Room To Think

The laptop I use most for everyday computing -- email, bookkeeping, maintaining my calendar, etc -- is a Dell laptop I purchased way back in 2003. It is certainly starting to show it's age. The battery barely holds a charge anymore and I use it almost exclusively tethered to an electrical outlet. The huge 30GB hard drive doesn't seem nearly so large anymore. And lately it has been getting so bogged down as to be nearly unusable. Of course, I did all the things I do to my clients' computers when they complain of a slow machine. I cleaned out the registry, scanned for viruses and malware, made sure the hard drive wasn't running out of space, looked at the processes that were running at start-up. All of that helped a little, but just a little. No matter what I did, the page file was always full and the computer spent a huge amount of time paging to the hard drive.

This makes sense, since the computer had only 512KB of RAM. That was a normal configuration back in 2003, and developers wrote software with those kinds of limits in mind. But in 2010, the average computer, and thus the "design standard" for software development, assumes a lot more RAM.

My first thought was to simply replace my laptop. I've certainly gotten a full life cycle from it, and it owes me nothing. And it sure would be nice to get my hands on a new Windows 7 PC with all the latest bells and whistles. But like everyone else I am pinching pennies a bit nowadays, so I decided to take another tack, and upgrade the RAM in my laptop. I replaced the two 256k sticks with 2 1GB sticks, at a cost of about $65. Wow, what a difference! With all that memory the computer doesn't have to go page to the hard drive nearly as often, and the performance is night-and-day improved. It boots faster. Applications load and run faster. Using the laptop is no longer an exercise in frustration.

I still want that new Win7 PC, but I'll wait a while for that. Meanwhile, I've gotten a year or two more of service out of my existing laptop, for a relatively small investment.

Virus Protection

I'm sure just about everybody who has a Windows PC know by now that they need to have some sort of anti-virus software running. The McAfee suite seems to be quite popular, but being a New England Yankee, I like free stuff when I think it works well.

For some years I used, and recommended, the free edition of AVG Anti-Virus. It works well, it updates automatically, it's easy to set it up to scan when you want it to, and for the most part it stays out of your way. But every once in a while the automatic update seems to get 'stuck', and you need to manually trigger and update.

So lately I have been recommending to my clients that they use Microsoft Security Essentials instead. MSE has a very simple interface, you can configure it to update and scan nightly or whenever you want, and the automatic updates seem to work flawlessly. MSE is free from Microsoft, as long as you have a genuine Windows installation.

I recently did a clean-up and optimization call on a client with an older PC with minimal memory. As part of that service call I installed and configured Microsoft Security Essentials on that PC. The boot process on that PC seemed to take forever.

Since then, I've done a bit of experimenting on one of my PCs at home, and it seems that MSE uses more resources on the computer than AVG does. That probably makes little difference on a modern PC with a fast processor and plenty of memory, but for older PCs, I am going back to recommending AVG Free Anti-virus over MSE, even though it requires a bit of hands-on maintenance every now and then.

And Jim, if you happen to read this, I would have emailed you to let you know about this, but I never got your email address.

Allen "Monkeywrench" Freeman