Start the New Year On the Right Foot

Dennis Snider

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As we approach 2020, it’s well worth taking the opportunity to use the end of the old year as the starting point to clean up your systems and hit the ground running as the new decade begins. Here are a few things that you should think about doing asap:

Change every password
Security is more crucial than ever, with ever-increasing online threats to businesses and personal information. It is recommended that you should change your passwords every 90 days, but many people don’t. Set yourself a target of changing all your passwords by the end of the year. Make sure they are complex, using a mixture of upper and lowercase, symbols, and numbers. Password management programs can generate new passwords for you controlled by a central password, so you will only have one to remember.

Clean up your files
Go through your computer and think about what there is on your hard drive that you don’t need. Empty the bin, to start with, you might be amazed to find how much storage you’ve been taking up. Then look for duplicate files – the ones where you saved version after version. Keep the final version and delete the rest. If you think you might be needing something in future but don’t need it now, move it to external storage.

Tidy up your desktop
We all put files in the wrong places from time to time, and many of us have a tendency just to throw things onto the desktop and leave them there. Have a good look through your desktop and other filing systems and make sure everything is in the right place and with names that make them easy to find when you need them.

Uninstall unnecessary applications
We frequently download applications just out of curiosity or to try a free version, then decide they are not for us. How often do we actually delete them though? Search through your app files and get rid of everything you no longer use.

Get all your updates and upgrades
Updates are essential for security, they are easy to install and free, but we frequently neglect the opportunity companies offer us to be more secure. Take a look at all your programs and make sure you’ve taken advantage of everything on offer. The new year is also a good time to see what special offers companies are holding out for upgrades.

These are just a few of the things you can do to make sure that you start 2020 in the best IT shape possible. A couple of hours spent on maintenance now could pay you back a hundredfold over the course of the next year.