How to Secure Your Home While Away on Summer Vacation

Keep your home safe.

Summer time is the perfect time to go away for a relaxing vacation.  An unguarded home, however, is a perfect target for thieves.  Take a few precautions before you leave for vacation to provide you peace of mind and true relaxation

Secure your important information.  Purchase a removable or external hard disk drive for your computer.  Save all important files and financial records on this hard disk drive only and not on your primary hard drive.  This portable drive should be removed from your home when you are away for extended periods and may be stored in a safe deposit box.  All important hard copies of deeds, licenses, birth certificates, social security cards, unused credit cards, etc. should be kept secure in an off-site safe deposit box as well.

Secure the perimeter of your home.  If you have a sliding glass door, place a broom handle or stick in the track of the door to prevent it from being opened.  The latch on a sliding glass door is very easy to bypass.  Drill holes in an upper corner of all lower wooden window panes and insert a long nail, which will make opening the window difficult from outside the home.

Ask a friend or trusted neighbor to collect your mail each day while you are away and to walk around your home and look for anything strange.  If possible, leave at least one car parked in your driveway and leave a few lights on inside the home.  Purchase several timers and set them to turn on at dusk and turn off around the time you would normally go to bed.  If a crook is watching your house, this may fool them into believing that someone is home.

Perform a walk-through of your entire home and film everything using a video camera.  Store the tape along with all other important items in your safe deposit box.  This evidence will be useful to provide to the police and your insurance company if someone does manage to break in and steal or damage items in your home.

Walk around both the inside and outside of your home one last time before you leave.  Unplug any dangerous or energy inefficient appliances and raise the temperature slightly on the thermostat.  Check that your oven is turned off.  Close all blinds or curtains, making it difficult to see into the home from outside.  Make sure all exterior doors are locked and place padlocks on all gates, storage buildings, and crawlspace doors.

Building a Kid-friendly Computer

Do you worry about your children using your computer? What trouble can they get into on the Internet? What harm could they do to your important data? Why not build them a computer of their own?

Build your children a computer using some inexpensive parts that you buy online or recycle an older computer. The child’s computer doesn’t have to be very powerful or loaded with memory. Just build something functional that they can call their own. If the hard drive is used, format it in order to wipe it completely clean. Install an operating system that you are familiar with. For this example, we will use Windows XP. Once the operating system is installed, remove all applications that your child doesn’t need. This should free up quite a bit of space and remove a lot of distracting icons. Install some fun children’s learning games and create shortcuts for them on the desktop.

Customize the computer to match your child’s tastes. Apply cool stickers to the computer case or even paint it a wild color. Adjust the screen resolution so that the text and icons are larger and easy to see. Change the background on the desktop to a colorful splash with some familiar cartoon characters that your children will recognize. Once you have everything set the way you like it, create a store point using System Restore. This is found by clicking the “START” button and going to All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>System Restore. Chose the option for creating a restore point and name the restore point description something easy to identify, like the current date. Now, if your child changes a critical setting by accident, you can restore the computer to perfect working order.

Take control of your child’s online experience. Buy a router and configure it with policies that restrict the times that they can access the Internet. For even more control, purchase Internet monitoring software that will block websites based on your criteria. Use Windows Remote Assistance software or one of many available remote access programs to monitor your children’s activities if they are located in another room or if their monitor isn’t visible to you. You can also configure your router to save a log file of the pages they visit that they cannot delete unless they have access to the router.

Password-protect your own computer and leave it logged off when you are away from it to encourage your children to use their own computer. Check the permissions on your computer and turn off sharing to the root of your hard drive. You will not have to worry about them accidentally deleting your files or infecting your computer with any malicious viruses. Let them have all the fun they want with their computer and if they mess it up, just reformat it and start all over.