Now having said all of that, we all know that sometimes you just walk into same room computer is in and a blue screen can appear telling us that we have done something illegal. After getting one of these messages, you might want to do what I always do. That is lock doors so computer police can not get in and arrest me for whatever it was that I was not supposed to have done. If you do same thing, you might not want to mention it to anyone outside your family. I have found that there are people out there that do not believe in computer police, (poor lost souls).

It is time now to get to good part. Anytime you download something off internet or download something a friend or relative has sent you, always run it through your antivirus program before you make installation. If you do not have a antivirus program on your computer you should really get one. Without one you have no way of knowing if someone has sent you a virus and no way of knowing if you are sending it to someone else. Here are two good ones that are free for personal use. You can find them here "http://www.asw.cz/index.html" and "http://www.grisoft.com" Do not include quotes when entering these addresses into your address bar. The bottom line is this, your computer can be a good friend and lots of fun if you know how to treat it. A good way to keep your computer running good is to perform maintenance on a regular basis. Maybe in my next article I will cover computer maintenance. See Ya, keep it on road.

You can set many of them up to run periodically, and they will do many of things talked about in this article. You can find many of these programs on freeware download sites.

4.) Spyware & Adware Removal – Both spyware and adware are real computer killers these days. You have probably been bombarded by offers to buy programs that will get rid of all junk on your computer – The simple answer is you don’t need to get these programs. You can find freeware ones all over that will work great. I like to use two programs simply because sometimes one will find stuff that other won’t. My favorites are Ad-Aware by Lavasoft and Spybot – Search and Destroy.

5.) Hard Drive Space – Ok, I’ll admit, this one may not be free. If you have deleted everything off of your hard drive that you possibly can and you still have a shortage of space, you are simply going to need a bigger hard drive. If you have less than 500 megabytes still available for storage space, I highly recommend getting a bigger hard drive, as a computer with a filled up hard drive will perform very sluggishly.

By periodically doing all of above you can generally keep your notebook in tip-top shape, and save your yelling for something else :)