The Weekly Geek

I have taken a large collection of my tips for tweaking and optimizing Windows XP and put them in this PDF just for you. Some tips are “old” and some of the changes suggested were implemented by Microsoft with XP’s Service Pack 3, however I have put them all in one place, just in case.

Enjoy the tips (18 pages worth) and have a virus free week!

I have written numerous articles on backing up and give more than my share of talks on the subject. Today I want to give you a PDF of all that in one free download. It is over 1.25 MB so give it a minute to open.

The Complete backup guide for Windows XP and older editions.

This does not include off site backup solutions, or more expensive automatic NAS solutions which I hope to cover both in a later article as well as how to back up Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines.

Over the years I have written several articles on the use of Virtual Memory and how to use it to speed up your computer.
Now that you have several “old” and “small” USB thumb or stick drives around that you don’t use anymore you can format them and install them on the back of your computer and use them as Virtual Memory instead of using the hard drive.  This should both increase your computing speed and make you feel good about recycling old computer parts. To be clear, I am not talking about external hard drives, just the little drives that are about the size of your thumb, hence the name “thumb drive”.

Now that you are done scrounging through your pencil drawer looking for old drives and you have finished hugging yourself for saving a USB tree from being dismembered, let’s continue. [Read more →]

With Firefox 4 about to come out, I figure it is way past time to get some tweaks about version 3.x out.
Now I used to be a big fan of Firefox until it become more bloated than Internet Explorer and started taking 2 or 3 minutes (literally) to load. But unless I want to get flamed here, I must admit it is a good browser and Mike at IFix Computers likes it and knows more than a trick or two.
As a matter of fact I had written an article about add-ins for Firefox security with Mikes help but for some reason cannot find it on this site. Hopefully I can find it, resurrect it, update it, and get it out in the next few days. Until then there is a quick blurb here.

The best way to tweak Firefox is by accessing its hidden preferences by using the “about:config” feature. Be warned that about:config and many of the preferences it can access are hidden for a reason.

[Read more →]

I advise people using loaned computers to always assume there is some sort of spyware planted.

The recent flap over a Pennsylvania school district’s use of tracking software on schoolissued laptops, supposedly to locate those that were stolen, makes me wonder how much illegal snooping goes on everywhere, whether initially intended or not.

read the rest of the story here… http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2364473,00.asp