Back in April I blogged about Part 1 of a two-part article on “30 must-have PC skills” by Anthony Dhanendran of Computeractive. Not so suprisingly I forgot about it and never blogged or mentioned the link to Part 2. Well, anyway, below are links to both articles at the vnu network and I highly recommend checking them out. If you’re new to PCs or you’re still a novice you need to read these articles because they outline the things you should know. Print them out if it helps, circle the things you don’t understand and ask someone or look it up somewhere. If you have an assistant that always there to answer your every question or do your job for you then maybe you could skip them. And maybe your assistant will call in sick one day. These are survival skills if you own a PC, or you’re going to own one, and you want to be able to do things for yourself.

30 must-have PC skills – Part 1
30 must-have PC skills – Part 2

Having a PC at home went from being a “geek” thing back in the days of DOS (what’s DOS?) to being a “cool” thing in the days of Windows 95 and 98. Now in the days of XP it is even easier to use than ever and almost everyone has at least one PC in their home. But recently the tide has shifted and it’s not as easy as everyone was thinking. At one time you only had to worry about saving your Quicken file to a floppy disk and having a decent Antivirus program. Now you’re lucky if you haven’t recently had to learn how to format your harddrive and re-install all your programs, not to mention all the MP3s you lost in the process because you didn’t know where to find them or how to save them.

I can’t teach you everything in a blog, but I’m pointing you to this article that might be useful to some of you out there: 30 must-have PC skills – Part 1 – vnunet.com The article is very brief, but it gives you an idea of the basics that you should know if you’re daring enough to own a PC these days. Read through it and make notes of which things you can’t do or things that you forget to do. If you don’t understand one of the things on this list you should do a little reading elsewhere and figure it out — for your own safety. Not being knowledgable of these basic things can be dangerous to the health of your PC. At a minimum you should know how to copy and move files, create CDs, update Windows, protect your PC with Antivirus, Antispyware, and firewall programs and know how to keep them and all your other software up to date (i.e., not getting an update for your browser, IE or not, means that you could be vulnerable to the latest nastiest Malware on the Net). Windows is not the only thing that has vulnerabilities.

Wake up, the Matrix has you. Now follow the white rabbit…