Weather Sites, XP Restore, and Crap Cleaner

March 1, 2005

Wow, it's definitely spring around here now! I've not seen a winter this mild in the 15 years I've lived in Montana. In fact, the last time I enjoyed such a mild winter I was living in Texas.

If you like to keep tabs on the weather, my two favorite sites are:

Yahoo - customized for Coram

http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/USMT0077_f.html

and

Accuweather - also customizable

http://wwwa.accuweather.com/

At Yahoo, you can check the high and low temperatures for days gone by, which is handy if you like to keep journals like I do, but often fall behind. At Accuweather, you can check the weather forecast for 15 days out, which can be handy if you are planning some outdoor activities or travel. Yahoo tends to be more optimistic and Accuweather tends to be pessimistic, so by checking them both I can get a pretty good idea of what the possibilities are. I've played with Weatherbug, which I know many of you are using. It's a great idea - having the weather right there in your System Tray, but personally, I'd rather not give up any more resources than I possibly have to, and Weatherbug, along with any other programs that run continuously in the background, eats up a lot of resources - which translates to a slow computer. And everybody knows I like speed!

For months now I've been wanting to talk about the Restore feature, as found in Windows XP and ME. This is a handy little utility that actually backs up your computer to a section of your existing hard drive, in case you mess things up. It does this behind the scenes, without you needing to worry about it. Unless you've intentionally turned it off, it's probably running right now. The nice thing about the Restore feature is that you can change your system back to the way it was yesterday, last week, or last month, before you did whatever it was that messed it up. Of course, a hard drive only has so much storage space, so the Restore feature can only record a limited amount ofinformation. Don't worry, it won't use up all of your hard drive space. It has a designated amount of space to use. When it runs out, it will drop the oldest backups - which means you can only go back as far as it has space to record.

The downside to the Restore feature is that it backs up everything - including viruses. This means that if you do find your system infected, with spyware, adware, trojans, viruses, worms, etc., you will need to disable the Restore feature, so that it erases all those backups, and then run your clean up routines. Once your system is cleaned up and working right, then you can turn the Restore feature on again.

If you have Windows XP and want to learn more about the Restore feature, just press the F1 key on your keyboard, to access the Help system, then in the search field type in the word 'restore' and click on the search button. It's well worth the time to learn about it.

Another handy little utility I've recently come to enjoy is called Crap Cleaner. It cleans out the crap on your computer that you normally pay me to clean out! And it's free too. What a deal. You can download it at:

http://www.ccleaner.com/

It's easy to use, and safe. It has two sections, one to clean up the general crap, like temporary files, temporary INTERNET files, history, internet cache, etc., and the other section that cleans the registry. If you aren't sure what you are doing, skip the registry cleaning. It does back up any changes you make to the registry, though, so if you are brave, feel free to experiment.

One last note - I know that many of you get my newsletter and file it away without reading it (which means you probably won't ever read this!) That's fine, I understand we're all way too busy these days, just remember, the info I send is intended to save you money and make your life a little easier, based on the calls that I get throughout the preceding months. I sure don't mind making more money, so just keep on filing them away!  

Thanks to everyone for their prayers and concerns for my back problems. My back is doing great now, and hey, my fibro has been in remission for a full month now! Pretty awesome. Write me if you want to know my secret!

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