Continued from page 1
If you take nothing else away from this article, try to embrace
following two thoughts:
- Not being aware of every program installed, and particularly which ones get invoked by default at startup time, could cause your system to become highly unstable, resulting in frequent crashes, loss of data, or possibly even irreparable hardware damage.
- Try at all costs to refrain from installing non-essential software.
While you may very well find an overabundance of non-essential software installed, even more important is
fact that there may NOT be antivirus, firewall, or other security/protection software running. Consider this point CRITICAL. The absence of such software or it being improperly configured can set you up for disaster! In an upcoming article we'll discuss
various “sleuthing” techniques for determining just what software resides on your computer.
The object of
second point above is to simply use good judgment in deciding which software goes and what stays on your computer. Sure, there's no harm in keeping reputable software around such as that favorite game or multimedia player, given that you know where it came from and you do at least use it occasionally.
OK, let's summarize our discussion. Start thinking now about your current software and which programs you consider as really important to you or your family. Remove everything else you can bear to part with. Furthermore, of
types of software you feel you must keep, evaluate it's “utility”. Some programs you may have obtained and installed, and others were probably just pre-installed on your PC. You may want to consider upgrading existing packages, or particularly in
latter case, other similar software may exist which has a better feature set that can serve you better.
Now go ahead. Take out
trash!
Stay tuned for
next installment coming shortly.

Earl Gooch is an engineer who has been involved in the high tech industry for over 23 years, working in various capacities including design of both computer hardware and software, web development, system engineering, customer support, and marketing. http://www.softwarehelpme.com