Dull Days of Summer – Time to Tune Up the Computer

No matter how exciting your summer might start out being, there are certainly days where nothing is scheduled, and nothing is available, it seems, for at least a great portion of the day. Perhaps it is the heat, perhaps it is because we have been doing so much, then, with the end of school, which affects most of us, either because we are ending a year, or our children are, or both.

For me, I am awaiting the Fourth of July for some excitement, and, after being lulled into a sense of well being by very mild days for the last 3 weeks, we are now experiencing monster heat. This leads to making one dull, and listless; the best thing to wake up is do something that has been put off for a while.

I have been lax in my housekeeping duties on my main PC lately. It has become the main PC because of problems with another PC, so I am back to using a P4 2.8A, so I need to restore snap to the machine, as allowing it to slow with slovenly behavior makes me irritable.

So, in working up to the housekeeping, I decided to look around for updates to some of the utilities I use on my machines. as I have stated here, and elsewhere, I tend to get machines that I heavily configure, molding them to my exact tastes, and then wonder how anyone else works with standard installs.

The first place I checked is a place that I feel is one of the two best places for freeware on the planet (more on the other later). The site, Freeware Genius, is amazing, and has an article on the front page right now, concerning 43 of the best enhancements to Windows extant.

Rather than rehash what is there, the best thing is a personal trip to that site – and some free space on the hard drive.

Another thing I am about to do is move my machines, all of them, to Avira Antivir, which I believe has become the best free antivirus available. My previous choice, AVG, is not suddenly a terrible product, it is simply a fact that Avira is able to scan effectively, far faster than AVG. It has also gotten better marks in unbiased testing; speed and ability to find infections are both superior.

The next thing is something I think many people do – I have gotten behind on the updating of many of the utilities and programs i use. So, a small amount of time will be devoted to updating programs that show useful improvement, while avoiding updates of software that is simply bloated with unnecessary fluff.

For me, like many, using Windows XP is something I will do, because I don’t feel that Windows 7 is a useful upgrade,  nor do  I like the basic interface, so the cleaning, and clearing up is something that will bring the installation back to the snap it first had. A notable thing for those who are short on cash, or are frugal, and like much of the froufrou of Windows 7; Freeware Genius has a full collection of freeware to make many of the changes to the XP interface to make it look like, and for the most part, work like, Windows 7.

More later. Have a good weekend, clean your machine if it needs it, backup – because you can never be sure when disaster might strike,  and, listen to some Michael Jackson tunes, while thanking (insert higher power or belief of your choice here) that you are still among the living.

•

•

trying a new browser is always fun, the number of settings in Opera has changed, almost doubled, but the defaults work great …

I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There’s a knob called ‘brightness’, but it doesn’t work.Gallagher