Vanessa is a 24-year-old stay-at-home mom, wife, military spouse, and veteran. She started her online education while she was still in the Navy. After receiving an honorable discharge, getting married, and having two beautiful girls in two years, she is still going strong with her education at Ashford University. She is currently doubling up on classes with hopes to attend graduation December 2009 with a Bachelor's in Business Administration.
I think it's been mentioned here before on the importance of having backup files for your computer just in case you should have a bad hard drive, virus or other little ugly mishap but it's worth saying again, have a plan "B". This week I have been out of commission due to a nasty little Trojan horse that ran on my system. My antivirus caught it, but not before the damage had spread to my system registry, thus corrupting the PC enough to warrant a fresh start. Unfortunately I have lost my office suite and since I am moving it is sitting in a box in some warehouse far, far from here. So it looks like I will have a little adventure tonight in attempting to locate such freeware and shareware as Abi Word or the like to use in lieu of Microsoft until I can get back to 100%.
I was able to isolate the virus to keep it from spreading to the My Documents folder where all of my work and music is stored, so I ran to Target and picked up a little 80GB external USB hard drive and quickly backed everything up to reload tonight. So yeah, I'm going to be a little behind the curve this week but thank goodness for Thanksgiving, perhaps I will have a little leniency from the instructor and be given another day or two as the school has no classes for 2 days. I honestly don't know if this applies to the online grad students but it should by golly. So the lessons learned this week?
- 1.) Get a plan "B". Make sure you backup your critical files. I was lucky.
- 2.) Have an antivirus, even a freeware one is better than nothing. Update it routinely.
- 3.) Have a spybot buster, again update it frequently.
- 4.) Keep all of your critical software CDs handy. That doesn't include you music by the way but instead your driver files, office suite, etc.
- 5.) Perhaps you may consider using an external hard drive to back things up on, that away when your system becomes corrupted, you have an independent device.
- 6.) Don't count on tech support. Likely you'll get someone reading you a script in India only to resolve the call as "user error".
- 7.) Read my next couple of blogs to see what free office suite out there will work with Word, etc.
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About Cajun
Cajun is 31-years-old and currently employed as a Project Analyst for an Information Technology department at a major financial firm. He has recently changed careers after spending 7 years in Federal Law enforcement of which he spent 5 years as a supervisor. His management experience combined with the MBA he finished in October, 2008 allowed for a career change even in the face of these uncertain economic times.
Cajun was introduced to the concept of distance education while working full-time as a law enforcement officer with a demanding and unpredictable schedule, obtaining an Associate of Science degree in Criminal Justice from
Ashworth College, a Bachelor of Science degree in Criminal Justice from Southwestern College of Winfield, KS graduating Magna Cum Laude and a Master of Business Administration with an emphasis in Organizational Leadership from
Ashford University. To further his new career Cajun will be working towards a Master of Science in Management of Information Systems with an emphasis in Project Management from
Bellevue University.