For many people, the fall season is a time to clean.  Houses, homes, and apartments may have accumulated more than their share of dirt and clutter over a summer’s worth of use, and it’s time to clean, dust, and get everything spic and span before winter sets in.  Out in the yard, especially if the yard in question features one or more trees, the need to clean will commence just as soon as those trees start dropping the leaves that provided such cool shade all summer long.  In whatever location, for whatever reason, now is the time to do that last bit of cleaning before the snow starts to fly.

That’s all very good.  But, when you’re cleaning inside and outside, don’t forget to clean the piece of electronic equipment without which you wouldn’t be reading this article—your computer.  Just like any room in your house, computers can get cluttered with useless or unnecessary stuff that builds up over time.  When there’s enough clutter—in either a house or a computer—it becomes tough to get around.

So this month, we present some useful tips to keep your computer cleaned up and running efficiently—and by the way, these can be used at any time of the year (not just during fall cleaning) to help your computer run better.

·  Scan and defragment your computer’s hard drive.  Think of your computer’s hard drive like an attic.  You bring up boxes of things to store in the attic, just like you write files and data to your hard drive.  At some point, you may bring a box down from the middle of your attic and take two up for storage, putting one in the hole left by the previous box and the other farther away.  Your computer works the same way.  If you delete a file that had been stored in the middle of your hard drive, and then save a larger file to the drive, your computer will put part of the file in the spot left by the deleted file and the rest in a different location.  This process tends to fragment files on your hard drive.

At first, that isn’t a bad thing.  But the more file fragments are saved to different locations on the drive, the harder your computer has to work to find them all and load your programs and data, the longer it takes to do so, and the greater the chance of damage to your files.  So it’s periodically a good idea to scan and defragment your drive to put all these file fragments together in the same location on your drive.  On a Windows XP computer, you can do this by opening the My Computer window, right-clicking on the icon for your hard drive (usually labeled C:), and choosing Properties.  Then click on the Tools tab.  On that screen, the top section will be labeled “Error-checking” and you’d click the Check Now button to scan your hard drive for errors.  The next section down will be labeled “Defragmentation” and you’d click the Defragment Now button to defragment your hard drive.

·  Clean out your temporary Internet files.  Most browser programs, when you visit a Web site, will store a copy of that site on your hard drive.  This is so that, if you should visit the site again and there have been no changes to the site contents, the browser can load the site directly from your hard drive and save the time of contacting the server via your Internet connection.  This is a very good thing . . . up to a point.  Because the more Web sites you visit, the more files will get stored on your drive, the harder your browser will have to work to find the site you’re visiting, and—you guessed it—the slower your computer will run when displaying the site on your screen.  So it’s a good idea to periodically clean out these temporary files as well.

You can do that in Internet Explorer by clicking on Tools on your top menu, and then choosing Internet Options.  On the General screen that pops up, the middle section labeled “Temporary Internet files” will contain a Delete Files button.  Click that to clean those files from your hard drive.  In Netscape, you would click Edit from the top menu and then choose Preferences.  In the list of preference options at the left of the next screen, double-click Advanced and then click on Cache.  There will be buttons on that window (which may have different titles depending on your version of Netscape) that will allow you to clean out those files.  In Firefox, you would click Tools on the top menu and choose Options.  Then click on the Security tab and select the tab labeled Cache to clear the items.  (And take this caution:  our Firefox expert—support technician Dan Fusselman—advised that he believes it’s more unproductive to clean these files in Firefox than to let them accumulate.)  In Opera, click on the Tools option on the top menu and choose Preferences.  From there click on Advanced and select the Cookies/History option.  You have the ability there to not only clear the files manually, but to set automated options to clear them automatically every time you exit the program.

·  Update your anti-virus and spyware programs with the latest definitions.  This is one we can’t stress strongly enough—at any time of the year.  New viruses and spy programs are written on a daily basis and distributed via downloads and mail messages that appear completely innocent at the time.  Make sure that your anti-virus and spyware detection programs have the latest updates.  In many cases, your programs will be set to download them automatically; if not, it’s a good idea to manually update them on a monthly basis.  Follow the directions in your program to do so, and if you need a hand, please do call our technical support team—we’ll be glad to help you prevent greater trouble from infecting your computer.

·  Use the Disk Cleanup tool with Windows.  This program will not only help you delete your temporary Internet files, but it can also clean out other temporary files that Windows used at one time but no longer needs, and find other files that you no longer need.  It’s located on your main programs menu, under Accessories|System Tools.

A clean computer, like a clean house or yard, does require a little effort.  But the results in both cases are well worth it—especially when you can use a clean computer to quickly and easily navigate your way on the Internet.

If you have any questions at all about cleaning your computer, our trained technicians at HunTel.net® are available and are happy to assist you.  You can contact us by phone at 402-533-5777 (Washington County and Omaha) or 1-888-491-9115 (toll free throughout our service area); by E-mail at techsupport@huntel.net; or through our live support chat service at http://www.huntel.net.  Normal support hours are 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., Central time, 7 days a week.

Thank you for using HunTel.net!