In order to keep Windows 7 running smoothly, you're going to want to check the Action Center
from time to time to manage your computer's Security and Maintenance.
The shortcut to the Action Center is on the taskbar, and it's this small flag icon.
The red "X" symbol means that there are important messages that we need to address.
Let's open the Action Center to view the details.
You can also get to the Action Center through the Control Panel, under "System and Security."
All of your Security and Maintenance messages are listed here, and the two red items are
the important messages.
This means that this computer is vulnerable to viruses or other malicious software.
The Action Center makes it easy to fix these problems: just click the button on the right
side of the message.
We're going to want to take care of all of the red items now, and the yellow one can
wait until later because it's less urgent.
So now the red "X" symbol has disappeared from the flag icon, and we just have one message
left, and it's about setting up Windows Backup, which we can choose to do now or later.
But maybe we're planning to use a different program for backups and we'd rather not see
this message anymore. We can click "Turn off messages about Windows Backup," and it's going
to hide all backup-related messages.
If we want to turn those messages back on, we can go to "Change Action Center settings,"
and we can check the Windows Backup box.
You can uncheck any of these if you don't want to receive those messages, but keep in
mind that if you uncheck any of the Security messages, you could make your computer less
secure.
Now we're going to look at the User Account Control Settings.
User Account Control adds another layer of security to your computer by notifying you
when a program or user is trying to make changes to your computer.
In previous versions of Windows, some users complained about the high number of pop-up
messages, and in Windows 7, you can control how often you will receive these messages
by using this slider.
To get the most security, you should use one of the top two settings, and the other two
are not recommended and should only be used in special circumstances.
If you're not sure which one to use, just use the top setting, and you can always bring
it back down later if you find that you're getting too many pop-up messages.
So when we click "OK," User Account Control notifies us that this program here is trying
to make a change to our computer.
If this program looked unfamiliar to us, we could click "no" to stop it from making any
changes, but since we recognize it, we'll click "yes."
Remember to use caution when changing the Action Center and User Account Control settings.
You can adjust the settings to receive fewer pop-up messages, but there can be a tradeoff
between convenience and security.