Cleaning out the junk

I am a hoarder. I hate throwing away things. Invariably, when I am finally persuaded by my wife, the next day I could have used it. But when it comes to junk on my computer I am almost ruthless, no more so than in my email program. There can be a thousand reasons why computers slow down, but a common one is that the email program is clogged - and do I mean clogged. I looked over a friend's computer recently, and he had never deleted a single email. There were thousands of old files in there! And, of course, many of those files had big attachments, all of which the email program was groaning to try and cope with. Here's the drill: 1) Ditch everything from the In box, except those emails you must keep. And create folders in which to store them. 2) Go to the "Sent" section, and delete everything except, perhaps, the last few weeks worth. 3) Go to the "Deleted items" or "Trash" section, and delete everything there. (Stuff does not automatically vanish from the system when you hit the delete key in the In box. You have to manually clean it out from "Deleted...") 4) Compact your folders, by going to the File menu and then choosing "Folders", then "Compact all folders". Your computer will send you flowers for this.

Taming the PC taskbar

One of the (many) annoying things about the PC taskbar - that strip at the bottom of the screen which shows all your open applications and documents - is its inflexibility. What if you want to change the order of the items? No-can-do, unless you have this lovely little utility, called Taskbar Shuffle. Download a copy here. (Incidentally, you can rearrange the order of tabs in the Firefox browser, by clicking and dragging them.)

Firefox rules, OK?

If you buy a PC, it comes with the Internet Explorer browser built in. If you buy a Mac, the browser is Safari. But the (also free) Firefox browser, available for both platforms, is rapidly gaining popularity, and may soon overtake IE. For me, it's a no-brainer: Firefox wins hands down on just about every count. It was the first to introduce tabs, so you can have multiple pages at the ready. It puts out new updates very regularly, whereas Microsoft is always lagging months or years behind. But the clincher is the thousands of add-ons available to enhance Firefox. My favourite is DownloadHelper, which lets me download to my computer videos from sites like YouTube.

Guess it beats talking

Last summer I went to the Classical Sparks concert. I swear there were kids in the audience listening to their ipods while the concert was on. Duh! I have seen kids texting the person sitting alongside them. (I guess talking is so 20th century.) Those of you who have been to a church service in an Anglican or Catholic church will have encountered what they called the "sign of peace", where at a given sign members of the congregation actually say hello to each other, and self-consciously shake hands or even (horrors) hug one another. I'm just waiting for the time when the minister says, "And now let us share a text of peace."

Even the built-in obsolescence is not working

I reckon Harvey Norman has a big bin at their front door, so that when you buy a new computer, as you leave the store you toss it in the bin and go back and buy the upgrade. Someone should add to Murphy's laws that stuff breaks down the day after the warranty expires. I bought a tv from the Warehouse about two years ago, and the last couple of days it first started clapping out in the picture department, and then gave off very nasty noises, to the point it's now effectively non-functional. I rang a cousin who used to fix tv's, and he told me what in my heart I knew, that it would cost more to fix than to go and buy another one. (He no longer fixes tv's for this reason - I think he's now got a part-time job repairing satellites, or somesuch.) Similarly, we had a DVD player (admittedly an el cheapo from DS), for which the remote controller stopped working. They told me it would cost more to repair than to buy a new one. Actually, it would have cost more to repair just the remote than to buy a complete new DVD player including remote. I did that - I guess in reality I was buying a remote with a free DVD player thrown in. But I don't always give in so easily. About six months ago, the volume control on my electric lawnmower (bought at a garage sale) gave off a nasty puff of blue smoke followed by silence. I took the controller off and trotted down to my local lawnmower shop with it. The guy didn't even bother to look at it. The advice (you guessed it) was that they didn't make those any more, so I'd have to buy a new mower. For once I got ornery. Back home, I drilled out the sealed screws (the kind for which there is no known tool in the universe), spent the next half hour on my hands and knees finding all the bits that sprang out, shortened the cable where it had burnt out, and reassembled with some bolts instead of screws. It works a treat.

An alternative to the consumer Christmas

Once upon a time, my wider family decided Christmas had become a competition, and we needed to downsize it. So at my sister's suggestion (and if you knew my sister, you'd understand why this was a bolt from the blue) we agreed to limit spending on a gift for any one person to $5, and that purchases from second-hand shops were fine. The idea was to be creative, not stingy. Everybody entered the spirit of the idea, and it really was exciting to see what people came up with.
If Christmas has become a consumer nightmare for you, here's another suggestion for getting off the treadmill (and the video is worth watching for its own sake - it's very clever).

Finding stuff on your computer

I'm sure it's happened to you. You just know you have a document or file somewhere on your computer, but can't remember where you put it. You can try using Windows Search, but never was a search tool so badly constructed, plus it's slower than treacle in a snowstorm. Google desktop search is better, but can slow your system down terribly, and is highly invasive. Like, just where are they sending all that info gathered from the depths of your computer? Enter, riding to the rescue, Copernic Desktop Search. It's brilliant, it's fast, and I could not live without it. Even better, it's free. Get it here.

Doing it for free

One of the great things about the internet is that for almost every high-priced piece of commercial software, there is a free alternative available. In fact, some of the free offerings beat the pants off the commercial, particularly at the price! Here are some of my "can't do without" favourites:
Irfanview - an image editor (think Photoshop lite), that also doubles as a photo organiser. Has amazing capabilities for such a small footprint. Can also play many video files (eg, the movies you take on your digital camera).
Audacity - a sound editor I use all the time. You can also stretch or condense sounds (including songs) without changing pitch, move songs up or down a key, and much more.
OpenOffice.org - equivalent to Microsoft Office. Has all the bells and whistles, without the awful "ribbon" introduced by Office 2007 (and which I loathe). Has modules equivalent to Excel, PowerPoint and Access, as well as a drawing module, but the PowerPoint module is not well implemented and probably is better avoided.
EditPad Lite - a general-purpose text editor (a replacement for the Windows Notepad, but can do much more), small and compact with lots of functions.
Copernic Destop Search - I have posted separately on this.
VLC Media Player - can play all those videos and movies that Windows Media Player won't touch. Don't be fooled by its utterly basic interface.
CDex - a CD ripper (ie, copies music tracks from your CDs to your computer).
PdfEdit995 - Can create pdf files from any programme that has a print function. Can also convert pdf documents to Word format files, and much more.
Feel free to share your top favourites.

Recover forgotten passwords

One of the bugbears of my life is forgetting the passwords for websites I have signed up to. Even if you ask your browser to remember the password, the row of dots or asterisks doesn't actually tell you what the password is. And you can't copy and paste them into another field. To the rescue rides a brilliant little utility called PasswordFox. Assuming you use Firefox as your browser, just open this tiny (41kb) program and it gives you a complete list of all the sites you've signed up to, and their passwords. You can download a copy here. The downside is that anyone else visiting your machine can use PasswordFox to raid your store, and any websites you didn't want anybody else to know about will be shown in all their glory. There is an Internet Explorer equivalent, but you can go look for that yourself.

It's not your fault

If, like me, you regularly feel intimidated by technology, or that your computer is beating you up, here’s a word of encouragement: IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT! The fact that you can’t make head or tail of the newest piece of software is not your fault. A huge weight of guilt fell off me when I read “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum”, by Alan Cooper (I got it from the Christchurch Public Library). Subtitled “Why High-tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity”, Mr Cooper, who is an acclaimed software designer himself, makes it very clear who is at fault. It’s the faceless twits who design the stuff. Here’s the secret: geeks design to impress other geeks. People like you and me who have to use these engines-of-Satan only get in the way of their ideas of good design. Hit back. Email them and tell them in no uncertain terms what you think.