Resolve to Improve Your PC's Health in 2004

As we approach the time to make New Year's resolutions, I'd like to offer a suggestion or two that I think can help you keep your PC running smoothly and enable you to take more control of what's going on with it. If you already know about these resources, then all the better. If these suggestions are news to you, then I'll have achieved my objective.

The first idea is to take control of what gets loaded when Windows starts up. Recently, my cousin, Bowen, reported "I have been unable to run the defrag program on my computer for months and am still trying to diagnose the problem. I suspect that either a Virus Scan or Firewall is blocking it but have not figured out how to work it out." After we exchanged a couple of messages, he resolved his problem using a program called MSCONFIG that's available on Win98, WinME and WinXP, but that's a program that most users don't know about. This site does an excellent job of explaining what that program is and how to use it. The author, Paul Collins, explains the issue this way ...

"Virtually all applications you install using the default installation these days decide that they should start-up when Windows starts. If you allow them to take control, you can end up with a situation where (unless you have sufficient memory installed) every other program slows down to be unusable.

The reason for this is that all of these programs use a portion of the system memory and resources which leaves a smaller percentage for other programs once they're opened."

My recommendation to you is to click on the link to Paul's site and then bookmark it so that you can get back to it when the need arises, as it surely will. Most of you will be surprised to discover how many programs (or processes) are running on your system that you didn't intentionally give permission to install and that don't have to load at startup to be used. Fortunately, using MSCONFIG you can easily regain control of things, if you wish. Paul's site also provides a database of 3912 (as of December 18th) programs that may get loaded at start up and what they are as well as whether it is necessary to load them at startup for your system to work properly.

A second site, with the intriguing name of PC Hell, provides excellent guidance about removing a number of programs that get installed surreptitiously in what has come to be known as "drive-by downloads," things that are installed when you click on some innocent-looking popup message that a website presents to you. For example, such programs as Gator and Bonsai Buddy are found on many people's computer, as a result of this type of drive-by download, and seem almost impossible to remove. Fortunately, however, this site will tell you how.

Another site that should be on everyone's list of Favorites (or Bookmarks) is Snopes.com, because it can save you the embarrassment of forwarding a piece of email someone sent you to ALL your friends and web-acquaintances only to learn belatedly that the outrage it reports is false. Of course, to be helped by Snopes, you'll have to form the habit of checking things out there before your outrage prompts you to dispatch that recently received email to your distribution list. It has happened to us all, so I think all of us would do well to resolve to check out Snopes BEFORE we decide that we need to inform our friends of such messages.

I'm sure there are other important websites that I've omitted and about which I'm uninformed. If you know of others that fall into this category, I'd be delighted to learn of them. Just click on Comments below this posting and nominate the sites you find of similar value, if you'd like to suggest them to others.
- posted by Perry @ 10:43 AM