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October 11, 2004 |
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About Town Dave Uphoff |
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Time for a technical tuneup
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As the internet becomes more sophisticated and technically superior, it also has become more complicated
and dangerous. In addition to the omnipresent hackers who attempt to invade our computers with malicious
results, there are also unscrupulous companies who install programs in our computers through the internet
to record our internet activity and report it back to their own computer. This type of computer invasion
is referred to as "spyware".
I really don't know why these spyware programs are so prevalent and I really don't know what their ultimate goal is but I do know that they can really screw up your computer. A month ago my computer was hijacked by a program that changed my homepage to be its homepage on my browser. In addition, it would not allow me to go to certain websites it didn't approve of. I had to eventually back up my computer and reformat my hard drive and reload my operation system in order to get rid of the hijacker. There are programs that you can download from the internet that will detect any spyware programs you might have on your computer. The two that I use and recommend are Adaware which can be downloaded from http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/ and Spybot which can be downloaded from http://www.safer-networking.org/en/. Both of these programs should be run once a week to keep spyware from invading your computer. Another technical word of advice is to eliminate programs that are running in the background of your computer that aren't really needed. Most people are not aware of these programs that are running but the symptons are real. A few weeks ago I got on my friend's computer and try to get on the internet and it seemed to take forever to navigate from one page to another. In a word, his computer was really running slow. |
If your computer is running slow also, here is what I recommend. Click on the Start button at the lower
left of your screen and then click on the Run command shown in the lower right of the menu that pops up. A dialog box is
then displayed in which you can enter a command. Type in msconfig in the text box and hit the Ok key.
This will display another menu. Click on the tab labeled Startup at the top right of the dialog box.
This will display a list of programs that are started up when your system boots up. If the box to the left of
the program is checked, that means that the program is running and residing in memory in your computer. Many of
these programs are not needed and are taking up valuable memory space.
When I followed this procedure on my friend's computer, he had over 25 programs checked off as running in the Startup list. Most of these programs need not to be running. I unchecked most of the programs and rebooted his computer and it ran much faster. A rule of thumb to follow is that any program in the Startup list that has the word "Common Startup" or "Startup" listed under the Location column should be unchecked. After doing this procedure, click the Ok button and reboot the computer. You will find that it should run faster. How do these programs get included in the startup list in the first place? Whenever you load in new software, often the install program will include the new program in the startup list even though it is not required. If you need to run the program, all you have to do is click on the icon for the program from your desktop and it will start running. There is no need to have the program running continually in the background and hogging valuable memory. The only programs that need to be running in the background are the anti-virus programs and a few Microsoft programs. I hope this advice helps your computer run better. I know it helped my and my friend's computer. You may have noticed that I have changed the format for the front webpage. The menu is now at the top instead of at the side. I will be redesigning other webpages to have the same format. I am sure you will get use to it after a a bit of browsing. I am gradually bringing the webpage back to full steam after running MinonkTalk lite for the summer. New pages and new formats will be continually introduced. Stay tuned and keep watching. |
