Tech Tuesday Tip

Tech Tips for the Non-Techie:

Got an old computer, want to keep it running reasonably fast?

I have a couple of real life tricks that have helped us recently.

In 2003 I bought a couple of computers from the local Gateway store. Gateway was a brand that my former father in law always bought from and in 2003 they had retail stores, not just a mail order.

One of those computers we still have, the desktop. My wife uses it these days, but at one time, we had 5 or 6 people who used it. Each person had their own account desktop settings and a couple of them loaded music and pictures on the desktop computer.

As a result, over the past few years the computer was taking longer and longer to complete tasks. So a couple weeks ago I decided to do some pruning. See, everyone now had their own computer laptops, even my wife, but she preferred to use the desktop and I wanted to squeeze a few more years of life out of it.

I bought an external hard drive last year and moved all the pictures, music and documents from everyone's accounts off the computer's internal hard drive to my external drive. I left my wife's stuff alone.

Then I began deleting everyone else's accounts and did ran a couple of clean up programs.

CCleaner does a decent job and after you run the Cleaner option and the Registry option, there's another feature in the Cleaner section that you should run, but only when you don't need your computer for awhile. And by awhile, I mean hours. Maybe overnight.

Check the Wipe Free Space box and run the Cleaner option again.

Once a week run CCleaner, depending on how big your hard drive is, and how much time you use your computer every week. I use CCleaner on my 3 year old laptop every other day.

One other simple tip to keep your computer fresh and ready to perform. Shut it down every 24 hours. Like at bedtime. Or when you leave the office.

There used to be arguments both for and against leaving your computer on all the time.

Leave it on and you reduce the stress of the computer starting.
Turn it off and you extend it's "lifespan".

I now say turn it off which will allow it to reset some of the settings and junk that accumulated while you were working.

I told you this was for the non-techie, and I meant it!