From: "Louise Gullion" REMEMBER TO ENGAGE IT AGAIN WHEN YOU ARE ALL DONE. IT TAKES ABOUT 3 HOURS TO COMPLETE THE CLEANING PROCESS. HAPPY CLEANING Routine Tune-up's for Computers (Author unknown) The following 6 actions should be done at least once a month. However, heavy internet usage dictates that they be done once a week. By not doing these actions, you will see your computer performing slower & slower until it may finally lock up. It will eventually not execute programs correctly (events out of order, colors wrong, sounds broken, etc.) and on most computer's the mouse will disappear! All you can do then is press reset but it will disappear again shortly. So, take a deep breath & let's get into your machine. HONEY, will you take out the trash pleeeeease? First, let's find the trash. Click START/FIND/FILES OR FOLDERS. Type in *.tmp then ENTER. These temporary files are created by Windows and are SUPPOSED (minor Windows flaw) to be closed out when you shut down your computer. Sometimes Windows forgets some. Enough of those leftovers are called TRASH! Delete them. Second, Remember the letter to Mr/Miss Wonderful that you wrote months ago before you found out they were not worthy of your time? Throw it & all the other "old stuff" into the recycle bin by deleting them. Especially true for old pictures. Third, Empty the recycle bin! Every time you empty the kitchen trash can, empty the recycle bin for me, ok? It's icon looks like a trash can for a reason! Keep minimum stuff ( bytes:-)) on your CLIPBOARD. Clipboard stuff is stored on your RAM memory. You were probably too cheep to get lots of RAM so don't slow down your system by using up RAM to hold something you don't need. When something is put on the clipboard, Windows wipes it clean first. So why not put something tiny on the clipboard to keep the RAM freed up for faster computing? Let's do to: Put onto the desktop any text document like this one your're reading now. Highlight a small word...like..."Pete" Do this by holding down the "Ctrl" key and run the mouse over..."Pete" You just cleaned off the clipboard & put "pete" on it "Pete" is a lot smaller then the last item you coppied/cut or whatever some program decided to put there for quick use. RAM is "precious"' protect it always. CLEAN out THE Internet folder. Each time you visit a web site & click through it's pages, each page's web address is stored in the HISTORY folder and the TEMPORARY INTERNET FILES folder. Two hour's on the web & my folder is so full my mouse freezes! Delete them away. Click START/SETTINGS/CONTROL PANEL Double click on the INTERNET icon. The folder you're looking at has 6 tabs. We will deal with the NAVIGATION and ADVANCED tabs. Click NAVIGATION. See "HISTORY" on the bottom half? Set the days to 1 if you use the web a lot, set to 5 if you don't. Now click "VIEW HISTORY" You can count them or look at the total at the bottom left. Anyone else on your 'puter can see wher you've been!! But, too many will clog up your machine. Click EDIT/SELECT ALL, now click FILE/DELETE. Close the NAVIGATION window. Click ADVANCED. See the TEMPORARY INTERNET FILES in the middle? Click "View files"- Click EDIT/SELECT ALL, now click FILE/DELETE. Close the TEMPORARY INTERNET WINDOW. While you're on this ADVANCED page, put a check mark next to the "Warn Before Accepting Cookies" I'll tell ya about cookies later. Close the Internet Properties window then close the Control Panel window. Now we gotta do two built-in Window95- maintenance programs SCAN DISK Basically it scans the disk for errors. Click START/PROGRAMS/ACCESSORIES/SYSTEM TOOLS/SCANDISK. Make sure there is or put a dot next to "THOROUGH" and a check next to "Automatically FIX ERRORS". Click start and go do the weeks laundry cuz it usually takes a while. When it's done, close the window. Piece of cake, huh? DEFRAG Imagine a bag of M&M's on a platter, then you eat all the red ones. I come over and eat all the yellow ones. See all those random empty spaces on the platter, that's what your hard drive looks like if you don't DEFRAG once in a while. It takes the hard drive longer to find information if it's scattered around like the M&M's. Let's push them all together. Click START/PROGRAMS/ACCESSORIES/SYSTEM TOOLS/DISK DEFRAGMENTER. On the tiny window that appears, click "OK". On the next tiny window, click "START" Zooooom,off it goes! Think I was silly about the M&M crap? Click "SHOW DETAILS" (told ya) COOKIES....COOKIES....COOKIES....COOKIES...COOKIES...COOKIES "WARNING, Will Robinson..DANGER-DANGER" A little known trivia fact is that Mr. Robot was talking about:..COOKIES.. They look good but taste terrible. MOTTO: Don't eat them by accepting them. Cookies are a mini tattle tale program that a web site wants to put onto your hard drive. Cookies look at the web addresses in your Internet History folder and tell the web site what other web sites you have visited. Is it for marketing or spying or to find out what your interests are so you can be sent even more junk mail (spam). If you've never heard of cookies, then you're probably laughing at me like the M&M story. OK, follow me for a reality check. Click START/PROGRAMS/WINDOWS/EXPLORER. Think of what you see as a book that's folder open. Whatever you highlight (by clicking on the word) on the left, it's contents will be shown on the right. On the left page, click the "+" next to the word 'WINDOWS'. Under WINDOWS ARE all the sub folders in WINDOWS. Oh my gosh! Is there really a folder called COOKIES? Click on the word COOKIES to highlight it. The right page will now show it's contents. If you didn't know anything about COOKIES before now, and you didn't have a check next to "WARN BEFORE ACCEPTING COOKIES" on the ADVANCED TAB folder in Intenet Properties, I'll bet you've got a lot of damn COOKIES on the right page. They're all squealing like 7 th grade red-headed girls gossiping. Let's flush them out. Click EDIT/SELECT ALL, click FILE/DELETE. What? You say they all didn't go away? HaHa, you learnd too late and you've got a taste of..."SUPER COOKIE". 256 & 2048 are Super Booger cookies, look bad, taste bad & they're all yours. And last but not least, let us not forget all those little temp devils in our MS-DOS. This is where all these temporary files wind up if we are not careful. To delete these, we must do the following..... 1) Shut all open programs down.. 2) Click to Windows..Start.. 3) Click on Shut Down.. 4) Make sure the little black dot is in front of.. Re-Start in MS-DOS.. 5) Click on Enter... 6) You should now be in MS-DOS mode.. 7) Look down left side of your screen for Windows prompt: 8) Type in... deltree tempor~1 9) Click on Enter.. 10) You will be asked if you want to delete all temp files... y n 11) Click on..y.. 12) Click on enter.. 13) You should now be deleting all temp files in MS-DOS... 14) If you have never done this before, you may find this may take a while, so sit back and relax... 15) When it is all done deleting, it will show you the Windows prompt again.. 16) At this point, all that remains is to reboot..