Windows Housekeeing. Using Operating System Utilities for system optimization at Gizmos, Inc: Toolkit: PC Workshop

Summary | Like any complicated machine that's part of a system, your computer needs regular care and maintenance. Use Windows Accessories and System Tools to monitor and optimize your computer.

What is it?

Perhaps you know the joys of home ownership. Or car ownership. It must be nice to have a maid and a cook, to say nothing of a chauffeur and staff mechanic. The rest of us outsource some of it and do the rest ourselves as the result of intricate cost/benefit analyses.

The bad news is that your computer is yet another high-maintenance machine. The worse news is that your computing will get more complex as you network all your home appliances (many of them already containing computers) around a central computer we might call an information furnace.

Standalone PC market penetration is reaching the late adopters. Internet penetration isn't far behind. The natural-born geeks are already on board, but what about the rest of us as market penetration reaches that of homes and cars. I foresee an industry growing up around home network maintenance, repair, and operation just as industries have prospered serving the home and car markets. What will be the new Home Depots and Pep Boys?

Meanwhile, Bill Gates is turning all of us into some form of geek, no doubt in reaction to all the snubs he got during high school. The true revenge of the nerds? (Just kidding, Mr. Gates! Sir.)

You are starting a business and hiring new employees. They all need a computer. What do you want them to know, given that the alternative is to spend precious start-up dollars on experts?

You have college-bound children. What do you want them to know on high-school graduation?

More importantly, how are we going to continue to learn? From what other activity are we going to take time just to keep up with computers?

I have attempted to draw a thick blurry line for the purposes of this MBA program and your future employability. This page is as thicker and blurrier than most.

What do you do when things don't work? Your computer freezes. You can no longer open a file, or it has disappeared altogether. You accidentally delete or write over a file and you will have to redo all of your hard work. Your computer crashes.

You hear or read about something bad to do with computers and you don't understand what it is, but it sounds as though it's way over your geek line, way beyond your control, so it adds to your nebulous but painful anxiety about computers and machines and tools in general.

skills

Using software programs bundled with or added to the operating system to regularly perform routine maintenance tasks:

tools

commercial tools: Symantec has the Norton line of tools, for example, Utilities to optimizes your PC's performance and solves problems easily, CleanSweep to remove unneeded programs and files, plus CrashGuard, System Doctor, Rescue, and Protected Recycle Bin.

Best Bet

System monitoring and optimization

Windows System Tools

Tune up your operating system. Just like a new car, it may not need much tuning when it's brand new. But the more you use it, the messier it gets and the less efficiently it runs. If you're searching, the technical phrases are "disk maintenance" and "file integrity". How will you know when you are ready for a tune-up? At PC Pitstop, you can save baseline data so you can compare your system's performance months or years later.

At PC Pitstop we can help you get your PC in top form -- running fast, stable and secure. PC Pitstop runs diagnostics on your PC to identify things that might help improve performance. The process is fully automated, private and safe. After the diagnostics run, we'll give you tips for improving all kinds of things. Best of all, the service is free!

Explore each of these. Note especially the maintenance features on the System Tools menu. You should regularly use, especially when your computer starts to run sluggishly:

Disk Defragmenter - gathers the parts of large files that may be scattered around the sectors of your C: drive so that the files will load and save more quickly

ScanDisk - checks for errors not only in files and folders but also on the drive's physical surface

If they are not available, go to Start | Settings | Control Panel | Add / Remove Programs | Windows Setup | System Tools and select them. All of the programs on the System Tools list are also available via Windows Explorer in your C:\WINDOW\ folder as .exe files. Three other system resource tools are interesting but are probably over the geek line: Resource Meter, System Information, and System Monitor.

Fred Langa's Scrub Your Hard Drive Clean! Anywhere from tens to thousands of megabytes of junk files can accumulate on your system beyond the reach of Windows' built-in cleanup tools. Add CleanUp.Bat to your Recycle Bin's menus: http://www.langa.com/cleanup_reg.htm

Avery Tarasov's Cache Decimator -- This is a direct download. Screen shot on right. Cache Decimator sits in your system tray and gives you options for covering your tracks. Note that URL clear won't work until you re-boot. To get rid of this tool, just exit it and delete the .exe file cdv3.exe.

Reboots your computer and runs the defragmenter at a point during reboot when nothing but Windows itself has kicked in -- instantly solving all problems with interference from antivirus programs, screen savers, and such.

system configuration utilities

In you look around a little bit, you'll find thousands of programs that will do very specific and very useful tasks that you didn't even know needed doing.

The world of utilities available to help achieve maximum efficiency from the Web. How to handle even the most basic tasks, like reading files that have been attached to email. This easy-to-comprehend reference covers the most basic information, like what the Internet is and what it is not, and advanced utilities, like archiving and MIME translation software.

MDWin.com - Shareware and freeware, commercial software, hardware and books, links, help for Windows users and web page designers, usenet newsgroups, tips, e-zines.

The Driver Guide - how to find and install drivers from a database of drivers, manufacturer information, and links; discussion board

Microsoft's collection of Windows 98 guides, downloads, and support, especially TweakUI (Tweak the User Interface)

The worlds first site and best site dedicated to improving and customizing Microsoft® Windows® XP.

Tired of waiting for your computer to start? When Windows is starting it can load many programs that you might not need. Some of these are not even visible to you and just work in the background even if you don't need them.

StartStop lets you control which programs will start and change your configuration each time your computer boots. With StartStop you can stop programs being run or get StartStop to ask you if a particular program should be loaded.

Software updating

If you have registered software or opted in at a corporate download web site, news of software updates may find you. Personally, I don't register and opt in often, if only to keep my email down. I use Ziff-Davis's My Updates and C|Net's CatchUp.

Microsoft may well push updates on you. They may take a couple of minutes, but you should accept them.

Data compression

Just as the brand name Kleenex has become the accepted name for paper tissues, so "zipping" has become the accepted name for data compression. Larger files take longer to send and download. They don't always fit on floppies.

Tip | Don't confuse this zipping to mean compression with the Zip drive made by Iomega.

Pack multiple files into one smaller .zip file. Unzip any .zip files that someone might send you. For example, you can do some work on your team's web, compress the files with WinZip, and FTP the .zip file to the server. Then your teammates can download the .zip file and uncompress it to see what you've done. You can also zip files and then move them somewhere as back-ups.

Then you should be able to right-click on any file and one of the options will be "Add to zip". Select it and the file will be compressed and appear in the same directory with an icon that looks like a vise.

Then attach that file to your email.

WinZip will also decode email attachments, aka MIME files, such as movies, music, images, or spreadsheets that someone sent. To learn more, see the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) FAQ web site.

We have only a couple dozen letters in the alphabet and a couple hundred common two- and three-letter combinations. The page you're reading now looks as though it has only three colors, the red links, the dark brown text, and the light brown background. In fact, it has nine colors, as you can see from this blow-up.

Much of the information is repeated. WinZip finds the patterns, replaces them with tokens, finds the patterns in the patterns, replaces them with tokens, etc. Before long, you're talking about real space.

As an example, let's try a wild exaggeration. Let's say you want to send a million copies of an image without any text or graphics, only a solid color. Let's call the color C. Let's say there are a thousand pixels in the image. Express it as C*(1000) or C*(10^3). That's C times ten to the third power. Thus, eight characters will describe the whole image. But I want to send a million of them.

OK. That's seven orders of magnitude, correct? C*(10^10), so we're now at nine characters to send over a gigabyte of information. With a very slow modem, say 14.4, or 14,400 bits per second, it would take all day, literally, to transfer a gigabyte. It would take way under a second to transfer nine characters.

That's an extreme degree of compressibility, but you get the point. Zip your files and expect to received zipped files.

Using WinZip

After you install WinZip, you can use it right away. In my experience, you don't need to open WinZip directly. It will open automatically when you try to zip or unzip a file. Because you have the free version, you'll get a screen where you'll have to click "I Agree" each time.

You'll have two options, the Wizard interface and the Classic interface. I recommend the Classic, as in the screen shot on the right.

You can configure WinZip by pulling down the Options menu and selecting Configuration. Unless you're doing some heavy-duty zipping, the folder options in the screen shot below should suffice for everyday simple zipping and unzipping.

Unzipping

After the files display, you can click through the extract process or just drag them onto your desktop and then x out of WinZip. In the above screen shot, you would click once on the filename or icon and drag it. You can do more than one at a time by holding down the Shift key while you click to select consecutive filenames or holding down the CTRL key while you click to cherry-pick filenames.

Zipping

When you right-click on any file or folder on your desktop or elsewhere, you should see a list of options that looks something like the screen shot on the left. It offers three zip options. In this case, I right-clicked on a file named systemtools.txt.

The third option, Zip and Email, will work if you use Microsoft Outlook or similar email software. It won't work if you use AOL's email software.

The second option will create a .zip file called systemtools.zip, that is, the name of the file with a .zip extension. It will automatically save the .zip file to the directory where the zipped file is.

The first option (as well as the Extract process) will bring up a dialog box like the screen shot on the right. You would use this option to add the file to a .zip file that already existed. Here, it is called an "archive".

Clicking on either the New or Open buttons will bring up the window in the screen shot below. You can navigate to the file you want anywhere on your hard drive.

Note that if you have your copy of WinZip configured as above to default to the last opened archive and last extracted and added folders, you can probably avoid this Add process for routine zipping.

Backup

You should back up your files regularly, especially unique files you created yourself. You should keep the back-ups in a separate physical location. A floppy holds only 1.2 M, which won't back up very much of anything. Other options:

If you have a home network, dedicate one PC to backups. This is a great use for an older, underpowered desktop or laptop. You could also back up the machines on each other. That is, back up computer A on computer B, back up computer B on computer C, etc.

Use an Iomega Zip disk (100 or 250 Megabytes) or Jaz disk (1 Gigabyte), both requiring special internal or external drives

Use an online service such as Backup Central: Free Storage, Backup, and Recovery Resources. Please don't use your Parkside Plaza folder for backups because I don't have enough server space.

Backup creates ZIP files, mirror functions via copy or FTP. Several backup sets can be configured. Folders and separate files can be added to each backup set. For each backup set there's the option to delete specified files depending on the extension you enter. For each backup set extension for files that should not be included in the backup can be specified.

At CNet's Download.com, you'll find a couple hundred other mostly free or inexpensive shareware backup tools.

An easy to use backup tool with a good array of features that will meet most basic backup needs. You can select directories and files to be backed up and save them as templates, so you can keep multiple backup sets and only start the one you need. The program supports recursive directories, file filters and moving redundant files to the recycle bin. Your backup process is clearly documented, all steps of the way are logged and accessible from the interface. That way you can be certain that the backup was successful.

If you follow Fred Langa's 20-step sequence below, you will be able to recover from any disaster.

Fred’s System Setup Secrets
by Fred Langa
Information Week (originally published in now defunct Windows Magazine), August 31, 1999; updated, January 2001

Total Backup

The easiest way to set your mind at ease is to put all the files you harvest or create -- text documents, images, spreadsheets, tunes, web pages, and everything else -- into a sub-folder in your My Documents folder.

C:\Documents and Settings\Admin\My Documents

Then periodically, weekly or at least monthly, burn a CD of your whole My Documents folder. Date the CD and put it away. Then no matter what disaster befalls your laptop, you haven't lost everything, only everything since your last backup.

Note | A CD holds about 650 MB (megabytes) of data. Unless you have a lot of videos in your My Documents folder, everything else should easily fit on one CD. If you have lots of videos, you can back them up separately on CD, back them up by burning a DVD, or just not worry about them.

There are several other folders that may have information that you also might want to back up.

You might want to clean up your desktop before you back up the My Documents folder.

Some applications store data here. Depending on what email client you use, the individual emails may be store in this folder under the name of the client.

When you download and install a program, it usually installs itself here by default unless you specify otherwise. Some programs, however, install themselves directly into the C:\ root directory. If you were to lose your laptop, you would have to re-install all the programs from CD or download onto the new laptop, but presumably they're all still available. Backing up the Program Files folder

Other folders such as C:\My Shared Folder. If you use KaZaA for file sharing, they files you download go into this default folder. It is the contents of this folder that the RIAA (major record labels) uses to decide whether to sue their customers. If you don't move the files from My Shared Folder to a folder in your My Documents folder, you might want to back up this folder, too.

Low-level troubleshooting

What happens when something goes wrong? Do you panic, stop, give up, and wait for help? I'd like to encourage you to try to diagnose and repair. The more you know, the more you'll be able to evaluate what's wrong?

Here's the painful truth: Your computer has more mysterious disorders than a season's worth of ER episodes--agonizing error messages, sickening slowdowns, and even the tragic blue screen of death. To cure these techno-maladies, you need expert attention. You need us.

There is nothing more upsetting for a PC user than when there is a problem with their machine. This upset can turn quickly to frustration when the problem seems to be impossible to solve, or even to understand. Every PC user has experienced these feelings, but it is in most cases possible to both diagnose and correct most problems with the typical PC. And with some help, you can usually do it yourself.

The most important resource you can have at your disposal when you are trying to troubleshoot a problem with your PC is: experience. ...

There's no substitute for experience, but I'm hoping that this Guide will be the next best thing.

Shutdown problems in Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Millennium Edition can be caused by many factors including, but not limited to: a damaged exit sound file; incorrectly configured or damaged hardware; conflicting programs, or an incompatible, damaged, or conflicting device driver. This article can be used to troubleshoot the possible causes.

Find any lost and deleted data on your drive (e.g. hard disk) even if the partition table is lost or the hard disk has been quick-formatted. Lost Data, that is the result of a system crash can also be recovered.

What have you learned about troubleshooting your computer, as opposed to just plain shooting it? Talk about it at the Bistro.

error messages

Error messages aren't usually a wrist-slapping for anything you did wrong. And the dialog boxes that your browser pops up so often are usually asking you to make a simple choice. But it takes a while to figure out the implications of each message or choice. We've compiled a list of the most common error messages, complete with what they mean and what you can do about them.

Gregory Braun's MS Windows Error Messages - free program that automatically explains them when they happen.





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modified: December 5, 2001 by Douglas Anderson http://RicciStreet.net/gizmos/toolkit/operatingsystem/systemtools.htm

Windows Housekeeping

The PC Workshop