The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
It's finally March and we've made it through another winter. Spring is (hopefully) not too far away. With spring comes spring cleaning. Your house needs it. Your cabin and your camper need it. Your computer needs it, too. When was the last time you opened the case of your machine? If you haven't done it in the least year or so, you will be amazed by the amount of dust that collects inside, attracted by fans and the electric field. Carefully, very carefully, you can use the smallest nozzle on your vacuum cleaner has to remove the bunnies from your beige case. Don't play with the wires, and make certain you're not banging around the electronic parts with the nozzle. Simply holding it inside the case should get rid of most of the dust. Once the machine has been cleaned, make sure that all of the wire connections are solid and well-seated. Wires that have come off or are loose are a prime source of short circuits and can destroy a machine very quickly. Once the machine is clean, turn to the software. If you have a Windows machine, it needs to be regularly maintained. XP can nicely update itself and will keep downloading and installing updates if you let it. The only danger is that it will download everything and install everything, including such things as the ability to convert English files to Finnish or Danish. Be careful if you let everything by with Windows Update, as it can chew up a lot of your bandwidth. Following the updates, make sure you run through the standard utilities. At least once or twice a year, run a thorough scan of your files, folders, and your hard drive itself. This will detect any trouble with your hard drive, or with the structure of the files and folders. It can find lost file fragments, chips in your mirror Ð smooth hard drive surface, and any files that are simply not working. Once you have scanned, you also need to defragment your hard drive. What this utility does is make certain that everything in your hard drive is in the right place. The files installed on your computer, boot files, Windows program files, and software files, belong all together and in one place. When you use your machine a lot or when you take a lot of files on and off of your computer, things get moved around. Defragging your hard drive puts everything back in the right place. Running these several utilities can do wonders for the speed of your machine. I have an uncle who goes as far as completely wiping his computer hard drive every six to eight months. Windows gets bloated over time and slows down, filling up with cookies and registry key files. All of this adds up to a slower computer. Don't forget to keep your ad-aware software updated, as well as your firewall and anti-virus software. The regular time that you spend looking after your machine will more than add up compared to having a machine crash and losing all of your data. Finally, no matter how well you look after your machine, it is a machine, and machines are prone to failure. Back up the important files on your hard drive regularly. Every several weeks at least, burn your document folders, pictures, music, and whatever else that, if lost, would make you cry. Buy yourself several re-writeable CDs or DVDs and copy over them each time. Once you've got a system in place, it will only take a bit of time to do this every several weeks, and it is invaluable time. Everything needs cleaning. Make your computer happy. ([email protected])
