photos, movies, music, documents, and software collection be then?
The reason that percentage is so low, of course, is that setting up a backup system isn’t cheap or easy. It’s a lot of steps, and nobody shows you how.
One approach: Pay a monthly fee for a service like Mozy or Carbonite. These companies offer you software that continuously backs up your computer online. That’s smart, because your backup will be safe if your computer is stolen, flooded, or burned. But keep in mind that if the worst should come to pass, downloading your files again is a very slow process; it can take several days.
Another approach: Buy an external hard drive to hold your backed-up files. They’re incredibly inexpensive; you can get a 2-terabyte drive (that’s 2,000 gigabytes) for $75 these days.
Then you need some software that will automatically back up your files onto that drive. Read on.
Automatic backups on the Mac
When you connect a new hard drive to your Mac, a message asks if you want to use it for Time Machine, Apple’s built-in backup software. Click “Use as Backup Disk.” From now on, the Mac will back up your entire computer on that drive. (Actually, it can be another internal drive, or even another Mac on the network.)
Every hour, it stores on that drive only the files that have changed; it doesn’t make another entire copy of everything.
In System Preferences (here), you can click the Time Machine icon to make changes, exclude things from the backup, and so on.
Now, then: Suppose the terrible day comes. You lose or delete a file, or want to recover an older draft of something. You’re in luck.
Open the disk or folder window where the file was. Now choose Enter Time Machine from the 
menu.
Your desktop slides down to reveal some classic Apple eye candy: an animated starry universe. The desktop window you opened seems to be one of hundreds, stretching back in time. Each is a snapshot of that window at the time of a Time Machine backup.
You can drag your cursor through the timeline at the right side, as though it’s a master dial that flies through the windows into past versions. You can use the search box in the corner of the window.
Or you can click one of the two big, flat perspective arrows. The one pointing upward means “Jump directly to the most recent window version that’s different from the way it is right now.”
Eventually, you’ll find the deleted or changed file. Click it and then click Restore (lower right). The OS X desktop rises again from the bottom of the screen; there’s a moment of copying; and then presto: The lost file or folder is back in the window where it belongs.
Automatic backups in Windows
If you’re willing to invest in a backup hard drive, you’ll really like File History, the Windows automatic backup system. If anything bad happens to the files you work on—including you making an ill-advised revision on too little sleep—you can rewind to a time when it was safe, and recover it.
When you connect an external drive, a Windows AutoPlay box offers to “Back up your files on this drive.” That’s what you want. The rest is automatic; Windows quietly backs up your PC once an hour, so it’ll be ready in case of disaster.
When the day comes that you want to recover a lost, deleted, or badly edited file, open the Control Panel pane again. Click “Restore personal files.”
Now you see this window:
Your job is to find the file you want to recover. You can dig it up manually, double-clicking folders as usual.
If it’s been deleted, of course, you won’t find it without rewinding its window into the past. You do that by clicking the (
) button. The entire window slides to the right, showing you versions of the current window, going back in time. Scroll back far enough, and you’ll eventually see the missing item reappear. (At any time, you can double-click a document to open it in this window, so you can see if it’s the correct draft.)
You can also search for the missing item by typing its name into the search box at the top of the window.
Once you’ve found the file (or a good version of it) or folder, click the big green Restore button. Windows brings back the lost file, folder, or document from the dead.
Rewind your entire PC to a time when it worked better
When the day comes that your PC suddenly starts acting up, you can “rewind” it to an earlier condition when everything worked fine—without changing any of your e-mail, documents, and so on. This delicious feature is called System Restore.
Unbeknownst to you, the Windows System Restore feature has been creating memorized snapshots of your PC’s copy of Windows, called restore points, ever since you’ve been running it. Once a day, plus every time you install anything new. When the day comes that your PC suddenly starts acting up, you can “rewind” it back to a restore point when everything worked fine—without changing any of your e-mail, documents, and so on.
If this is your unlucky day, here’s how you do the rewinding. First, open the System Properties dialog box. (Here’s one way to get there: Open the Control Panel. In its search box, type properties; in the results, click System.) At the left side, click System Protection.
Now click the System Restore button, as shown here.
Next, click Next.
Now Windows displays a list of restore points; a little description helps you understand what changes you made to your PC on that day.
With a little bit of study, you can usually figure out the best one to rewind to. Click its name, as shown on the next page.
Click Next again, then Finish, then Yes, then marvel as Windows reinstates your operating system to its condition on the date you specified. Don’t use your PC during this process.
Once the PC restarts, you should be back in business. (If you don’t like the results, you can undo the undoing. Just click Undo System Restore, which appears on the System Protection box shown above.)