Computer Hygiene - Take Out The Trash!

Do you find that your computer exhibits one or more of the following behaviors?

- Inexplicable message or warning pop-ups

- Frequent unsolicited reboots

- Your favorite application often crashes

- Applications now start up sluggishly

- Your computer seems to take forever to boot up

- You find new software running which you did not expressly install, and you cannot explain it's existance

Your computer may simply have become cluttered with software to such a degree that all those programs now fight with each other for resources, or a particular type of software installed (with malicious intent or otherwise) could produce adverse side effects and may even compromise your system's health and security. Even if your PC does not appear to suffer from any of the symptoms above, chances are over time one or more of these issues will surface.

So where should we look to find the root cause of such problems? In short, we can attribute this abnormal behavior to:

1) Our not being vigilant in monitoring the list of software running (or not running) on our system

2) Not being sufficiently mindful of how the installed software got there and why

Let me explain further. When one purchases a computer (or you inherit that