Tech Tips for the left brain challenged

Today we’ll focus on some soft­ware, and some more advice on what to do when your com­puter starts to slowdoooown.

Soft­ware

Using pro­tec­tion and First Aide

Regard­less of your oper­at­ing sys­tem both Secu­rity of your pre­cious stuff and help when things start to go all jumbly for you are very impor­tant to keep­ing all those lit­tle crit­ters inside that box happy.

Use Pro­tec­tion
If you use Win­doz you are invit­ing dis­as­ter if you do not have your sys­tem pro­tected against viruses and spy­ware. A lot of hang-ups can be traced back to a virus that took the oppor­tu­nity you offered to make your machines all goopy and wheezy. Or maybe you just noticed some­thing strange on your credit card bill and don’t remem­ber buy­ing $10,000 worth of cloths from Land­send. McAfee and Nor­ton are the two best and can be down­loaded from their repec­tive web sites so.…DO IT NOW!!
If you a Mac per­son you can use pro­tec­tion but you really don’t need it Nor­ton makes an virus spe­cific for Mac users. The thing it will do for you is help reduce the “pass through” of viruses that may infect a sender’s e-mails.
First Aide
Last week we talked about slow inter­nets, there a cou­ple more thing that can make your com­puter feel like it is all gummed up inside.
First rea­son is that your disk has been stash­ing bytes all hel­ter skel­ter and it takes for­ever to remem­ber where it put them so it has to act just like that turntable (kinda dates me) skip­pin’ all over that LP try­ing to find the song you want. This is called disk frag­men­ta­tion. It is easy to fix regard­less of what type of com­puter you are using.

What to do?

Win­doz machines need to be “de-fragged”, in the old days we could by pass win­doz and go directly to the oper­at­ing sys­tem, type in some sim­ple com­mands in MS-DOS and in a few min­utes every­thing was honky dory. Not the same now you’ll have to use some­thing like Nor­ton to do the defrag of your disk.

Macs will have to use exter­nal soft­ware to defrag disks and the absolute beyond a doubt best is Disk War­rior. This soft­ware not only defrags the drive it also takes care of wan­der­ing fold­ers, and incor­rect per­mis­sions both of which if out of order can really cause things to slow. Oh.. and it can also check the phys­i­cal state of your drive. I have also used it to res­cue a drive that was try­ing to go all hay wire on me. The down side of Disk War­rior is to run it on your main boot drive you have to run it from the CD which restarts your Mac and then boots off the disk…be pre­pared to spend so qual­ity time with your Mac as this takes for­ever to do. The end result is well worth the wait though.

Sec­ond rea­son is  that your com­puter is hav­ing a gas­tric block­age! Well, the elec­tronic ver­sion of it but it is eas­ily fixed. Your computer…PC or Mac doesn’t mat­ter uses its mem­ory chips to store all those 1s and 0s you are mak­ing it eat, but just like you reach a point when you have over indulged your­self in that favorite din­ner or desert, those mem­ory chips fill up and can’t take any more 1s and 0s. A few things here at play…

The amount of 1s and 0s you stuff into that sucker are lim­ited by the size of its chips. So if you’re busy multi-tasking away and sud­denly the pro­gram you’re work­ing on goes miss­ing, or that new one you just clicked on won’t budge, well .…guess what? You’ve reached it’s limit.

What to do?

You could make a mad dash out to the Apple Store or call the Geek Squad and have them stick a few more mem­ory chips in. How­ever, the best way to pre­vent this is.…have enough chips ( also known as mem­ory or RAM) to begin with. These days you should have a min­i­mum off 1 gig to run cur­rent soft­ware, 2 gigs would be better.

The other thing you can do is close some pro­grams, or bet­ter yet close every­thing and restart. See…that emp­ties those chips giv­ing you a fresh start.

Third rea­son is Mem­ory hogs –Soft­ware, all soft­ware uses space on the mem­ory chips to keep all of its instruc­tions and other gob­bledy gook and when you quite that pro­gram it is SUPPOSED to give it all back so that some other soft­ware can use it. Well, there are a few cul­prits out there that just love to have per­ma­nent dibs on your chips, they swal­low it up and abso­lut­ley refuse to give it up. Two of the biggest hogs you might be using are Pho­to­shop and Fire­fox…they will keep tak­ing over the cub­bies in the chips as long as they can and they don’t care if they make every­thing else includ­ing you run slow!

What to Do?

Close and restart Fire­fox and/or Pho­to­shop if you are using them.

Desk­top helpers

Do you often find your­self fran­ti­cally search­ing and try­ing to remem­ber where you stuck that PDF file, or photo, or word doc and can’t remem­ber what you named it? Whether you have one sin­gle drive or mul­ti­ple Ter­abytes of exter­nal stor­age find­ing images, PDFs or the most recent file you saved can cause a body to go bald early. Well, I just fin­ished test­ing a suite of really cool and very help­ful lit­tle apps that can take some of the frus­tra­tion away. The suite is put out by Ironic soft­ware and here is what they do:

Leap

Kinda assists the finder by only find­ing the types of files you want, so I often can’t remem­ber how I named a graphic file but I do know the file extension…by selet­ing the file type and what dri­ves I want searched Leap shows me only the files that match the search cri­te­ria and only the fold­ers they are in. So what’s the big Whoop? The thing is if you are visu­ally ori­ented you get to SEE thumb­nails of all the files which makes it mucho easy for us right brainers.

Deep

Does some­what the same thing but like its name sug­gests it goes deeper by allow­ing you to search by color, tags, and just about any way you can come up with. If you want that photo of the red glazed pot or the paint­ing in blue just use the color chart to selct the color range and Bang every­thing with those col­ors is front and center.

YEP

How often have you searched and search for that PDF you down­loaded the other day, only hav­ing a vague idea of the cover? YEP does the same thing for PDFs that iTunes does for music. You search the same way as Leep, or Deep and once you find that bug­ger you can ver­ify if it is the right one by pag­ing through it right there in YEP…no open­ing up Adobe Reader or whatever.

Fresh

How many times have saved some­thing and imme­di­atly had a senior moment that draws a total blank when an hour later you can’t remem­ber diid­dly about where you saved it to? This lit­tle gem will keep track of it…just open it up and shows you thumb­nails of every­thing you have just saved and where it was saved to…how ’bout them apples?