- The internet is not some OMFG horrible and scary place. No more so than the real world. If you want to find porn, you can do so pretty easily in the real world.
- If you have children, grandkids, or younger visitors, you may wish to use Parental Controls in Windows.
- Another way to limit access to the net is 1- have a difficult password to login to your box, 2- make sure all accounts except the Guest Account have difficult passwords, and 3- religiously monitor the Guest account and the files on your hard drive.
- You can also buy net filtering software, such as Net Nanny.
- The only 100% guaranteed way to keep younger people from viewing the net is to 100% prevent them from having access to a machine connected to the net. Younger people under 18 are much much more computer and net savvy than my generation is. They can go to a friend's house and learn how to crack or circumvent the software.
- Remember, all software can be hacked, given enough time and skill.
- The Pentagon was hacked one time. The US Congress was also hacked at least once. The CIA was hacked years ago. Moral of the story: Take security seriously on the net.
- Your ISP will not function well at least once.
- Your ISP will undergo maintenance at 3 AM while you are trying to read something important on the net.
- Get a webmail account specifically for non-important things, like registering at websites. Some websites will sell your addy and then you get spammed to death.
- Resist the temptation to buy anything from spam email. It could be legitimate, but there is a strong likelihood you will get ripped off. Be especially wary of any email related to Nigeria. Nigeria is famous for being home to net scammers.
- A good website to know exactly what time it is in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia as well as your hometown :)
- Your NIC card will fail on you at least once. Hopefully you can simply uninstall it and reinstall it via Windows (or even, if you can, taking it out of its mobo slot) and cure the problem. Make sure you have the correct software installed for your NIC card. Windows typically has good software for it, but not always.
- A spare portable NIC card is a nice thing to have, when your NIC card decides to die at 10:01 PM.
- Good things to write down on old-fashioned paper: your modem's MAC address and serial number, your router's exact name and firmware (internal software) version, your webmail password (and hide it well from prying eyes), your Windows Product Key... When I think of more, I"ll put them here.
- I recommend Gmail for webmail. Hotmail and Yahoo Mail tend to be a tad slow.
