Tip O'Tex Computer Club

August 2003 Newsletter

Routine Maintenance

There are many things that need to be done to keep your computer running smoothly. Almost all of them are done routinely by the club members, having been nagged to death in the past. But just in case you've forgotten some of them, or for the new ones, here are two lists - "weekly maintenance" and "monthly maintenance" - because some tasks need to be performed more often than others.

Weekly Maintenance

Check Norton (or whatever your anti-virus program is) to be sure the virus definitions file is up-to-date.

Delete Temporary Internet files. (In Internet Explorer, click on Tools, Internet Options, Delete Files. This will delete only the temporary Internet files.)

Empty the Recycle Bin.

Run Ad-Aware - remove any "spyware."

Monthly Maintenance

Run Scandisk

Run Defrag

While online, run Norton LiveUpdate (Occasionally Norton will have a program update, in addition to the regular virus definitions updates.)

While online, open Ad-Aware and click on "Check for updates now" and if there is an update available, get it. And run Ad-Aware again.

General Maintenance

Once in a while, there are other things you need to attend to.

Fonts

You need to keep an eye on how many fonts you have in Windows - some programs don't really want you to have 800 - 1,000 different fonts. It gets rather tricky deleting fonts, as there are some that are required by Windows, and some that are the normal default of other programs.

Here is a list of DO NOT DELETE fonts:

You can get more information about deleting fonts at:

http://graphicssoft.about.com/library/extra/bldefaultfonts.htm

There you will find more about what fonts should be left because certain programs use them as defaults. When in doubt about deleting any particular font, be sure to check with that page, or with someone you know that has deleted fonts without dire results.

Favorites

We all get way too many items in our Favorites. The best way to find out which ones to get rid of is to click on them, one at a time. You'll find out in a hurry which ones are invalid links - and there will be a lot of them probably. Also sometimes you can tell just by looking at the name of the Favorite that you want to delete it. When that happens, you won't need to check to see if its valid - just RIGHTclick on it and click on Delete.

To check your Favorites, while online open Internet Explorer. Click on the word Favorites at the top. You can use the icon for Favorites if you want to, but that will take up precious space on your screen, and it won't show you anything different than clicking on the WORD Favorites.

You'll see all of your Favorites - well, not all of them because there will probably be way too many to see without scrolling down. Start at the top and you'll find that a lot of them will be deleted, making it so you can see the others.

You can also "nest" your Favorites into folders. To do that, click on the WORD Favorites, then click on Organize Favorites. You can create new folders, and from there you can move some of your Favorites around. For example, if you have a LOT of links to "recipes" you might want to Create Folder named Recipes and then move those links into that folder. In the future when you save a new site to Favorites, when you click on Add to Favorites you'll notice a Create In portion of the screen - just click on the Folder you want to use. You'll get used to it, and it will make your "surfing" a lot more enjoyable.