Cleaning & Tuning

Today was a good day for me. I found enough time to clean and tune my own (primary) machine! Rarely do I get such a luxury. I rely on my recommended security suite (http://pcdocsblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/please-take-heed-and-secure-your-system.html)  to keep my machines safe from rogues and viruses and other malware, and they do a great job. Once a week I try to do a full scan with either Malwarebytes or SuperAntispyware. My MSE antivirus runs every night - a full scan - while I sleep.

But after some time has gone by it is always a good idea to do a focused and thorough cleaning and tuning, and today I did just that. I also reorganized my recent photos. It turns out that I had taken many hundreds of photos during July, so I created some sub-folders to further define the July photos.

Many of you have asked me about how to organize your photos. Here is what my photo library looks like (click on it for larger view):

If you want to know a program you can use to organize your photos, I'd recommend Picasa, but I do mine manually. I like being in control and programs like Picasa and others take that away from you. In those 10 years of photo folders I have 33,495 digital photos, mostly of family, and of course, these are all precious to me, so I back them up regularly. Like most other PC things, I do that myself too.

One thing I don't get to do each week is to run some of the utility programs within Tune-Up Utilities. I freed up disk space, I cleaned the registry, I defragged the registry, checked for broken shortcuts (there were none), ran CCleaner, and did general housekeeping tasks. I feel a lot better having a clean machine that I know is running at its optimum.

As you all know, I am available to perform this service for you if needed, but I take a lot of pride and get great satisfaction knowing that so many of you, who have been following me for years, can do the same for yourselves. It's very comforing knowing what you are doing, right?