Good security for your PC or laptop requires a bit of effort especially if you want to keep the contents of your hard drive, email, passwords and USB drives safe.

To say the least, it’s important to have a certain degree of security on your system without going paranoid.

With that said, here are 4 steps to securing your PC adequately:

#1: Strong Passwords

Regardless of what people say, strong passwords that are unique, random and long enough are still the best way to keep your digital information safe. For this, the best solution so far is to use a password manager such as KeePass or LastPass. While both of them are relatively neck and neck when it comes to being user-friendly, LastPass can be used to access your data across a number of devices.

#2: Encrypting email

Using a web-based email address instead of an email desktop client (like ThunderBird) might be easier to use. However, it becomes difficult to keep the contents of your email from people who’d like to snoop, not unless you use an OpenPGP public-private key encryption service. You’ll have to create a key pair and a revocation certificate as well.

#3: Go Public

Now let people know that you are using encrypted emails which involves uploading your key to a keyserver where other people can find it. Also, you can publish the public key generated on a blog, personal website etc.

#4: Test it with Adele

Now is the time you can test your encrypted email by creating one which is to be sent to Adele, the OpenPGP email robot. Create one in plain text, and which will make it easier and send it to adele-en@gnupp.de. Make that the ‘Sign Message’ and ‘Attach my Public Key’ options are selected in the OpenPGP menu. Adele will respond in a few minutes informing you as to whether the signing was successful or not.