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A podcast brought to you by Kosciusko Connect. On Connected Conversations, we talk about technology, the internet, and how to navigate the digital world in which we live.
Jonathon Bailey:
I mean generally a phone, at some point the battery is going to start getting worse.
Andrea Melton:
Yes, that is inevitable.
Jonathon Bailey:
It used to be phones lasted long enough that you might have to get a new battery, but now the phones just don't last at all. They make the phone so after a couple years you have to buy a new one because it's more money to go out and buy a battery than anything else. So I just say in general, just even with laptops, every now and then, every couple months or whatever, let it go down to zero, then charge it back up, and that should reset that counter in the battery so that way it'll charge up more.
Andrea Melton:
Welcome to Connected Conversations, the official podcast of Kosciusko Connect. Kosciusko Connect is a subsidiary of Kosciusko REMC. Since 2021, we have been providing lightning fast, reliable fiber to the home internet service to rural portions of Northern Indiana. On Connected Conversations, we talk about fiber internet, technology, community, and how to navigate the digital world in which we live. I'm your host, Andrea Melton. Thank you for connecting with us today. Thank you so much for tuning in today to another episode of Connected Conversations. I'm Andrea, and today in the studio I am so pleased to have Jonathan Bailey, who is a system administrator here at Kosciusko Connect and KREMC. Hi Jon, how are you today?
Jonathon Bailey:
Oh, pretty good, and yourself?
Andrea Melton:
Pretty good, pretty good. Thanks so much for coming in and talking with us. We're going to talk today in general about some device maintenance when we're talking about our computers, tablets, cell phones, and also dive into some cybersecurity concerns and tips. Jonathan, you are a system administrator here at our company. Can you tell us what exactly you do, what your role entails?
Jonathon Bailey:
The main thing I do is I support the infrastructure, whether that is the virtual infrastructure we have that hosts all of our servers, or anything else that's really needed within the company. I just kind of jump in and help out wherever too as well. I ended up doing quite a few projects this year, so looking forward to more stuff coming down the line.
Andrea Melton:
Very good. Well, I thought being that you were the IT guru, you would be a great person to have in for this topic to talk about our devices, how to take care of them, and how to protect them and our home networks. So let's dive in. What would you say are some basic maintenance steps that every device owner should perform regularly if we're talking about our computers and cell phones?
Jonathon Bailey:
I'll start off with the mobile devices first. With your phones and/or iPads, the best thing to do every now and then is just to close all your apps. That'll help with the memory and help with speed. Making sure that you update them normally. That helps with fixes and it helps with patches that protect us from online issues and makes sure that the device runs accurately, because sometimes a little fix will make things break and you won't even notice it, so it's a good thing just to keep that stuff going. On computers, I would say the best thing to do is to try to make sure you clean out your old data, and that also applies to your tablets and phones as well too.
Andrea Melton:
So old photographs and media documents, really anything?
Jonathon Bailey:
Anything like that. If you can do cloud storage, it's better to push it up to the cloud and not stored on the device. That allows it to run better. On a laptop it's good to make sure you clean that out because most laptops people buy don't have a lot of space in them. So as those pictures build up, things slow down, and once they get to a point to where there's hardly any space left, the computer actually uses some of the memory and buffers it to your hard drive, so when that fills up, it just runs slow.
Andrea Melton:
And then we have different options when it comes to backing up some of that stuff. So you might put it on a USB device or an external hard drive or keep it on the cloud.
Jonathon Bailey:
And a lot of times now with the cloud, you can actually do it pretty cheap. You can do it very cheap monthly, or if you don't have a ton of stuff, you can just go out and buy a cheap USB drive and plug it in and save it on that.
Andrea Melton:
Okay, very good. I give my husband a hard time because he, on his cell phone, loves to keep lots and lots of tabs open so he doesn't forget the article he was reading or what he was looking at. So is that maybe slowing down his device, all those tabs being open, all the pages?
Jonathon Bailey:
Oh yeah. I have typically, because I do lurk look so much stuff up all the time on my phone, I can end up with 60 or more tabs open in the browser, and yeah, it slows it way down. So when you close those down and shut down and reopen the app, it's much faster.
Andrea Melton:
Okay, good to know. So I can tell him there's a reason behind my giving him a hard time about that. Very good. What are the most common issues you see with devices that could be prevented with regular maintenance?
Jonathon Bailey:
One is Windows updates. People that don't update their machine regularly could be subject to getting vulnerabilities of Windows, getting hit with that. Another thing too is blowing out your computer regularly. We'll get the dust out of it and make it so it runs more efficient
Andrea Melton:
Okay, with like a can of air duster type of thing.
Jonathon Bailey:
Can of air, that's the best. Just wiping the screens down and stuff. All that stuff just helps deteriorate the screens and the computers and all that stuff. Dust is just a major invasive thing that destroys computers.
Andrea Melton:
Right, okay. So keep it clean. When you talk about updating your computer, updating your software, I always thought when it comes to my laptop that that happens automatically. Sometimes you get a thing that says, "Do you want to do it now, restart now, or do you want us to remind you?" Do people need to be more proactive in initiating those updates?
Jonathon Bailey:
When you first get a computer, sometimes it'll ask you if you want to turn on automatic updates. Sometimes people just say no and they move on and then the computer stays stagnant where it's at because it doesn't keep getting updates. In that case, it's always better to go to your start button and settings and Windows update to see if those updates are getting automatically put on. If they're not, there should be an option to turn that automatic in there.
Andrea Melton:
Okay. Somewhere I would say in the early 2000s a friend gave me a tip that my computer was running slow and she said, "Andrea, you need to go defrag your computer, run the defrag. That's what you need to be doing." Do we still need to be running the defrag on our computers?
Jonathon Bailey:
Only if you have a spinning disc. So the difference is when computers first came out, they actually had platters inside, and they had these little arms that would actually read each one of those platters. Well over time the data would get kind of pulled apart in different places. So by running that defrag, it would put everything back into one spot for each of the files. And that a lot of times would take a long time to run, so people would have to do that at the end of the day, at lunch or wherever, and then it would speed up their computer quite a bit. I've actually seen some at 10% fragmentation before, so 10% of the drive was fragmented, so every time it had to go find something, it had to search all over the disc to find that one file. So it's one of those things where on SSDs it's not really such a big deal as much. I haven't hardly seen any fragmentation on any of the SSDs I've had.
Andrea Melton:
Okay, very good. That makes sense why defragging was on my mind years ago and it's not so much now. What are your top tips for extending the lifespan of your device? We pay a lot of money for them. How do we make them last as long as we possibly can?
Jonathon Bailey:
Again on laptops, it's keeping them clean, blowing them out, making sure that you store them in a place if you don't have them up sitting there all the time, like a laptop, that you keep at someplace that keeps it safe and without issues. Not leaving them in a car when it's super hot or super cold.
Andrea Melton:
Yes, weather elements are not good.
Jonathon Bailey:
I worked at a place where one of the higher ups froze his laptop in a car.
Andrea Melton:
Oh my goodness.
Jonathon Bailey:
Yeah, so you just replace it, but it's just stuff like that. For a phone or tablet I always like to buy a decent case that protects it from fall, and I usually put a glass green protector on, tempered glass. Not everybody believes in the tempered glass, but I've broken many tempered glasses and not the screen, so for me they always work.
Andrea Melton:
Yeah, you found value in that. Good tip. Great. And what about the battery life on our cell phones? How do we extend the battery life?
Jonathon Bailey:
The battery life on cell phones I would say probably could get helped a little bit if you allow them to completely run out once in a great while. Because even on laptops, if you never allow the battery to completely go down to zero, then you end up with the battery trying to remember where it is all the time, and it ends up never allowing you to store more power than the normal power you used to do. So with phones, that should be the same way. I mean generally a phone, at some point, the battery's going to start getting worse.
Andrea Melton:
Yes, that is inevitable.
Jonathon Bailey:
It used to be phones lasted long enough that you might have to get another battery, but now the phones just don't last at all. They make the phone so after a couple years you have to buy a new one, because it's more money to go out and buy a battery than anything else. So I just say in general, just even with laptops, every now and then, every couple months or whatever, let it go down to zero and then charge it back up and that should reset that counter in the battery so that way it'll charge up more.
Andrea Melton:
Okay. Let's talk about cybersecurity. Huge issue that we all are facing day after day when it comes to the digital world, our devices. We're also ingrained into this digital world, and so much of what we do happens online, and cybersecurity affects all of us. So what are the most common cybersecurity threats that we should be aware of?
Jonathon Bailey:
The biggest one off the top of my head, it would be phishing, and whether that's someone calling you on the phone or sending you an email. The issue with those is they're so... Sometimes they are so complex and how they put those together, it's hard to distinguish between what's real and what's not real. A lot of times you can tell by looking at the from address to see whether it's actually coming from, for instance, like Best Buy, or if it's coming from some weird account that you don't even recognize. And that's real easy to do. All you have to do is take your mouse and hover above where it says from, and it should tell you who it's coming from. And then if it's something you don't recognize in any regard, just delete it.
Andrea Melton:
Absolutely. It's disconcerting, these messages we get, I get text messages with links and things like that, that people can text your private number, the number you think is private belongs to you and you get these messages and it seems like it might be something you need to address, but really they're phishing attempts, scam attempts.
Jonathon Bailey:
Oh yeah. I get them all the time for saying that I need to click on something to confirm my shipment, and I'm like, "I didn't buy anything."
Andrea Melton:
How important are strong passwords and what makes a password strong?
Jonathon Bailey:
Passwords are the key to most of what everything you do. On a phone device or even an iPad, you can actually go in and you can set a Face ID, and I use those too, but I will also set a pretty strong password, and what I try to do for a password, which seems to work better than trying to come up with a complex, short password, is I try to come up with one that's like a phrase, like "my dog has fleas," because those are much harder to break than a short one that's like, let's say, password123!. Because we're at the point in technology where the smaller ones can be broken easier, and if you make one that's like 14 characters or longer, it's like a sentence, then it might take years for them to break it.
Andrea Melton:
Okay, so longer the better. What are your thoughts on multifactor authentication? Should everyone be using it?
Jonathon Bailey:
If it makes sense. Where I have multifactor authentication on my accounts that I have at home, not everybody has it available for you, I use it, and where I don't have it and they can do texting or a one-time password through email, I use that. I always try to use an extra measure of security so that way if I'm logging into a website or something, it just works. I just go in, I have my phone, I put the code in and I'm into my account. I don't have to worry about somebody breaking into it. Because if you think about it, if you have, and I won't say who it is, if you have a department store that you're constantly getting stuff from saying that your account's locked out, that's somebody trying to break into your account. And if you have your credit card on there, they could buy all kinds of stuff and have it sent and you would have to go to the store and work out that it was not you and somebody else.
Andrea Melton:
Right, okay. What steps can our listeners take to secure their personal devices against unauthorized access?
Jonathon Bailey:
The first thing I would say is set Face ID or set a pin code on it if it's a tablet or a phone. If it's something like a laptop or desktop, I just set up a user account with the password. Somebody tries to get in, as long as the admin account on a PC isn't set to blank or the basic default, they shouldn't be able to get in very easily. And on PCs now you can also encrypt your stuff, so if you know how to turn on encryption, it's probably in... Most Windows machines are coming with it, but if it's not, I always try to make sure that's turned on as well.
Andrea Melton:
Okay. Turn on encryption. I will take a moment here to remind those listening that at Kosciusko Connect, if you're on one of our fiber internet plans, we do offer Guardian Protection, which is a great add-on for only 12.95 a month added to your plan to bring you peace of mind. Guardian Protection as a service that actually proactively monitors your home network. It helps protect your network. It automatically blocks those cyber threats and potential attacks, and it also gives you some great features when it comes to device prioritization, blocking inappropriate content if you have young kids in the home or visiting your house and that sort of thing. So it's a wonderful tool, Guardian Protection, and you can give our office a call if you're interested in learning more about that or adding Guardian to your plan. Jonathan, if somebody is interested in seeking professional help when it comes to taking care of their devices, their cybersecurity, what should they look for if they're looking for someone to really help them in that way?
Jonathon Bailey:
Well first think of it as you're not just going out and finding somebody who knows computers. It's like somebody roofing your house or somebody doing any kind of work on your house. You're trying to find somebody who you want to trust and you want that person who you trust with your data and your machine to be able to do a good job. The best thing I do is look up references, look up reviews, try to make sure that person is someone that people trust and they like. To me, that's the beginning of it, because otherwise you're just taking a guess, because any person can say they know computers and they don't.
Andrea Melton:
Right, right. Absolutely. I'd say that's great advice across the board. No matter what type of professional service or help you're looking for, check the references and make sure they know what they're talking about. Last thing, I guess one final piece of advice, something that you wish that everyone knew when it comes to device maintenance and cybersecurity?
Jonathon Bailey:
The biggest thing is when you get an email or someone calls you and they want to get in and look at your computer and they push and they try to say that they're Social Security or all the different lines that they use from different scammers, if you're never sure if they want you to reset your password on some site you're using, I always go to the site and try to do it through there and not through wherever they tell you to go. And if you don't trust it, hang up, because it's probably a scam.
Andrea Melton:
Great advice. All right, Jonathan, thank you so much again for taking time out of your day to come and talk with us on Connected Conversations. We appreciate it and I hope you have a great day.
Jonathon Bailey:
You too, thanks.
Andrea Melton:
You've been listening to Connected Conversations, the official podcast of Kosciusko Connect. From all of us at Kosciusko Connect, thank you for connecting with us today.