Keeping It All Under Your Thumb

This one is for all of you PC users out there.  If your system is running slow and this little things like running Scandisk and Windows Cleanup don't seem to improve performance of the computer, consider re-imaging the hard drive and start with a fresh installation.

It is time consuming to do this, but even more time consuming and frustrating to be stuck with a sluggish computer. 

Here's a tip to ease a little of the pain. Store many of the installation packages for the programs you use frequently on a thumb drive or CD-ROM.  With the cost of these drives being less than $20 for 4 to 8GB of storage, you have room to store many programs and drivers as well as your critical files.  You can also set this drive up as an emergency boot disk.

On my thumb drive I store my downloaded packages for my virus protection (I currently am using AVG Anti-Virus), anti-spyware packages (Spybot and Ad-Aware), the printer drivers for the 3 printers I use most often, OpenOffice installer, and various utilities such as Adobe Acrobat Reader, decompression software, iTunes, and a couple of other shareware utilities that I commonly use.  Granted they are not always the latest version of the program, but once you have the program reinstalled, most packages ask if you'd like to update them anyway.


This gets all of those packages that you were going to reinstall anyway all in one place to make it a little bit faster to get your system back up and online.