Your hard drive.  That magical magnetic thing (unless you have an SSD) that stores all of your data, programs, and other important stuff.  It’s amazing how much you can fit on a hard drive, but every drive has its limit.  Once it gets maxed out you’ll probably notice some performance degradation.  The computer takes longer to start up, programs take longer to start, etc. because of all that excess data.  This article will discuss some of the techniques you can use to help clean out the unneeded stuff from your hard drive to get it back to that zippy speed you had before.  Click to read more…

Being the computer nerd that I am and having written a book, created this website, and taught courses about better computer use like I have, you can imagine that I fill the role of personal tech support to many friends and family members.  I usually welcome the opportunity to help the people that I care about, though sometimes I definitely face challenges when helping them out.  This post describes the work I did on a notebook that belonged to my wife’s friend and colleague Bobbie.  Her problems consisted of serious infections, poor system performance, instability, and an excess of unneeded programs.  Click to read more…