Statisticians (whoever they may be) tell us that 90% of the individuals buying personal computers never change their system defaults. At first glance this would seem to indicate a serious failure on the part of these individuals. In point of fact, however, hardware manufactures and operating system software developers tend to configure their products to operate somewhere in their midrange. This provides maximum stability and satisfactory performance for the largest number of users. This is just what the majority of users want. The trick is to stay there as you continue to use your computer. If a user never connected to the Internet and always used only the software that came with the machine, he or she would have a stable, dependable, and relatively trouble free machine.

The problem is that change is necessary and begins almost as soon as the computer is setup. If the computer is to remain "stable, dependable, and relatively trouble free", changes need to be managed. The first necessary changes are those already discussed in previously articles. If you connect to the Internet get a firewall program and set it up. Get an anti-virus program and keep its definitions up to date. Do this first! More problems come via your Internet connection than from any other source. If you don't protect yourself, you will get into trouble, and there will be nobody to blame but yourself. To paraphrase an old expression, "Do them before they do you".

Less urgent, but still important, get programs to check for spyware and other malicious programs. (Adaware and Spybot Search and Destroy are good and free.) Other programs you install depend on your needs. Note the word "needs". Don't randomly install programs, particularly in the beginning. Install programs that do what you need and want to do. Don't randomly install programs to "see what they do" (particularly free ones). If you do, uninstall them immediately, when they turn out to be something you don't like.

Any long term user will tell you that computers slow down after a period of use. This is caused by the gunk collected from unnecessary programs and programs installed and uninstalled. Entries left in the registry are the main reason. The computer is constantly running down blind alleys and in some cases generating error messages because it can't find something a registry entry says should be there. Most of these require hard drive access. Unnecessary files on the hard drive also increases undesired drive activity. Remember hard drive access is the slowest activity of the computer

Many power users believe that it is necessary to reformat the hard drive and reinstall everything from scratch approximately once each year to recover the lost performance. This certainly works but I believe it is overkill and that it is better to avoid, or at least minimize the problem, in the first place. I also believe that most users will not do anything so radical and time consuming until their computer actually fails or becomes so slow they essentially can't use it.

In the next few articles I'm going to try to cover some of the things you can do to keep you machine humming along.

CAG