Holiday Laptop safety tips

Losing your lap top doesn’t just mean having to fork out the money for a new one, if it’s uninsured. Increasingly, laptops contain multimedia that can include all the holiday snaps, documents you have worked hard on, or even personal details such as passwords to bank accounts.

The following tips can help you, your laptop and your personal information to stay out of trouble.

Top tips for keeping your laptop safe

Lock it with a password: Some laptops now come with biometric locking systems, such as fingerprint scanners. More commonly, you can stop people accessing your information by protecting it with a log in password. Just make sure it’s not too obvious a password, like your birthday or child’s name. Also, to make the password harder to crack, make sure at least part of it is caps and a numeral.

Don’t keep important information on it: It’s more common than you think for people to store all of their passwords on their computer. For instance, does your email automatically login without the need to sign in? Do you keep a word document that has a list of all your passwords? If you use your computer for business, do you also store customer databases or blueprints on there? Making sure these are locked or not stored on your computer can avoid these being stolen along with your hardware.

Avoid showing off your new laptop: Laptop theft is on the increase, so while it might be essential for you to work while on a train or in a café, try not to attract too much attention to it.

Mind your food and drink: for your own safety and that of your laptop, keep hot and cold drinks well away from it!

Make sure it has room to breathe:  overheating of batteries and the computer itself has all too often been the cause of fires. Always use your laptop on a stable surface with plenty of airflow and keep all vents clear of dust.

Common scams to watch out for

Thieves are getting more sophisticated, and in places you might not suspect. Did you know, for instance, that airport security check points are increasingly active places for laptop thieves? Sometimes the thieves might work in pairs, slowing the line down so there is a gap between you and your laptop created. By the time you get through to the other side, your computer is gone. One way of minimising the chances of this happening is to put your computer through the security scanners last, so that the time you are apart is very short.

Another common scam is for people to look over your shoulder when you’re working in a public space to try to work out your passwords and other information before they steal it. Privacy screens, which fit over your screen and make it hard for others to see what you’re working on, are a good way to minimise this also.

Lastly, full-encryption hard drives are especially important if you have a lot of sensitive information on your laptop. These fit into your laptop where the normal hard drive would go, and have special log in procedures to access the fully encrypted information stored within. Couple this with more stringent network access for storing files and you can really reduce the chance that important files will be lost or hijacked.