• Software Tip
  How to Clean your PC
  
  
• Website of Interest
  How Stuff Works
  
  
• Computer Parts
  Hard Drives
  
  
• Tech Tip
  What is Defrag?
  
  
• eScams
  Do Not Open Attachments
  
  
• Reader's Emails
  
  
• Reader's Tips
  
  
• Update Notices
  
  
• A Personal Note from Ray

Software Tip - How to Clean your PC

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        I am sure that everyone gets the Windex out and cleans their keyboard, monitor, and computer at least once a month, but do you clean the inside? I am not talking about the parts that are inside your computer. I am talking about the data on your hard drive. You would be amazed at the amount of trash that hides there.
        Windows is the biggest litter bug. Each new edition of Windows gets more careless. It is not unusual for Windows to pile several gigabytes of trash throughout your hard drive and leave it there. Other programs also make it a habit to use your hard drive as an open dumping ground. This trash can quickly comsume your free space and slow your computer down. If it gets bad enough, it can cause problems, errors, and even crashes.
        In order to hunt down the trash on my computer and eliminate it, I wrote a program called A1Click Ultra PC Cleaner. The main part of A1Click, Clean PC, uses 45 processes to safely find and remove clutter. The first time that most people use Clean PC, it finds over a gigabyte of trash.
        Since I released A1Click two years ago, it has received many top awards and high reveiws from satisfied users. Just today we received another 5 star award.
        And it keeps getting better. I frequently update A1Click so that it works more powerfully and safely. Those updates are free.
        Don't you hate it when you buy software and a year later it stops working until you purchase the update? What you thought to be a bargain ends up costing you a fortune. Not only is A1Click reasonably priced, all future updates are free. That means that it will outlast your computer. Now that's a bargain!
        I recommend that novice users only use the Clean PC part. It is extensive and safe. I use it everyday.
        But I added sections for experienced users, such as, Cleaner Settings, Remove Tracks, Duplicate File Finder, Font Remover, Recent List Cleaner, Uninstaller, Registry Cleaner (this only does a fraction of the cleaning that our program RegVac does), Favorite List Cleaner, and the PreFetch Cleaner. Please be aware that some of these sections may not have the expected results, so know what the section does before you use it.
        You can find out how much junk is on your computer today for free. Just download a demo of A1Click Ultra PC Cleaner from http://regvac.com/a1cleanz.exe. For more information and/or to purchase A1Click go to http://regvac.com/a1clean.htm.
        Have a clean PC today and everyday with A1Click Ultra PC Cleaner.


Website of Interest - How Stuff Works

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        Have you ever wondered how a digital camera works, how blood works, how hybrid cars work, or how chocolate works? www.howstuffworks.com is packed full of explanations and pictures on how these things and hundreds more work. The HowStuffWorks brand is recognized as the leading source for clear, reliable explanations of how everything around us actually works.
        Click on this link to go to www.howstuffworks.com.
        If you want to know about a specific thing, a search box allows you to find it. With the amount of articles on this site, you are sure to find it.
        If you just want to go browsing through the topics, there are tabs across the top which take you to each topic with the click of a button. The topics are Auto Stuff, Science Stuff, Health Stuff, Entertainment Stuff, People Stuff, Computer Stuff, Electronics Stuff, Home Stuff, Money Stuff, and Travel Stuff.
        I could spend a whole month on this website, but if you don't want to spend that much time, stop by every day and check out the feature artilces listed on the front page.
        The only down side of this website is the abundance of advertisements, but they have to pay for it somehow.
        So the next time your child bugs you with a million how questions, take him to HowStuffWorks.com.


Computer Parts - Hard Drives

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        My first computer, a Commodore 64, did not come with a hard drive. When I wanted to use it, I had to either type in programming code by hand, load the code from a tape player, or load it from a floppy disk. What an inconvenience! Those days are gone. Today you turn on your computer and it immediately loads Windows from the hard drive and has all of your programs there ready to be used with the click of a button.
        This article tells about this important computer part, the hard drive.
        If you want to see what is on your hard drive, open Windows Explorer and it will show you. To open Windows Explorer click on the Start button, go to All Programs, and then to Accessories. The Accessories folder should have the Windows Explorer icon in it. Click on the icon and Windows Explorer will open.
        Windows Explorer lists the different hard drives starting with C:. Some hard drives are divided into partitions which allows more than one drive letter on a drive. So D drive could be another hard drive, a second partition of C, or some other type of drive like a CD drive. It all depends on how your computer is set up.
        Windows Explorer shows the folders and files in each drive. You can run a file in Windows Explorer by double clicking on it.
        Hard drives are distinquished from floppy drives (or diskettes) because the data is stored on a hard disc instead of a flexible plastic disc as in floppies. A hard drive and floppy are similar to a cassette tape in the way that they store data using magnetic charges. They also share the major benefits of magnetic storage -- it can be easily erased and rewritten and it lasts for many years.
        When you buy a hard drive two main numbers are given: the size and the speed.
        The size is the amount of data that it can hold and is stated in gigabytes (gb). One gigabyte is 1024 megabytes (mb). One megabyte is 1024 kilobytes (kb). And one kilobyte is 1024 bytes. So a gigabyte is over a billion bytes. That is enough room to store the information in the amount of books that would fit in a pickup truck. That is a lot of data.
        While the physical size of hard drives has decreased slightly through the years, the capacity size has grown immensely. My second computer had a hard drive that could hold 250mb of data. Now hard drives hold 1000 times that much. Hard drives range from 10gb to 250gb or more.
        Older computers may not be able to handle larger hard drives, so keep this in mind when buying hard drives if you have an older computer. If you get a hard drive that is too big for your computer, your computer will only let you use the amount of it that it can handle. So if you buy a 250gb hard drive and your computer can only handle 200gb, the drive will show up as a 200gb drive and the extra 50gb will not be available to you. One way around this is to partition the hard drive into sections small enough for your computer to use.
        The other number that is often given to describe a hard drive is the speed. It is expressed in rotations per minute (RPM) and describes how fast the disc inside the hard drive spins. The faster it spins the quicker it can get information to the computer. The common speed of a hard drive now a days is 7200 RPM but you may find faster and slower speeds than that. You probably would not want to get anything slower than 7200 RPM.
        The data rate and seek time are also numbers that show the speed of a drive, but they are not always given in the specifications of a drive and so it may not be possible to compare models using those numbers.
        Look there inside the computer! It's a chip! No, it's a curcuit! No, it's SUPER HARD DRIVE! Able to spin faster than a speeding locomotive. Able to hold the information of a library. Able to enter tall codes in a single bound. It's SUPER HARD DRIVE!


Tech Tip - What is Defrag?

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        It occurred to me the other day that since we have been mentioning defrag recently in this newsletter that I should explain what the term means.
        Defrag is short for defragment and is the process of cleaning up fragmentation. A drive gets fragmented when files are deleted and added to it over and over again.
        Here is a simplified explanation of how that happens. When files are put on an empty hard drive, they are put at the beginning side by side. But what happens when one of these files is deleted? It leaves a hole or space the size of the deleted file. As more files are deleted more holes appear. As files are added to the drive, they are either put at the end of the drive or in the holes. When a file is too big to fit in a hole, it is split up and stuffed in several holes. In time instead of having entire files side by side on the hard drive, you have fragments of files side by side. When the computer reads a file, it must find each of the fragments and piece them together in memory. This can slow your computer down, and if the hard drive gets too fragmented, errors may occur.
        To remedy this problem Windows comes with a defragment tool, Disk Defragmenter (see the Start - All Programs - Accessories - System Tools menu). This tool first of all analyzes a drive and shows you how fragmented it is. If you want it to defrag the drive, it pieces together fragmented files and puts them in a temporary place at the back of the drive, thus clearing out room at the front. When there is enough room at the front, the entire files temporarily stored at the back are moved to the front. This process goes on until all or most of the fragments are gone and what you end up with is entire files sitting side by side on the drive.
        Some people obsess about defragging and defrag all of the time. But you can go for years without defragging and not notice much of a difference. Defragging once a year is probably plenty often enough.
        With drives as large as they are today, defragging can take many hours, so make sure you have the time. Besides Windows defrag tool, there are defrag tools made by other companies which claim to do a much faster job. I prefer to stick with the Windows tool since it is free and I don't defrag very often.
        The Windows' Registry can also become fragmented. With the registry, the holes are never filled in, so the registry only gets bigger and bigger, never smaller. Defragging the registry is the only way to make the registry files smaller. Our WinRescue and RegVac programs defrag the registry.
        Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of what it means to defrag the hard drive and the registry.


eScams - Do Not Open Attachments

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        Near the end of October a new virus called Sober.X struck the internet. It is delivered in many different email messages. Some of its subjects are

• hi,_ive_a_new_mail_address
• Mail delivery failed
• Registration Confirmation
• smtp mail failed
• Spam: Registration Confirmation
• Your Password
• Your IP was logged
• Paris_Hilton_&_Nicole_Richie
• You visit illegal websites

        Some of the emails have FBI and CIA addresses in the From slot and say that they have logged your IP address on illegal websites. This is a lie. As I have said before, don't believe everything that you receive in an email especially if it is from someone that you do not know.
        This virus is similar to many other viruses in the way that it works. It comes attached to an email message. When you open the attachment, it puts the virus on your computer which runs without you knowing that it is there. The only thing that you may notice is that your computer is running slower. It is slower because the virus is looking for email addresses on your computer and sending out the virus with those email addresses in the To and From slots of the emails.
        Viruses like this would be thwarted before they even began if every computer user would heed one bit of advice: do not open attachments unless you know 100% what it is and who it comes from. If you follow this advice you can throw away your antivirus programs and save yourself some money. I know because that is exactly what I do and I have never had a virus on my computer even though I am very active on the internet.
        I now receive thousands of emails a day containing the Sober.X virus because a lot of people who open attachments have my email address on their computer. I guess it is the price of doing business on the internet.
        If you have the Sober.X virus on your computer, please remove it. If you have an antivirus program hopefully it will remove it. If not see the following sites:

Click here for more details about the Sober.X virus.

Click here to download a free tool for removing the Sober.X virus.
        The sooner you remove this and other viruses from your computer the sooner your computer will run faster and the sooner people like me will stop receiving virus emails from you.


Reader's Emails

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James - My computer does not recognize my cd's/dvd's. I have to go to Start and click on run to find the cd/dvd that I put in. Do you have any idea that will help me? My computer should recognize the fact that I have put in a cd and either go to a menu on the cd or open the music such as windows media player!

Ray - The problem is that the autorun feature on your computer does not work or it is turned off. Microsoft's website tells how to turn autorun back on. Click here to go to their article - http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;330135. I suspect that step three is your problem. I am not sure if these steps work for other versions of Windows but there should be a solution for other Windows if these do not work. You can try doing a search on the internet for "autorun does not work" and you should find an answer.

Danny - what dose RMS stand for?

Ray - RMS stands for Root Mean Square. It is an electrical term which signifies the most common mathematical method to define the current of an AC wave. It is often used to show how much power a speaker has.

Gil Coon - My question is, "Why does the system tray show only some of the programs that I have designated for start-up some of the time, and all of the programs some of the time?" I have Zone Alarm Pro, wireless, Trend-Micro's PC-Cillin, speaker volume adjust, a USB "safely remove hardware" symbol, and Counter-Spy show in the tray. The only way I can get all of these icons to show up is to save them under "System Restore" by creating a system restore point, or going back to a system restore point that I created several days ago. Is there another way that I can try to get these icons to consistently show up in the tray every time I start my computer? I am running WinXP, Home Edition, as my platform.

Ray - By tray, I take it you are referring to the area on the taskbar next to the time. It is up to a program as to whether it wants to list itself in the tray or not. WinXP automatically hides most of the icons after a certain amount of time and has an arrow which you can click on to reveal (or hide) the hidden icons.
        I don't understand why you are using Restore Points. They have nothing to do with that.

James Oliver - I am running Windows XP Home addition and it locks during a cold boot. I have reinstalled all my programs, replaced the sound card, replaced memory, and the ethernet card. After the second or third reboot it will bootup and operate fine. Tonight during the second boot up it flashed a warning that the 27K / 53HZ frequency is out of range. Any suggestions as what I should do next?

Ray - I have also had similar problems with WinXP (an earlier version). In my case, Windows would start to a blank screen and seemed to have processes running behind the screen. If I restarted the computer, it worked fine. This happened once or twice a week, but since I bought a new computer with a newer version of Windows on it, I have not had this problem.
        With this newest version of WinXP I have had Windows start up and then restart itself, but this rarely happens.
        I don't think that anyone apart from Microsoft programmers (if they know) knows exactly what causes these problems but it does seem that Windows corrects the problem on restart.

Ivan Fraser - XP's Documents and Settings folder is inconvenient when one has partitioned the hard drive to run the OS on a dedicated partition. over time it grows and grows, as well as fragments easily. Programmes dump many aspects of themselves in there and are largely hidden. favorites folders, pst files, search prog data etc. Some of these individual folders and files can be safely moved and linked by setting in the individual programmes or by using tweak software like Windows TweakUI, but the majority of the docs and settings folder is kind of 'hard-wired' into the system.
        It would be great if one could move this folder to another partition and be able to maintain the OS partition's size to be smaller and less frequently fragmented.
        I was wondering if your new programme would enable a move of this folder whilst maintaining the integrity of the registry and the links therein, or if you know of another safe and reliable way to move this folder to another partition, or drive?

Ray - Microsofts' website has an article about how to move the Documents and Settings folder. It is located at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q236621/.
        I have never tried this, so I know nothing else about it.

Robert Thompson - In your warning about the "substantial income" scam, you might have mentioned that a 1-900 telephone number (or a 1-809 telephone number) may incur substantial charges on the telephone bill. The 809 area code is actually for the Caribbean, which is, of course, outside U.S. laws and conventions. And it's only some telephone numbers with an 809 area code that incur charges. But the charges may be in the order of $25 per minute! (Ref: ScamBusters.com).

Ray - I didn't mention that because I hoped that people read my article and realized that they should not call any number in an email or linked website.

L. Taylor - I have two computers at home on a netwok, both running Windows 2000. They each have My Documents shared, and a printer shared. They each have the same Login name and password. When either computer is rebooted, its files and printer are automatically shared with the other.
        Recently, I purchased a notebook computer running Windows XP (connectivity is by 802.11g and WPA). It has the same Login and password as the other 2 computers, and has My Documents shared. Whenever I try to access a file via the notebook that is located on one of the W2k computers, or print to a shared printer, I have to enter the Login password. Is there a method to allow the W-XP notebook to automatically Login to the other computers? I really don't want to put W2k on the new notebook just to have "normal" network access.

Ray - I am not too good at networks. For me it seems to be a hit or miss thing, sometimes I can get them to share files and sometimes I can't. So my advice may not be the best. I will put your question and my comments on our newsletter and maybe someone else will have some advice.
        I don't think that you have to have the same login and password for the different computers on a network. I think that you can set up the network to either require or not require a login and password. WinXP can set up a Home network and make a diskette with the settings on it to help you set up other computers. I have gone through that whole process and it didn't seem to make a difference, so all I can do is point you to Windows' Help and wish you luck.


Reader's Tips

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Bob Morrison - In response to Kent Albright's question, I use two programs (note from Ray - he only tells of one program) for my small business (not free) instead of Outlook and Address Book: "Phoneslips" ( http://www.telexis.com) allows interoffice messaging and gets rid of those pink paper "Phone message" as well as keeping an address book that can be accessed by all in the office across a LAN. The software can also be used a calendar and there is even a group scheduler module. Phoneslips can be "hot-synched" with the Palm handheld and Palm desktop with a small add-on to the Phoneslips program. Addresses can be imported from Address Book.

Harold - You forgot Skype -- that works well as an Instant messenger - plus one can also talk at the same time.

Don Bryant - I read with interest the topic in this issue of "Ray's Computer Tips" which deals with RAM utilities. Like yours, most every discussion I read on RAM-clearing utilities is of the opinion that RAM-boosting utilities are a scam and really do nothing to improve PC performance.
        I, for one, am strongly of the opposite opinion.
        (a note from Ray - I deleted six paragraphs from Don's email here. I am sorry but please keep your emails short and to the point.)
        I heartily encourage anyone with low-RAM problems to try RAMBooster! I can't imagine trying to run an older PC without it! It works great, and it's free!

Bruwer - A tip for a better mousepad. Mousepads don't last long, they buckle and eventually become slippery. I found that a piece of plate glass, 1/4" thick and cut to whatever size you want, with the corners rounded and the edges smoothed is an excellent mousepad. Any glazier will be able to supply. On the underside the corners are roughened up with some wet and dry paper. Grommets available from an auto spares shop can be cut in half and glued to the corners with silicon adhesive (RTV). Alternatively discs can be punched from an old bicycle inner tube or anything that will provide a slip free surface.

Alan Turk - I have had a similar problem to Roy Harrison's regarding DVDs that wouldn't play on my XP PC. It was all working nicely until I downloaded a Windows update. After quite a lot of trouble, I finally solved it by installing the latest driver for my video board. I thought he might be interested to know this and perhaps he can solve his problem in a similar fashion.

Brian Taylor - Dave should use Google gmail for his emails if he wants to stop 20-33 scams daily. My son is responsible for the Google anti-spam dept. and he has effectively produced a program for gmail which prevents spam. Gmail is free. I use it and never get spam.


Update Notices

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        Our programs are updated about once every two months. The latest version of our programs is always kept on our website. There is no need to uninstall previous version. Just install the latest version over the previous version. If you have purchased our software, you can use the Registered Users section on our website to download the latest registered version, to get the password or key, to change your email address, to find out what name you used, and etc. There is no need to contact me.


A Personal Note from Ray

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        Merry Christmas to everyone.
        December is Subscribe Your Friends month. Do you have friends who would benefit from Ray's Computer Tips? If so, why not subscribe them in the subscription section of Ray's Computer Tips?
        If you do not want to be subscribed to this list, please use the unsubscribe link.


Thanks for reading,
Ray Geide