There
is no feeling for the true PC nerd like having a smooth
running, optimized PC that just sits there and hums
beautifully on the desk. And we all know that over time and
hours of use, the drive becomes cluttered and the system slows
down. You may have crap on the hard drive that you forgot
about, orphaned registry entries, etc. How do you restore your
PC to the pristine shape it was in when it was new? Well, if
you have a CD-R drive, it’s easy. When you have your
computer into this state of PC utopia, you can use a program
such as Ghost to back up a true image of your hard drive. It
makes an exact byte-for-byte image of your hard drive and
backs it up into one image file, with the *.gho extension. You
can then burn this to your CD-R. Ghost can even compress the
image file so that you can fit it onto one CD-ROM. A few
months down the road, when the PC is old and cluttered, or it
isn’t working correctly, you can restore it to utopia by
simply restoring the image file using Ghost.
There
is nothing like having your hard drive too full for that nice
new app you just bought. What’s worse is that your drive may
be full of software that you don’t even know about or never
use. You should know exactly what is on your machine. If you
are looking through the directories or your start menu and
find something that doesn’t look familiar, check it out. Run
it and see what it is. If it is useless, then un-install it.
You can do this by using a program such as Cleansweep or the
basic Add/Remove Programs. On a lot of systems you may find
stuff such as AOL install programs, useless sound card
utilities, etc. If you are using Windows 95 and they come up
as un-installable, then manually delete these file and remove
the shortcuts from the start menu.
You’d
be surprised at the amount of software that runs on your
machine that you don’t even know about. These programs are
set up to start on boot-up without your knowledge. They eat up
precious resources and CPU cycles. Some of these programs hide
in the StartUp folder of your Start menu. Others hitch onto
other applications. For example, when you install Microsoft
Office, it installs Microsoft Fast Find utility. It loads on
start up and indexes all of your documents when your PC
isn’t busy. It slows down the PC quite a bit when it
indexes, so this is an example of the kind if program that can
be nixed. To find out what is running on your PC, hit
Ctrl/Alt/Del. It will bring up a list of all that is running.
Do you recognize everything? Those that you loaded yourself
will probably be obvious, but menacing programs such as
“Osa” and “Navapw32” make finding the useful apps more
difficult. Some of the easy ones can removed by going to the
Start Menu / Settings / Taskbar & Start Up. Hit the Start
menu tab and you can remove those programs you don’t want to
load. Some of the programs aren’t located in the StartUp
folder. The only way to get rid of these is to edit the
Registry. Open up REGEDIT and open the Hkey_Local_Machine\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
folder. There you should see those programs that boot up
automatically. Delete the keys that load the offending apps.
Before this, however, make sure you make a back up of your
registry.
If
you installed Windows over a machine that had DOS on it, then
you probably have older AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files.
There is nothing wrong with these files, but they may be
launching old files that are no longer needed, or files that
you may not want to start automatically. Some such files are
called Terminate and Stay Resident apps, or TSR’s. These
apps stay in memory until they are summoned. To fix this, you
can open up these files in NotePad. Most of the time, these
files are on the C: drive root directory. You can look for
real-mode DOS drivers or virus scanners. For example, you may
see and entry loading up MOUSE.COM. You don’t really need
this since Windows handles it’s own mouse drivers. You can
delete this line from the file. To be safer, instead of
deleting the lines, just put a REM in front of it. This makes
the system ignore the line, but leaves it there in case you
made a mistake and need to re-initiate that line. Experiment
until you get the best results. In general, Windows 95 or 98
do not need much in these files in order to run properly.
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