A Lean Clean Computing Machine
This is what we optimally want on our desk (or in our briefcase), but how to get our computer to being a lean, clean, computing machine AND to keep it that way?
Keep this in mind. With a few exceptions (which we will talk about later), your computer will never run as well as it does when you do that very first boot up right after purchase. This may seem obviously silly, but then in the light of “add-ons” which promise to “speed up your computer”, this maxim brings with it a new light.
Let me say again in a different way. There is NOTHING that you will add (with few exceptions) AFTER the fact (at least in terms of software) that will speed up your computer. We are not talking about more RAM or a larger faster hard drive, both of which can certainly have performance increases. What we are talking about are software promises that tout making your computer run faster.
Almost every piece of software that you will add to your computer after you purchase it is going to slow your computer down by some degree. Thus, we want to add software wisely AND to do an appraisal and subsequent clean-up of software that no longer serves us. With the average life span of a computer somewhere in the area of 4 to 6 years, the amount of no longer used software can add up.
This is a little like driving your car for 10 years and keeping ALL of the old tires, batteries and other old parts STILL attached to your car for all of that time. Silly, right? So, when you do a semi-annual every 6 month clean-up, look at any software that you have not used in the past year OR perhaps installed just to check it out and then forgot about it, and then DITCH that old useless stuff!
For the PC owner (Macs do this more or less automatically), running the disk defragment and disc cleanup are also useful. A hard drive that has less than 30% or so of free space is also a performance hog and with the price of huge hard drives so inexpensive, it is well worth replacing a full hard drive with a larger (and often faster) drive and then moving your files (the still used ones) over.
So, we have old unused programs to un-install, defrag and disc cleanup, free space to monitor and next would be Browser maintenance. Quite often when someone complains of a “slow computer” what they really mean is the computer being slow on the internet. One of the biggest culprits of slow browsing (besides using MS Internet Explorer!) is multiple “Toolbars” getting installed in the browser. Very often these are installed almost without the user realizing as part of a “bundled install”.
Let’s face it, every company out there on the internet wants a piece of you, or, at the very least they want to track you, monitor you and “suggest” options and shopping possibilities. One way that they do this is by installing Toolbars in your browser and I have actually seen a browser that had no less than 20 toolbars installed in it from every web company known. This of course made the browser run like an old 486 computer (nevermind) and was truly painful to use.
Much more to come. Stay tuned . . .