Windows Support Information

Introduction

Following in the spirit of openness that the rest of this site promotes, we offer these support notes for the free benefit of all visitors to our site who continue to use Microsoft software products. (No guarantees are provided as to the content of external sites. See our Legal Page for further details.)

Please note also that whilst we do our best to promote free software on Windows PCs, not all the products we have found to be best of breed are free. Those we have chosen represent, in our view, excellent value.

Hopefully, they will help you to take care of your Windows PC yourself, keeping it both secure and healthy. If you should get stuck at any point we are always happy to help. If you do make a mistake, do not worry. And do not hesitate to call us. We will not talk down to you: for the simple reason that whatever mistake you have made, we will almost certainly have done it, probably more than once, ourselves!

Keeping secure whilst using Microsoft

Using Microsoft as your PC operating system means the minimum protection software you should have on your PC is a firewall, anti-virus and anti-spyware.

Some of the best products available are freeware and in our opinion better, in a number of ways, than the better known heavy duty commercial products. The list below is our current suggested minimum suite of products that you will need keep you safe:

  • Comodo Personal Firewall software
  • avast! Home free anti-virus software
  • Spybot free anti-spyware software

All three products must be kept up to date if they are to be effective. Each can be set to update automatically but it does no harm to check their status once in a while.

All Microsoft Products

Microsoft products are vulnerable to attack. There is no doubt about that.

What you may not know is that if your system is compromised, it may be taken over remotely and used without your knowledge to propagate even more trouble for you and others. It is therefore imperative that as well as keeping your security software up to date as described above, you ensure you have the latest security updates from Microsoft for your Windows operating system and all other Microsoft products you may have purchased.

This will include such things as Microsoft Works or Microsoft Office (all types).

As with the security suite we recommend, you can set your system to get updates automatically but it does no harm to visit Microsoft's site on a regular basis to check for yourself.

File Fragmentation?

What is it? Is it important? Fragmentation refers to the files (and their number can run into hundreds of thousands!) on your hard disk getting broken up into a number of small pieces or fragments. Microsoft systems do not come with automatic defragmentation built in.

As a consequence, being left unmanaged, the number of fragments grows over time. The more fragments, the more your hard disk has to thrash around pulling all the bits together every single time it accesses files (yours and the system's own files). This factor alone is probably the biggest single cause of deteriorating performance and instability (indeed, it can lead to many other problems too!). So, yes, fragmentation is important and therefore has to be managed.

BIG TIP: After, keeping your Windows PC secure and up to date, managing fragmentation is probably the next most useful thing you can do to keep your PC healthy.

There is a defragmentation utility included in Windows (if you know where to find it!) but, well to put it kindly, it is nowhere near as good as defragmentation software you can buy. Two of the best are:

Which do you pick? Well, it matters less which one as long as you pick one. If you are using Windows XP, then currently, our personal favourite is PerfectDisk, but either does a good job of helping to keep your PC well tuned. Get in touch if you want to know why we prefer Perfectdisk!

PC Health

What else do you have to do to keep your Microsoft PC healthy and well tuned? In addition to the issues detailed above, there are several other aspects of Microsoft operating systems that need to be managed: memory fragmentation (that word again!) and registry changes.

As you open and close programs, your physical memory gets fragmented by the programs you use (like Word, or email). When you close a program, and not all the memory that it used is returned for re-use elsewhere, resulting in gradual loss of available resources for future program to use. You need software to manage this.

The Windows Registry is the operating systems' own database of everything on your PC. It is very complicated and constantly updated every moment you use your PC and is absolutely key to the working of your operating system but for all sorts of reasons, it gets cluttered with unnecessary and redundant information over time. Again, software is needed to manage this.

We use, and recommend, Tuneup Utilities 2008 because it covers both these problem areas and provides other, useful facilities besides.

How else can you make your system better?

What else do you have to do to keep your Microsoft PC healthy and well tuned? In addition to the issues detailed above, there are several other aspects of Microsoft operating systems that need to be managed: memory fragmentation (that word again!) and registry changes.

As you open and close programs, your physical memory gets fragmented by the programs you use (like Word, or email). When you close a program, and not all the memory that it used is returned for re-use elsewhere, resulting in gradual loss of available resources for future program to use. You need software to manage this.

The Windows Registry is the operating systems' own database of everything on your PC. It is very complicated and constantly updated every moment you use your PC and is absolutely key to the working of your operating system but for all sorts of reasons, it gets cluttered with unnecessary and redundant information over time. Again, software is needed to manage this.

We use, and recommend, Tuneup Utilities 2008 because it covers both these problem areas and provides other, useful facilities besides.

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