If you travel a lot, you should follow these rules of maintaining your laptop. You never know what may be considered illegal in a new country you are entering. If you do not maintain the cleanliness of your laptop, your previous use could get you into serious trouble. Immigration, customs and police can use professional computer repairs and computer support suppliers to dig up a lot of information from your laptop.

4 Rules to Maintaining Security On Your Laptop When You Travel

If you travel a lot, you know how important your laptop is. You will really find out how important your laptop is if you lose it. Losing a laptop can mean giving away a huge amount of information about yourself, including very sensitive information related to your bank accounts. If you travel, and you take your laptop with you, here are a number of suggestions for you. If you have trouble understanding how these solutions work, it is always best to speak to computer support professionals.

• Keep it Empty. This should be the number one rule for anyone who travels. Here is a simple example. Let’s say you downloaded a short pornographic movie. You forgot about the small file sitting somewhere on your hard-drive. You pass through customs and immigration and are randomly questioned. The contents of your laptop could now get you in serious trouble. That small pornographic video could be very illegal in the country you have entered. Keeping all of your files online is not very difficult at all. A simple Gmail account allows you to upload all of your information into your account. There are a number of simple online disk accounts available for anyone. The first rule of keeping yourself safe, and keeping your information safe, is to not keep it on your laptop.

• Flush Your Browser. Most browsers will keep your history and a whole range of other information, including your passwords for all of the sites you have visited. You should regularly check the settings of your browsers. After each session, it is worth emptying your internet cache. This means to reset your browser and leave no history of where you have been or what sites you have been viewing. This is also very important if you are passing through immigration or customs of any country. If your laptop gets lost or stolen, you will know that all of your accounts and other information does not exist on your laptop.

• Secure Delete. Just because you have deleted information on your laptop, do not think that it cannot be found again. On most operating systems, there is a method of secure deletion. This means the data you delete, is also garbled and cannot be retrieved.

• Admin Name and Password.You must set your laptop to have a password to access. Apart from having Admin account, you should create multiple accounts like guest accounts that do not hold any confidential or sensitive information. This is especially useful when someone uses your laptop. Let’s say you were asked to open your laptop by customs or immigration, and you had something on your computer you did not want to let them see. If you have your laptop with multiple accounts with different passwords, you can open in a guest account and not in the main account or admin account of your laptop. Even the best computer repairs professionals cannot hack into your computer without having your password. The only solution for them is to re-install the whole operating system. At least in this situation, your information will be safe.

I travel a lot. I have learnt these rules from simple experience. You never know when a small amount of information can get you into a serious amount of trouble. Just because you are an upstanding professional does not mean that you might not have slipped up and have a small amount of information on your laptop that is considered illegal in another country.