Welcome to Something for Nothing

My least favorite question I get as a computer guy is when someone tells me that their computer is running slow. It is the biggest pain in the butt problem to handle. I’ll tell you why. There could be hundreds of reasons why your computer is slow.

How do you diagnose it?

The standard method is to go through ruling out different items that may be causing you slowness. Remembering always that it may be a combination of things that are causing you to pull your hair out. There are a lot of free and built in tools that can be used to help do this. One popular one is to defrag your disk. This comes with windows and is buried somewhere in the control panel. Many people like to do it and it makes them feel good when it goes because it shows them a nice picture that looks like it’s organizing things better.

This will work, but how many people have the time to do this? Not to mention how many people know where to find tools like the defragger? I would say not many.

What do you do?

Pointstone Software(http://www.pointstone.com) has come up with a set of pretty much all the tools you could need to clean your system. Here’s a summary of what they have available:

System Cleaner® 5.51e
Clean your system from all the garbage wasting space and slowing the performance of your computer with System Cleaner full set of powerful tools. Also comes with a Registry Cleaner so that you can fix all the registry errors.

Total Privacy Box Image
Total Privacy™ 5.21
Total Privacy is a complete solution to protect your privacy and enhance your PC performance. With a simple click Total Privacy can securely erase your internet tracks, computer activities and programs history information stored in many hidden files on your computer. Supports Internet Explorer, AOL, Netscape, Mozilla, Mozilla FireFox and Opera browsers well as more than 450 third party applications via plug-ins.

MemOptimizer Box Image
MemOptimizer™ 3.01
Is your PC becoming increasingly slow and unstable? MemOptimizer monitors your system in the background and optimizes your computers memory, making your computer run faster, and preventing up to 90% of Windows crashes.

Internet Accelerator Box Image
Internet Accelerator™ 1.31
Internet Accelerator works to decrease page load times and optimize your Internet connection. You’ll be transferring the maximum amount of data possible before you know it!

This is a nice set of programs that will really clean your system from some of the most common computer slowness problems.

However, that’s actually not all the programs they have available, because they also offer a nice set of free programs that you can use:

Free Programs

index.dat Viewer™
index.dat Viewer reads the index.dat files directly. This makes sure that what you see displayed by the program are the exact contents of the index.dat files.

Start Menu Click History Viewer™
View all the information stored on your computer that is saved when you open anything from the Start Menu!

Privacy Analyzer™
Take control of your Online Privacy!

Turbo-Edit™ 97 1.4
Edit files that have demanding text-editing requirements with this powerfull text editor.

I personally find the Start Menu Click History Viewer quite intrigueing(however you spell that word).

If you take a look at their Mega Pack you can save a lot of money by buying the products in a nice bundle. $60 for a faster computer is well worth the money and the time saved.

I’ve loved watching the Tour de France these past couple weeks. I think it has been a very exciting and interesting race. I loved when Lance just dominated all those other European riders, but it just wasn’t nearly as interesting to watch. This year was much better.

Unfortunately, on the last mountain stage I had a meeting I had to attend and so I taped it. However, when I got home I got caught up doing something and never got to see it. How mad did that make me? To add insult to injury I went out of town the next day and so I didn’t see what happened in the time trial either.

This all sucks because it’s like watching 3 1/2 quarters of a basketball or football game and then not being able to see the end. Not to mention when I go to OLN’s Tour de France website of course the results are plastered across their main page. It’s not OLN’s fault, because ESPN did the same. However, I don’t understand why they can’t hide the result and give you a warning that if you click on that link then you are going to know what happened. It pisses me off.

So, now I know Floyd Landis should win the Tour de France. That’s cool, but it would have been better to watch the action.

The real solution here would be to have on demand and streaming coverage of the Tour de France so that I could have watched it at work or anytime that I wanted to watch it. I know that OLN plays it throughout the day, but they need to expand their coverage and start streaming the stages of the tour. I’m even fine if they don’t start the streaming until after they are done playing the stage on OLN. Just give me the streaming media I want so I don’t have to be pissed and not want to watch the Tour next year.

Regardless, Congratulations Floyd. It will be very nice to see another American on the podium in France.

Living in Las Vegas about the only sports news we get is anything to do with UNLV. Therefore the only sports news to announce this week was about Marcus Banks signing with the Phoenix Suns. It is a really interesting choice for Banks who hasn’t played much in Minnesota, but looked good when they did play him. The problem is that he could have gone to a number of teams and gotten the starting job. However, he was fine with going to Phoenix and playing second fiddle to Steve Nash.

If you think about this for a second it really is a no brainer for Marcus Banks.

First, who wouldn’t want to learn from the best point guard still playing in the league Steve Nash?

Second, between the always impressive Shawn Marion and Amare Stoudemire returning to the lineup I think I could play guard for the Suns.

Third, look what playing on the suns did for so many other mediocre, but skilled players.

Fourth, the Suns have a real serious shot at winning the NBA championships. I don’t care what role you will play on a team, if that team wins a championship you are going to be super happy. He’s set for life and so now he wants to win championships.

Finally, he’s getting paid $21 million to do all of the above.

I think that many in vegas will pick up some Suns tickets and take the quick hour flight to Phoenix to catch a game.