Cryin' Those Old Computer Blues

Many years ago, at the dawn of the personal computing age, a poet visiting Northwest brought along his "portable" computer, which in those days was as large as a mid-size piece of luggage. When asked why so many Humanities types were enamored of computers, he replied with a phrase from Whitman: “They make the word electric.”

These days, most of us Humanities types aren’t just enamored of computers, we are addicted to them. While Computer Services takes care of our campus machines, we get downright cranky when our personal computers bog down with what seems an inevitable accumulation of digital sludge and plaque.

To start the new year off, nHumanities offers some online help in tuning your computer, as well a few suggestions for preventive maintenance.

Adware and spyware are constant irritations. Here are two of our old favorites for dealing with this junk. Both are free:

• Ad-Aware from Lavasoft removes popup ads which have been planted on your computer.
• Spybot Search and Destroy scrubs off malicious programs which track your web movements.
• (As readers of nHumanties know, we are big fans of Firefox, which does a better job of avoiding many of these problems than Internet Explorer. We'll have more to say about Firefox at a later date.)
  

One of the biggest reasons computers slow down has to do with the number of programs which get loaded into memory and stored on your hard drive.

• How to Maintain a Healthy Windows System offers a great overview of some simple and free programs to help your system.
• PC World has a nice article on Troubleshooting Windows which gives instructions on using msconfig so that you can control what is being loaded into memory. (It also offers advice on using the defrag command. With the large hard drives computers have today, we suggest starting defrag just before you go to bed.)
• Before you defrag your drive, we recommend running CCleaner -- you'll be amazed at the sheer volume of unnecessary files it cleans off.
• The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities has a great list of free programs for computer upkeep.
• WinPatrol is a slick little program which monitors what is running on your computer, as well as screening adware and performing a number of other useful little tasks.
• Holding down CTRL - ALT - DELETE pops open Windows Task Manager. Clicking on Processes allows you to see which processes are running on your computer. Most of us have no idea what these files do. You can find out by going to Process Library, which will explain what the processes are doing and if you can terminate them or not.

As always, we recommend backing up your data regularly. (Speaking of backing material up, keep in mind that external hard drives which run off a USB2 port have dropped dramatically in price and are widely available for as little as $80. There's no installation--just plug them in.)

P.S. We should have included this nifty little utility in our original list. As much as we may be in denial, we all know that sooner or later the hard drive in our computer will fail. The good news is that now you can have some warning. Modern hard drives come with built in S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring Analysis Reporting Technology), which will let you know when the drive is beginning to feel puny or nearing the big sleep. A number of programs take advantage of this feature and provide you with updates on the status of your drive. HDD Health is a nice one (and free). Here's a link to download a copy.

Photo by Norman Ellison and taken from National Library of Australia News.