Getting ready to be SERVED

The time is approaching for the Home Server to be built. All the components have been sourced, and  will now need to be ordered. I will be taking pictures as the build progresses so you can follow its progress. Building a server using hardware is the same process as building a PC. All will become clearer as the time approaches. The operating system chosen will be Windows Home Server. More on this build in a later blog.

We all hear and see in the media about identity theft so here are a few programs to help keep you safe when on the Internet.

First off is a very good site to get free anti-virus and firewall protection, PCtools. Also from this site get ThreatFire, this will monitor your on line work for any spyware or malware threats in real time.  One program to regularly check out your system for spyware is SpyBot Search and Destroy. I covered rootkits in an earlier blog, so that should keep you safe if you install and run the above programs.

There are numerous programs installed on our computers but do you know if you have the latest updates for them? A program that will automatically check all of them for you and allow you to download the updates is Program Patcher.

So now you have your programs all up to date, but they do take longer to load don't they? Maybe your disc is fragmented? This happens when you uninstall programs, they leave holes behind on the disc. When you install new programs they might well be too big to fit into these holes so some of the program goes in but the rest goes elsewhere on the disc. This fragments the program so instead of reading sequentially, the computer has to dart about on the disc to find the rest of the program. You need Ultimate Defrag. This will put everything back into sequential order on the disc. Are you sure you uninstalled everything when you uninstalled that program you needed no more? What you need is Absolute Uninstaller. Not only will this program uninstall programs but it checks the registry and the disc for anything left over, so everything get removed. A plus for this program is that it loads a lot faster than "Add/Remove" in control panel.

Now we have sorted out our programs and defragged our disc, what else can we do to make things run smoothly? I talked about defragging our disc drive, what else can we defrag? One thing we can do is defrag our registry. Now, I am sure you all know that playing with the registry can cause untold problems if we do it wrong, so before we do anything we need to back up our entire registry. We do this by doing the following: Click START - RUN - type REGEDIT and press return. This will bring up the registry editor. Click on FILE - EXPORT - this will ask you where you want to export the registry to and what you want to call it. Do it, and save in the default directory. Your entire registry is now saved, in case things go wrong.  To get it back as it was go to the directory and click on the file name you chose. You will then be asked if you want to add the information to the registry, click YES. With the registry backed up we need Registry Cleaner. This will clean the registry getting rid of unwanted or unneeded entries. Your registry should now be much smaller in size. We then need another program  Reg Defrag, this doing to the registry  what Ultimate Defrag did for the disc. When you reload the system it should load and run a bit quicker.

One final thing before we leave the world of defrag, why not defrag the page file. The Page File is a file on the disc drive which is used as extra memory when the installed memory is being used to capacity, either too many programs open or too many processes started at load time, that sort of thing. Now normally we cannot defrag the page file because it is in use, so what we do is defrag it before the system loads. To do this the program we need is Page Defrag. When we use the Page File, unlike physical memory, information will not vanish when system is powered down, it will stay on the disc. This program will clean out this information. All we need do after that is to clean out the PREFETCH folder. How to do this is explained in the blog Before we Begin... a little taster.

 NOTE:- In this blog you will see highlighted italic text coloured blue. These contain hyperlinks to web address links to obtaining the specific item. Just click on them and you will be redirected to the specific item.

Until the next time Chill Out and go with the flow.