Links to other sites that may be useful
Please note that Business before Technology has no relationship with any of the sites
listed below except those marked with
a ** or *** and
strongly recommends that you cross-check any information
contained within them before assuming their content is valid.
Please read the basic advice at the end of this page about
practical ways of backing up your PC before you use ANY of the
products that may be on offer at these Web Sites.
Spam filtering
- www.mailwasher.net/ Free (for personal use etc.) Spam filter
- www.symantec.com/sabu/nis/nis pe/ Norton Internet Security
- Mail filtering services are available from a variety of companies but
it would not be appropriate to provide links to them without some knowledge
of your requirements. Please use the Simple contact form to get in touch.
- Interesting ONLY if you want to see what sort of triggers
make an e'Mail get marked up as Spam:
spamassassin.org/tests.html Credits due to SpamAssassin
who produce an Open Source Spam filtering tool in use at the Servers that
we use.
e'Mail hosting known to provide an Easy to Use facility for Aliasing, Auto-responders etc.
- site-4u.com Domain registration and Mail hosting services***.
- www.unitedhosting.co.uk Hosting services. This company
does not offer a specific e'Mail only package because they normally host Web
Sites on a domain. However, they do host the Business before Technology site and have provided
good service and facilities.
FireWall - real time intrusion prevention
Virus/Worm related sites
MS Windows file extension / association issues
MS Windows security holes and fixes
Defeating: Trojan Horses, Keystroke Trackers, Dialers Phishing tools and Pop-up Ads
Although it would be ideal to have one tool for the purpose, these
two together are better in combination than each alone.
General reading about on-line privacy, security and related topics
Domain registration
- site-4u.com Domain registration and Mail hosting services***.
- 123-reg.co.uk Domain registration services.
Includes some aliasing / forwarding / auto-responder facilities.
Links above marked with
a *** are to a site managed
by one of the Xper Associates that presented at the Spam
Seminar.
Note that all other relationships with companies above are affiliate
status in that we are not recommending their products but may receive a
very small fee for passing leads on to the site in question.
All such sites are marked above with
a **.
The use of these links is to establish whether our guidance and Web Site
linkages are effective. All monies raised will be contributed to a local
charity on an annual basis.
Taking system backups - the safe way to try out new software
Please also note that you should take a full system backup of your PC and
the data you have on it before installing this type of "system level"
software. Because of the extent of the Service Packs that Microsoft are
delivering as part of Windows Update
(which in today's Web world is no longer an optional service)
your hardware may also need to be upgraded. 128MB of RAM is a
minimum for any Windows system (e.g. 98SE, 2000)
and 256MB is now an absolute minimum for Windows XP.
If you only have one physical drive in your PC and it is used for
business data and processes that would be disrupted if that PC failed
then it is recommended that you add a second hard drive at a cost of less
that £60 for the hardware - excluding fitting and formatting.
The 2nd drive should be regularly maintained as a set of "Mirrors" of your
existing hard drive using a tool such as PartitionMagic.
Norton Ghost can be used and is especially useful for backing up to DVD as it
can compress a drive as well as create a backup suitable for off-site storage.
You should also back up your (User) data, the following is a basic list,
there are more but those require more in-depth discussion / consultation
than a Web Site can offer:
- e-Mail storage for Outlook users this can be made safer and much
easier to backup and restore
if the Store Folder is kept outside of the 'Documents and Settings'
folders and ideally not on the 'C-Drive' at all.
You must close down Outlook before doing such a backup but when complete
the whole of your mail - InBox, Sent, personal folders etc. is held in
the single Store folder copy that you can write to a CD-RW (less than 500MB)
or DVD-RW (less than 4GB).
- Windows Address Book cannot be moved in most versions of Windows
and as such you will need to periodically Export the WAB onto your
backup media.
- My Documents is where later versions of Windows (XP for instance)
are relatively insistent upon storing files that you create or simply save.
The problem is that this can become very large, especially as the default is
to have the 'My Videos', 'My Pictures' and 'My Music' folders underneath the
main 'My Documents' folder.
It is strongly recommended that this should be kept off the 'C-Drive'
because the latter becomes impossible to perform a full disk backup.
A separate partition is a minimum requirement for a 'Home' user but for any
user that has business-related data of any significance then this should
be a separate hard drive as suggested above.
- My Favourites should be backed up separately if it is not within
the 'My Documents' folder.
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