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Welcome back to the podcast!
This week’s edition: “The Un-Dirty Dozen: Fighting the War on Computer Slowness!”
Atten-hut! You are hereby recruited to combat the evil forces that have infiltrated your computer, causing it to run slowly, display error messages about a lack of space, and above all, prevent you from being able to do your work efficiently! In your training, you will be armed with the proper weapons needed to effectively rid your computer of these annoyances. What is your computer’s major malfunction?
Actually, there could be a variety of maladies causing your computer to slow down to a snail’s pace.
Think about how hard these machines work for us. As we go about our day of browsing the Web, sending and receiving e-mail and attachments, and all the other daily tasks for which we rely on our computers, they are under constant attack. Your computer might be struggling to keep up with too many running programs. It might be bogged down by the sheer volume of unnecessary files that you’ve accumulated, either intentionally or in the form of temporary files. Or it may have even contracted a malicious computer virus.
Whatever the cause, there are some simple steps you can take to help reduce the amount of stress your computer is under. Once you’re done, your computer will feel like it just got back from taking leave—calm, at ease, and ready to get back to work! And just as we humans enjoy frequent vacations, be sure to spoil your computer often with this tips.
Let’s start with the simplest method: the tried and true system reboot. For many computer issues, it’s a panacea. Against the war on computer slowness, it’s heavy artillery. If you’ve ever called the help desk at work, it might be the first suggestion they make for a lot of different issues. Well, believe the hype. Restarting your computer actually can work wonders. It frees up the system’s resources, closes any programs that might have processes running in the background, and gives you a clean slate to work with. To reduce the chance that your computer will even need a reboot, it’s a good idea to shut it down at night or when it won’t be in use for extended periods of time. Here’s another perk of shutting down: reduced electricity bills! Saving money is pretty hard to top, so let’s move on.
Next on the list is keeping your computer’s anti-virus software up to date and running at all times. Most of the time, you won’t even have to worry about it. It typically runs silently in the background; crushing worms, battling vicious viruses, rejecting tiny Trojan horses (you know, the pink ones; the little pony types), and generally doing all it can to keep your computer out of the infirmary, all without interrupting you. But pay attention to the little icon that usually shows up in your System Tray, right by the area that displays the time. The appearance of the icon will vary depending on what brand of anti-virus software you have, but if a notification appears to let you know that virus definition updates are available, make sure you click it and follow the instructions. These updates keep your computer protected against the most current threats, so don’t ignore them.
Sarge here again! Now it’s time to roll up your sleeves and do some real cleaning. Don’t worry, this won’t be anything like scrubbing the latrines with a toothbrush. We’re just going to clean out some old files from your computer. If you’re anything like me, you’ve got files of all kinds stored away in various folders throughout your computer. I’m sure you have files that serve no real purpose any more—old documents, music or video files, maybe some pictures that you just don’t need—but where are they? Fortunately, you won’t have to scour through every file in your computer to find these files; you can just make Windows do it for you. Here’s how. Listen up!
The Search feature makes it easy to locate files of a specific file type. Want to locate every Word document on your computer? Just search for *.doc. The asterisk (*) is a wildcard character, pretty similar to the “Wild Draw Four” card in Uno—it can be anything you want. The asterisk wildcard indicates that the actual file name can consist of any combination of characters, followed by .doc for the Word document file extension.
So once you’ve found all files of a specific type, you can select one or several of them and delete them all at once, right from the Search Results pane.
That’s a step in the right direction, but those deleted files aren’t gone yet—they’re still sitting in the Recycle Bin. This really does you no good because they’re still taking up space on your hard drive. So the next step we need to take is to empty the Recycle Bin to permanently delete those files.
Well, recruits, that’s it for this week. Think you’ve got all the ammunition you need to head into battle? If not, don’t retreat; just check out the whole list of the Un-Dirty Dozen tips for keeping your PC clean. You can find them down at our bunker, at www.productiveUpodcast.com.
Here’s the Un-Dirty Dozen (plus a few bonus tips)
- Shut Down Your Computer Frequently
- Keep the Recycle Bin Empty
- Clear Temporary Internet Files, History, and Cookies
- Disk Cleanup
- Keep Anti-Virus Software Up to Date and Running All the Time
- Change Virtual Memory Settings
- Search for Files by File Type
- Compress Folders, Files, and Pictures to Save Hard Drive Space
- Keep Hard Drive to Only What is Used
- Clean My Recent Documents
- Scan Hard Drives for Errors
- Run Hard Drive Defrag
- Search for Files by File Size
- Search for Files by Modified Date
And if you’re enjoying these tips, I’d like to see you over in front of my tent at iTunes; write me up a review—5 stars, please. Then we’ll see you back right here at Productive U Podcast next week for another edition of our tips.
Dismissed!
Music courtesy of Clayton & Fulcrum
