Happy New Year

Each year I receive an assortment of questions about small annoyances that bother many users. For that reason, I will offer a few suggestions that can help you and your computer have a happier new year. I am a firm believer that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So I am going to offer a few things that should eliminate some annoyances.
The first thing that you may want to do is to remove programs that you do not use. These programs can range from the freeware that you downloaded to the extra software that was included with your new digital camera or mps player. To remove these programs you need to open the Control Panel in the Start menu. Once the Control Panel is open you should see an icon name ADD or Remove Programs. Next you only need to select the program that you want to remove and click the button to the right labeled remove.
After the programs that have been freeloading on your computer have been removed, then you can take the next step. The next step is to update the programs that you use frequently. You can accomplish this by visiting the websites of the software maker. Quite often the updates are offered for free. This provides you with the latest and greatest aspects of your most used programs.
The next thing is to set a schedule for maintenance tasks. Opening the Start menu, then the All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and finally Scheduled Tasks, does this. The tasks that you may want to focus on are the Scan Disk, Backup, and Disk Defragment. Of the three tasks listed, the backup should have the lions’ share of your attention. You should schedule a daily backup if you use your computer everyday, a weekly backup if you use it 3-5 times a week, and a monthly backup if you use it less than 9 times per month. This should keep your system healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Now the last thing that we can do is to give your computer a little pep when it starts. There are several factors for a slow start up. A relatively easy way to speed up the booting up of your computer is to remove programs from the Start Up Folder. To remove programs from the Start Up Folder you can open up the Start menu, then All Programs, and Startup. Next you can right click the items that you want to remove. This will only remove the program from the Start Up Folder and not your computer. A quick way to circumvent the programs in the Start Up Folder is to hold down the Shift key while the computer is booting up. For those of you who are a little more advanced, you can perform a boot defrag. A boot defrag places the files that boot your computer next to each other. A boot defrag will be performed once “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction” is enabled in the Registry Editor.