THE RITE OF SPRING CLEANING

As I watched the weekend fly by, I wasn't washing coal dust off the walls as used to be done in England, but busily doing some computer spring cleaning with the help of a techie friend. We discovered that Adware had accumulated on my computer to the extent that the icons on my Desktop would fade totally after less that a minute on boot-up. You might know that if there is nothing on the desktop, you are unable to get to any program to load. In essence the Adware had successfully functioned as destructively as a virus.

Undoubtedly it need not be upper most on the priority list of our lawmakers, but aren't there a few lesser-involved politicians who might introduce some legislation to make it against the law to drop unwanted, unsolicited pieces of junk on private computers? I understand that, even all those free programs we love, need to be paid for (advertising being the currently preferred method). Should it be lawful that it all be done on the backs of the sole, private computer owner to be forced to use precious time to look up those things on the task manager that are unknown (mine shows 62 processes running at the moment) as well as all the less-visible things? Most of these processes are written in some shorthand that doesn't make clear what they are. If you try to close them you get dire warnings (also that are inexplicable) as to what will befall you.

One, though tedious, way to find out what is running is to Google each process. It ia amazing how many processes have, without asking or receiving permission, decided to run on your computer, slowing down anything else you might be doing. My running Spybot and Ad-Aware several times times eventually rid me, I hope (see fingers crossed here), of all of it for the moment. I then ran a registry cleaner to pick out the debris and defragmented my computer. (I must confess that this all happened, discovery through purge, by a friend who knew what he was doing while I hadn't a clue at the beginning.

This over, I bought a 750 gig external drive and we did a back up of the whole computer after it had been defragmented as well. The backup program started by saying it would take 182 days. It must have been set for a VERY slow CPU because those 182 days speeded it down to 14 hours, long enough to tie the computer up for most of the day. The major culprit in this case was Hotbar.

The amount of time spent on computer maintentance seems equal to, if not exceeding, maintenance of my person and clothing.