Keep your computer in working order – tips & tools

For many months I’ve been living with an irritating message that displays every time my computer starts up. The computer runs fine so I just ignore it. It happened after I installed Norton Anti-Virus 2005. I am computer knowledgeable enough to know it needed to be fixed someday, but wasn’t hurting anything.

Almost a year ago I upgraded to ACT 2005 only to realize it did not sync both ways with my Palm. So, I de-installed it but ever since then email sent would not record in the history. A few weeks ago I had some more memory and a new sound card installed (so I could do audio taping on my computer – the sound card on the mother board is not high enough quality). The result was my Palm would not sync with the computer at all.

Enough was enough. My Palm is such a productivity saver while I’m out of the office that I had to make time to fix these issues. Eight hours later I am error-free…knock on wood. Here are my lessons learned:

1. Don’t wait so long to fix issues. Then you won’t have to spend so much time all at once.
2. Turns out, the USB hub my Palm was plugged into was not plugged into my computer. (Stupid me!) I need to put tape on the end of the wires indicating what is what and also be clear how many wires need to be plugged back in when I pull things apart.
3. Google indicated lots of occurences for my pesky message problem and they all lead back to the same help message by Symnatec. After hours of trying a step, rebooting, uninstalling, rebooting, reinstalling and rebooting the issue was an entry in the registry file. The registry is NOT something everyone should mess with, but it is something that needs cleaning. I quickly researched some registry cleanup utilities and found a consistent rating with Advanced System Optimizer. For great little tools, look at Tucows or C-Net’s download.com. I downloaded a 30-day free trial version of Advanced System Optimizer ($39). It found 287 issues…I’ll let you know what I think after using my computer for a while. It allowed me to see the pesky program in the startup file but I had to make the decision to delete it. Let your computer person make that decision. Just get them in!

Our computer is one of primary productivity aids. When it is slow, so are we. Get help and get your computer tuned. You’ll sleep better like I did last night when I finally got into bed at 2:00 am!