[Aishah]

I've done the delete Cookies a few times before and find it doesn't make any problems for me after as far as I know.. thanks for hints re IM.

[brownboy66]

Originally Posted by Aishah

And bb will wait for the expert on the job when I go to Delhi next month and hopefully, at same time get a lesson in keeping computer in good running order!

If they're anything like most techies (dealing with someone who is not so familiar with IT), the hard part will be getting them to shut up!

IT people are a strange bunch. Most of them like to be social rebels - so they'll be the ones dressed in black wearing a binary watch, talking on a cell phone running linux (why - because they can), preaching the virtues of open source while combing their goatie! However - they all avoid confrontation like the plague - so If they don't do a proper job - make a noise and jump up and down!

[Aishah]

Great joke, bb!!!

[Hyderabadi]

...and don't forget to defragment your drive, as MickeyS mentioned above.

Auslogics Disk Defrag is a free one that I use, they also have a registry defrag utility.

http://www.download.com/Auslogics-Di...-10567503.html

PS: Windows comes with it's own defragger and also a disk cleaner, look in Start > All Programs > Acceosories > System Tools.

[machadinha]

To add, it's just standard help desk advice. Your pc will look in its cache and so on for previous unaltered versions of requested pages; this will affect speed in a way (in fact it's meant to speed things up), but it's more about wanting clients with a problem to start up fresh just to make sure they're accessing the latest page versions like they ought to. Process of eliminating potential problems, really, and it's easier to ask them to clean it all up than go over the specifics one step at a time.

I have all that stuff set to be automatically cleaned up on log off, but do it manually on a regular basis anyway, as with MS at least of course there is no such thing as an automatic clean-up on log off, no matter what the help file and the comical blue-screen writer may have to say about it (The in-joke is the latter is a failed novelist.)

I know people who keep their history for reference; I guess files like that do build up, depends on your comp's capacity, and I prefer using my bookmarks and human memory. But... to each their own, of course. In any case deleting all that will do you no harm.

[goangoangone]

This defrag tool is among the best. I believe it was bought by Microsoft. Here's the old free version. Fast.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Diskeeper_Lite_d1207.html





more free software here:
http://filehippo.com/
http://www.majorgeeks.com/page.php?id=20#viruses
http://www.snapfiles.com/freeware/

[Papaji]

How often should one defragment an operating system drive? Using the Analyze function I always get a "you do not need to defragment" prompt, even though the drive looks a lot fragmented (going by the estimated disk usage window)..

[machadinha]

Depends on usage I guess. I do it about every 3 months; I hear it is actually tasking on your disk and there's no need to overdo it (however it is good to do it). (Another thing I hear but can't be sure of is it looks at your rate of usage of different files and programs as well, so if you do it a lot it will be mostly busy toggling this around.)

If you do a lot of file swapping and downloading and stuff you may want to increase this. Or after some large installments, etc. The usual advice is to do it before this even, but I can't be bothered and you'd need to do it again afterwards, quite some work just to play Quake. I know some folks with a machine mostly used for music and quite some gigabytes which was busy for days defragging when they finally thought of it.

If you're talking about WinXP I think its estimates are not that bad, i.e. you can follow those analyses, or do it on a quarterly basis anyway even if it doesn't call to.

Estimated disk usage btw doesn't refer to your level of fragmentation, necessarily; it just means what amount of your disk space is in use (I think -- stuff like this is hard to say not having the machine in question in front of you, besides there'll be as many opinions as there are users).

[Mickey S]

Originally Posted by Papaji

How often should one defragment an operating system drive? Using the Analyze function I always get a "you do not need to defragment" prompt, even though the drive looks a lot fragmented (going by the estimated disk usage window)..

The disk defragmenter I mentioned above (Defraggler) shows you a complete list of all fragmented files, with the number of fragments each file is in, and allows you to select the ones you want to put back together again. I run it frequently, and only recreate the files that are in more than a few pieces. It's free, and is vastly superior to - and faster than - Microsoft's own poor tool.

www.defraggler.com

[Alohaguy]

Originally Posted by brownboy66

If they're anything like most techies (dealing with someone who is not so familiar with IT), the hard part will be getting them to shut up!

IT people are a strange bunch. Most of them like to be social rebels - so they'll be the ones dressed in black wearing a binary watch, talking on a cell phone running linux (why - because they can), preaching the virtues of open source while combing their goatie! However - they all avoid confrontation like the plague - so If they don't do a proper job - make a noise and jump up and down!

Yes BB there are 10 types of people. Those who understand Binary and those who don't

[brownboy66]

Originally Posted by Alohaguy

Yes BB there are 10 types of people. Those who understand Binary and those who don't

I'm such a nerd........

[Aishah]

thank you to all again, will read all this carefully and combine with my Delhi clean-up - it is starting to become too technical for me to understand btw but this post will be good for those with more knowledge than me. Defragging - years ago i remember this used to be done weekly by the IT person where I worked. But I never knew what he was doing! And I'm talking about the days when Internet was coming into fast development.. And libraries were changing their card systems into computer catalogues. Thanks again, folks!

[machadinha]

In an office environment I guess setting it to be done weekly makes sense yes.

It's not so difficult: When installing anything (or saving a file, etc.), it just gets parked on your hard disk wherever there is space available. Hence the "fragmentation": one program may get spread all over your disk, with a cluster of files here, another there, etc. In the defragmentation process, your comp. will try to group those files together where they logically belong, which supposedly increases space and speed at least a tiny little bit, the latter I guess because they're more quickly accessible if they're grouped together.

Er, or simply put and in my understanding anyway, I'm sure there's more to it & there must be quite a few more highly developed IT bobo's than I here

[brownboy66]

there's probably less requirement for defragging a hard drive now than in the past. In the days when you had 4gig hard drives running at 5400 rpms - they would fill up fast so doing a defrag was essential to reclaim space and speed up the programmes.

these days you have 120/ 160/ 200 gig hard drives spinning at 7200 rpms or faster. If you're using less than say half of the disk capacity then defragging probably wont make much difference - its still fast and isn't constrained by space. My current PC only runs a 40gig hard drive as the primary, but has a 100 gig external HD. Most of my documents/ photos/ etc - are on the external drive - so the primary is only half full (20 gigs).

[vonkla]

Originally Posted by Nick-H

Cookies are a pain, because you want them for some sites, but there will be hundreds that set them.

Download the free program Cookie Monster (no joke) from www.ampsoft.net/utilities/CookieMonster.php.

With this you can easily manage your cookies