12 Days to a Healthy PC is designed to help you quickly make your computer faster, more responsive and healthier. We have listed steps beginning with Day 1 in order of importance. The view them all, begin here.
Day 11
Secure Passwords
It’s important to maintain security and privacy. Having a secure password is one of the ways to protect your personal information and secure your PC and Local Area Network. But it’s not just enough to have a good password; you also need to make sure you change your passwords, and having a schedule for this is a good idea.
So you decide you’re going to change your password the first of every month. Great. But what is a good password, what characters should I use and how long should the password be? You should use alphanumeric characters with a length of at least eight characters—the longer the better. A great tip for having a really long password with numbers and letters and even symbols is to use easy to remember keyboard patterns. For instance, hold the shift key and type ZXASQW!@, then release the shift key and type zxasqw12. Your password will be ZXASQW!@zxasqw12, which is really complex yet really easy pattern to remember on the keyboard. You can then invert the pattern and come up with new easy combinations.
We also recommend visiting GRC to get a totally random password of ridiculous length https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm.
We will not discuss password hacks on this site or in our forums, but we do recognize that computer passwords can become lost or forgotten over time. In the unfortunate event that you will require password recovery, we recommend searching for tools and software that can assist you. If you lost the administrator password in XP, you can search for SAM file recovery, and if you are totally locked out of your computer, you can search for BIOS password recovery software. There are a lot of software programs out to assist in cracking and recovery, which only strengthens our point to create and consistently change your secure passwords.
Network Forums
If you have any questions about passwords, please join our free message board and begin get free computer repair advice by professionals and peers. Tech Message board.
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