By this time many new students have already purchased that new laptop for school in the fall. Only a few weeks left to go. I would like to talk a little about virus and spyware protection.
Most new laptops will come with a 6 month "free" virus protection software package. These are great, but only for a short time. After the first months, you will have to either buy a commercial production or subscribe to a service. What you should not do is nothing at all. Your computer will become infected or innvested with spyware in no time. You will get frustrated by the slow performance or worse, "the blue screen of death".
We used to provide virus protection software free, but now Microsoft does it for us. We now ecommend that students, faculty and staff install Microsoft Security Essentials. This free product will do the job and its free. It will also update itself 1-2 times a week. We suggest that you download it, install it, and then uninstall the virus protection that was deliveried with your computer. Find it at http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/ .
BTW, you should also visit http://www.salisbury.edu/helpdesk/msela/ to buy your Microsoft software. The university has amazing pricing at this site. Just log on with your SU network userid and password.
