You’re driving along the road one day, not a care in the world. You’re on your way to work or something, I don’t know. You see a big rock or a board in the road, and you don’t really care, so you hit it anyway. All of a sudden, *BOOM*! You blow out a tire.

You limp the car over to the side of the road, and you get out and look at the car. You stare at it blankly, and immediately call up your brother. “There’s something wrong with the car, it’s not driving right.”

Your brother arrives, sees the flat tire and says, “How did this happen?” You shrug your shoulders and you have no answer. As he proceeds to pull your jack and wrench out of your trunk, you wander around and not pay attention to what he does. He tries to tell you that you shouldn’t have hit that board in the road, but you weren’t really listening anyway. You thank him profusely, promise it’ll never happen again, and then you go speeding off in your car. Your brother knows you’ll be calling him again for another tire change in a few months.

Sounds ridiculous, right? That kind of person shouldn’t even own a car! Yet that’s what so many people do with their computers.

Computers are not complicated. Sure, you open them up and all the flashing lights and doodads look impressive, but for day-to-day use, it’s not that big of a deal. Simple basic maintenance will help prevent so many problems and you won’t have to call your “family IT guy” for help every other week. When you make a big purchase, like a car or a computer, you need to understand how to care for it and simple, basic maintenance. Just like knowing how to drive carefully and change a tire, you need to know how to use a computer without crashing it all the time or without being able to fix basic problems with it.

I can’t wait for the Mac fanboys to start writing “Just get a Mac! Mine JUST WORKS! No maintenance needed!” But it goes deeper than that. Sure, Macs are fine. They’re slick-looking, and they run really well. But it’s like buying a $40,000 car: it’s great if you have the money to do that, but it’s wildly unnecessary if you’re on any sort of budget, and you don’t really want to listen to the people telling you to buy that car when you don’t have the money to do so right now.

 Pictured: A Mac.

Plus, it’s not the idea that Macs are inferior to PCs or anything. It’s the willful ignorance that people revel in when they buy a Mac. They run up their credit cards and dig themselves into holes just to buy a $1500 computer so that they can tell people that they don’t have to run an antivirus program. How ludicrous is that?!? I paid about $500 for my laptop and I’ve run this thing into the ground, but it works even better now than the day I bought it. So how do you learn the basics without spending all your freaking time being a nerd? Here are a few tips:

For the love of Pete, STOP opening email attachments from people you don’t know!!!

It could be naked pictures of Megan Fox, the secret to making a crapload of money really fast, or the “funniest picture of two monkeys doing it you’ll ever see!!!!” – if it’s from a stranger, it will screw up your computer. Period.

Keep dreaming.

Install a free antivirus program and forget about it.

Protect yourself. You wouldn’t drive around a car without a seat belt on, right? (Or you shouldn’t, anyway!) I don’t care if it’s AVG, Avast, or my personal favorite, Panda Cloud Antivirus. Just install SOMEthing. It’ll fight off most bad stuff. Is that easy enough to understand? This trouble alone is apparently worth $1,000 to some people.

Run CCleaner once a week.

CCleaner is an easy-to-use, two-clicks-and-your-computer’s-clean application that will wipe all the gunk out of your computer system when you run it. If you know how to check your email, this is even easier than that. Click, click, and it’s clean. Close the program and run it again in a week. Takes 30 seconds.

Got a problem? Something acting up? Google it first.

Before you go crying to your brother, try searching quick for a solution. If your Internet Explorer is running slow, go to Google and type “Internet Explorer is running slow”. If your screen goes black when you play Solitaire, type in “screen goes black when playing Solitaire”. You get the idea? There will be web sites and even a few forums where people post solutions to these problems, and most of the time, it’s with dead-simple instruction for newbies. That’s how you learn, people.

If you don’t know how to avoid crap in the road and not blow out your tires, and you don’t know how to change a tire, I don’t want you driving around in a car. If you don’t know how to avoid downloading viruses to your computer and you don’t know how to perform basic maintenance on it to keep it running, I don’t want you owning a computer. There. I said it.

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