This week my wife asked me if I could fix her friend's computer. I asked her what made her think it needed to be fixed. She said that her friend said that it was running slow. I thought this would be a great way to practice what I had learned in all of my coursework for my Associates of Applied Science Degree in Computer Information Systems.
Her friend brought the computer to me and we pressed the power button. About five minutes later, she was logging in using a fingerprint scanner. About ten minutes after that, I was looking at her desktop. I could see that her computer was moving painfully slow.
I wanted to see what was using all of her resources so I opened task manager on her Windows 7 machine. Nothing seemed to be bogging down the processor so I looked at what programs she had installed. I went to settings and looked at the system information. She had 4 GB of RAM which is plenty for Windows 7. Her processor was faster than mine.
I decided that it was not a hardware issue. I then went to the Add/Remove Programs part of Windows 7. I was surprised by what I found installed on her computer. She had several browser thirdparty toolbars installed. I had learned in my experience that many of these toolbars are notorious for collecting more information than cookies.
I set out on a quest to remove these. Some of them were difficult to remove because I had to uninstall them multiple times for each browser. The next culprit I found were the applications that offer coupons. Often these applications run in the background and capture your online shopping activities. I then spent a few minutes removing these programs.
By this point, the computer was running faster. It only took about three minutes to get to the login window and about two minutes after login to get to the desktop. I then removed some obsolete Skype and Tango applications. My next thought was to remove or disable the manufacturer add-on software.
The strange thing I notice was some applications appeared to be from the manufacturer but the web address was different from the manufacturer. I removed those too.
Next, I used the Windows Disk CleanUp utility. I installed CCleaner, analyzed and had it remove all of the junk files. I ran the registry utility in CCleaner and removed the obsolete registry keys. After that, I decided to defragment the hard drive. The hard drive was about 35% fragmented so I let it continue.
The reason I cleaned up the obsolete and unwanted programs and ran CCleaner first so that the defragment utility was not moving junk files around and making the process longer. At this point, I had spent about 8 hours fixing this computer. Most of it was waiting for the defragment to finish. I didn't actually sit there and wait. I went to dinner and when I got back it was done.
I learned that not everyone knows that you can't every program that asks to be installed. The next thing I learned and the reason why this is a threat is it limits the availability of the system that people pay a lot of money for. I don't know how much is spent to develop these programs that eat up resources or how much money they make off of them but it seems unfair that they get to use someone's computer resources for free and make money off of it.
The next reason why this is a threat is that these programs could be potential backdoors into your machine. Be cognizant of what you download and install. Not all of it is good.
Her friend brought the computer to me and we pressed the power button. About five minutes later, she was logging in using a fingerprint scanner. About ten minutes after that, I was looking at her desktop. I could see that her computer was moving painfully slow.
I wanted to see what was using all of her resources so I opened task manager on her Windows 7 machine. Nothing seemed to be bogging down the processor so I looked at what programs she had installed. I went to settings and looked at the system information. She had 4 GB of RAM which is plenty for Windows 7. Her processor was faster than mine.
I decided that it was not a hardware issue. I then went to the Add/Remove Programs part of Windows 7. I was surprised by what I found installed on her computer. She had several browser thirdparty toolbars installed. I had learned in my experience that many of these toolbars are notorious for collecting more information than cookies.
I set out on a quest to remove these. Some of them were difficult to remove because I had to uninstall them multiple times for each browser. The next culprit I found were the applications that offer coupons. Often these applications run in the background and capture your online shopping activities. I then spent a few minutes removing these programs.
By this point, the computer was running faster. It only took about three minutes to get to the login window and about two minutes after login to get to the desktop. I then removed some obsolete Skype and Tango applications. My next thought was to remove or disable the manufacturer add-on software.
The strange thing I notice was some applications appeared to be from the manufacturer but the web address was different from the manufacturer. I removed those too.
Next, I used the Windows Disk CleanUp utility. I installed CCleaner, analyzed and had it remove all of the junk files. I ran the registry utility in CCleaner and removed the obsolete registry keys. After that, I decided to defragment the hard drive. The hard drive was about 35% fragmented so I let it continue.
The reason I cleaned up the obsolete and unwanted programs and ran CCleaner first so that the defragment utility was not moving junk files around and making the process longer. At this point, I had spent about 8 hours fixing this computer. Most of it was waiting for the defragment to finish. I didn't actually sit there and wait. I went to dinner and when I got back it was done.
I learned that not everyone knows that you can't every program that asks to be installed. The next thing I learned and the reason why this is a threat is it limits the availability of the system that people pay a lot of money for. I don't know how much is spent to develop these programs that eat up resources or how much money they make off of them but it seems unfair that they get to use someone's computer resources for free and make money off of it.
The next reason why this is a threat is that these programs could be potential backdoors into your machine. Be cognizant of what you download and install. Not all of it is good.
Adam, I agree that most folks have no idea how to maintain their computer. Just like vehicles, you've got to do some maintenance; get rid of programs you don't need, be careful what you do install, clean up.
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