This was the norm for many years going back as far as MS-DOS to Windows98 SE if my memory serves. After that, somehow the rules changed. Mind you, I’m not talking about Linux here, just Windows. From the limited distros I’ve tested, Linux seems to be pretty spot-on with handling focus consistently.

Now, it is relatively common for another window to appear on top of whatever we were working on yet the cursor can still be seen blinking in the background window that currently does not have the focus. Why is that? Or, the foreground window will have a darkened border around a button (indicating a default if Enter is pressed) yet will not respond if Enter is pressed until the mouse is clicked to re-affirm focus.

In Windows98, when the advent of the scroll-wheel mice and the middle click began to take popularity, it was quick and easy to switch focus rapidly between all windows and subwindows using a single middle click. Now, however, the rules seemed to have changed. Sometimes the foreground window will already appear to have the focus, yet when I try to add text — nothing happens until I actually click into the text field, despite the fact that the cursor was already blinking there.

(In this example, the Acrobat icon is selected in the taskbar, yet the foreground notepad object has focus so that text can be selected, yet the CaseMap program in the background has the focus — at least visually.)

One of the most important features in Windows has been the long standing ability to reliably operate it without a mouse, using exclusively the combination of advanced shortcuts such as Alt+Tab (“Windows Flip“), Alt+Space, alt+key, winkey+key, and various combinations of tab, spacebar, etc. With the focus rules having changed to where they now no longer operate in a homogenous way between all applications, more clicking is required to perform seemingly basic tasks that could previously be executed in an instant.

(In this screenshot, the iPhone foreground dialog box and the background Gmail window both appear to have the focus, yet the taskbar only indicates that Gmail truly has the focus. I can type in the chat window in the background window, yet the foreground window has a darkened default OK button which should execute on Enter, but it won’t until I actually click to activate  the window.)

This isn’t a big deal for day to day tasks and general use operation, of course, but let’s say I had to perform some tasks over VNC and didn’t have a mouse? It can be a big problem. It seems as though people are now more mouse reliant than ever — I suppose that’s not such a bad thing — it certainly is easier — but it sure is slower.

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At first, Outlook seems like a great tool. It’s got everything in one place, e-mail, tasks, calendars, notes and so on. As you continue using Outlook over the years, I imagine it becomes familiar as you begin to make folders and subfolders, add to your calendar and make reminders for your calendaring. I get that.

Now, here’s the thing. Outlook was created a long time ago when most people barely even had a single PC, let alone two or more that is commonplace now. So, Outlook starts to really show its issues when synchronization is attempted between multiple computers. Outlook was never originally intended for this — so every attempt at having smooth synchronization is a convoluted process. Not to mention incredibly expensive.

There are many other small issues that compound as well. Such as, let’s say you have a new domain and you have your e-mail currently downloading via POP to a desktop system. Alright, not a problem. However, let’s say we start downloading the mail onto a laptop as well. Now we have to check whether the e-mails are stored on the server after they are downloaded. If they are, for how long? Will Outlook double-download them if they stay on the server for too long?

There are many things that cloud-computing may be wrong for, but e-mail is not one of them. By leaving your e-mails in the cloud, you could be free to use Outlook with IMAP as a synchronized e-mail platform. However, what about calendars, contacts, tasks and notes? Ah, right. For that you might need another solution such as SYNCING.NET or an Exchange Server. Both solutions which I do not recommend.

In general, my advice would be to stay far far away from Outlook and use something with the strength and versatility of Gmail. I can understand many instances in which Gmail wouldn’t suffice (privacy concerns, for one); however there are hundreds of competitors to choose from and a great percentage of them will be far superior than any minor advantages you might get from using Outlook. However, if you’re just now trying to get away from Outlook — you can actually import your Outlook data into Gmail, which is a pretty good solution.

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One day, after fumbling through a series of notepads and text documents trying to locate a phone number, it occurred to me that there had to be a better way to manage large volumes of interconnected information. What I needed was a surface, a canvas that would enable me to map out the process of gathering and collecting information as well as being able to keep a detailed catalog of notes for each area of interest. I tested a wide variety of software; ConceptDraw, NovaMind, Pimki, FreeMind, Compendium and a whole bunch of others.

Ultimately, I found VUE. The Visual Understanding Environment, developed by Tufts University. What struck me about VUE to be different than the alternatives was the straight forward interface. Despite the relatively crude UI, VUE doesn’t have any curves or gimmicks. It provides exactly what is needed: a blank, robust slate to make connections and store infinite notes.

By using a series of simple keyboard shortcuts for VUE in combination with Yod’m 3D, I am now able to maintain quick access to a staggering amount of information without impeding my workflow. (Yod’m 3D enables me to dedicate an entire “screen” to VUE. It’s decidedly old school, but it works rather reliably.)

(A small segment of my VUE map)

In VUE, I store information as necessary (such as locations I call, names of witnesses, etc.) in nodes and connect those nodes using lines. Nodes are preferred to text boxes because they can contain more than one series of information, such as a web-link, a link to a file and a visible pencil icon which appears when a node contains notes — which is a key feature. The system I use is simple, green for completed tasks, red for outstanding tasks. Blue, yellow and orange nodes indicate different things, such as names, notes and subcategories.

It’s not all simple, though. Once I’ve received crucial records, I scan them and then click and drag the PDF directly into the node. Instantly creating a mini-node which is hard-linked to that PDF document. Ready to be called up immediately.

(PDF linked to a node, note the simplistic vector-based icons at the left)

To get started, keyboard shortcuts are vital to keep things moving rapidly — that is the whole point of this, after all. The main keyboard shortcuts are:

New Node = N

New Line = L

New Text Box = T

Pan = Space

Zoom In/Out = Alt + Scrollwheel

I think it’s important to become as fast as possible with the latter two, pan and zoom. Those two enable you to move brisky about your VUE map. I ran into various problems when testing out newer versions of the VUE, for that reason, I have decided to stick with the older version, version 2.2.8, you can download it right now from SourceForge.

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Well, there’s certainly quite a few Outlook sync competitors, but I chose Syncing.net due to price and the pitch. They have a nice little flash demo showing everything going perfectly. Now, Syncing.net doesn’t only sync Outlook PST’s between computers, they also have a Dropbox-like folder sharing capability which allows you to “invite” other people to your shared folder(s). I did not use this functionality.

Syncing.net, in theory, is pretty easy to set up. According to tech support, you simply install Syncing.net on the host/master computer, then “invite” your other computers as necessary.

Syncing.net manages its syncing capabilities by using a secure P2P (peer to peer) connection as well as a “store and forward” feature which allows Syncing.net to use its own servers to temporarily store up to 250MB of data temporarily if one of the computers is off — thereby preventing the possibility of a P2P connection from taking place.

I tested Syncing.net on a pretty zippy dual-core Athlon based system running Vista Ultimate x64. At all times I had plenty of available memory and since I built the system there was no additional bloat from any other trialware or anything else. I used Office 2007 with Syncing.net.

The Syncing.net software is curious in that whenever it is running and has an Internet connection, it has a circle and a green checkmark in the system tray. Fine, but it’s really not clear as to what it’s doing because of this; the only way to tell if it’s transferring data is to open the software and look at the lower right corner and see that it is in fact transferring data at a certain KB/s rate. Additionally, you can view transfer status via a menu option to see additional options. But it won’t give you any indication of when it’ll be finished. No percentage or anything. They say this is because sync is inherently never “done.” Fair enough, but some kind of progress bar would be appreciated.

Upon the initial sync with the second computer, Syncing.net managed to make a mess out of it. There were duplicate folders and e-mails, calendar entries, folders within folders that had no business being there, etc. I had to instruct my client to essentially delete whatever was necessary to restore it to normal. Tech support was dumbfounded and told me to send them an error report using their built in error reporting tool — which failed (on every system I tried it on, by the way; I had plenty of opportunity to test it out). I asked them why it failed, they told me the usual, anti-virus, firewall, etc. However, I disabled my local firewall and set the router to use a DMZ (Demiltarized Zone) to ensure that there were no conflicts and disabled any anti-virus/anti-spyware to ensure that they had no excuses — still no dice. So I had to send it to them manually via a convoluted process of digging around in my hidden application folder for a huge ZIP file. Fine for someone like me, but what if I didn’t know what Windows Explorer was, or what a zip file was? Or how to browse around hidden folders?

Anyway, tech support is in Germany so they take a pretty long time to get back to you. When they got back to me in this instance, they just told me to do the sync again. Okay.

So this second time around, I deleted everything on the second machine so that it would gracefully accept the data from the master system without any hitches. An unnecessary yet recommended step according to tech support. I performed the sync again which took many hours (due to the large amount of data, primarily). When it was done I was shocked to see, again, that somehow Syncing.net had messed it up. I had practically the same duplicate folders such as “Inbox_1″ which would contain partial e-mails from Inbox, and it wasn’t clear why some were in those folders but not others.

To make matters worse, once I had my client “clean” everything up, Syncing.net would always seem to be one step behind and throwing up little prompts saying that I had made a change on a different system, asking which change I wished to keep. That’s odd because there’s only one person using any given Outlook at any particular time, so, how can these magic “simultaneous syncs” be happening? Tech support certainly had no idea.

My final qualm with the software is that it consumes an enormous amount of resources, mostly in disk activity, which is the worst kind of resource to be hoarding. It causes the computer to slow down enormously with intense I/O sometimes for nearly 20 minutes at a time, even when no changes to Outlook have been made. It really locks the system up — all 3 I tested it on, Vista and XP.

So, my issues with the software and service are as follows:

- No progress bar or any indicator of completeness (or even that it is doing anything, without manually clicking and checking or seeing the intense disk I/O);
- Poor resource management (hogs the entire hard drive without waiting for idle time);
- Incessant prompts which are difficult to permanently solve (“conflicts” resulting from supposed simultaneous changes);
- Difficult and generally unhelpful tech support;
- Extremely time consuming;
- Inconsistent (sometimes it syncs files perfectly, other times it skips several e-mails, even with the “store and forward” feature enabled).

If the software fixed the resource and inconsistency issues, it would be a passable solution. However, because of the compounding issues I cannot recommend this software, just as I cannot recommend Outlook as an e-mail solution. Sorry.

Look elsewhere for your e-mail needs and try to detach yourself from Outlook as soon as you can!

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Since then, Microsoft has made the largest leap of all by providing free anti-virus to anyone running a “genuine” version of Windows (i.e., not pirated). For most users, nothing will change since most hardware vendors will not equip their machines with MSE since it will not subsidize the cost of the machines as do Symantec products.

(MSE, protected; click to enlarge)

This is unfortunate because MSE is a near-perfect solution for combating viruses. It is self updating and generally not annoying. It’s green when everything is OK, yellow or red when action is required. The thing is so silent that you’d never even know you had it installed if no viruses are ever detected.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I used to use a hex editor in a masochistic endeavor to determine viruses out of .exe files back in the mid-90’s. Since then, my first experiences with anti-virus programs were AVG Anti-Virus which I used and recommended for many years.  Right around version 8, however, AVG started to become a little too Norton-like for my tastes — bloated, slow to start, nag screens, etc. I then switched to Avast! anti-virus, which I then recommended highly because of its light memory footprint and unobtrusive nature. Unfortunately, Avast! requires an annual registration, even for the free version. This tends to confuse people who are not familiar with the product, “my avast is expiring? what do i do?!” Mandatory registration for a free product is relatively perplexing. MSE deals with all of these issues and is the perfect anti-virus solution. It even uses less memory than any other anti-virus program I have ever tested.

There is so little that needs to be managed or customized for the end user that there is not much left to say. This is a rare and positive feature to appear amidst a category of otherwise insipid yet necessary software. Download it now!

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It’s a good idea, and it essentially mirrors the functionality of a forum, albeit a high tech forum with lots more capabilities.

Although Google Wave maintains the typical Google simplicity of its application here, I feel as though the people this might benefit most will be the least likely to use it.

(Google Wave screenshot, click to enlarge)

For example, I am currently working on a federal case where a single attorney is constantly e-mailing everybody about issues pertaining to the case, often with many drafts and revisions between several people — sounds like a clear cut case for Google Wave, right? I have no doubt in my mind that Google Wave would dramatically improve collaboration and organization for this exact kind of situation. That is Google’s mission statement, isn’t it? Here’s where it falls short: the kind of person who uses e-mail as a substitute for a forum or instant messaging is probably not likely to seek out options such as Google Wave, let alone take the time to learn its most useful core features which would benefit them most.

And that’s too bad, because Google has a winner here; a platform which takes the most useful aspects of a forum, the realtime capabilities of instant messaging and the convenience of e-mail all into one single page which can be interacted by virtually limitless participants. It’s a real evolutionary step for communication and collaboration.

All that said, I think Google Wave is going to rely heavily on IT departments to increase awareness. For all we know, the final version of Google Wave could look quite a bit different than what i’ve shown here.

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Here’s a quick checklist of what to remember when purchasing computer parts:

- How many watts does your power supply (PSU) need to have as a minimum? Use a Power Supply Calculator.

- When choosing a case, make sure it isn’t too small for your configuration. For example, if you’re building a system with 2x GTX285’s in SLI and five hard drives, you might want to avoid a mid-size tower and go for a full otherwise you’ll be really cramped in there with hardly any room to work and risk the likely possibility of overheating your system.

- Your motherboard — AMD or Intel based?

- Before purchasing the motherboard, check to make sure it has enough SATA ports, USB motherboard headers, and see if it supports onboard RAID and any other features you might need.

- Your CPU must match the socket type of the motherboard.

- Speaking of CPUs, make sure you have a heatsink of some sort.

- Your memory (RAM) speed and type must be supported by the mother board. If you plan to overclock, make sure the motherboard can handle it.

- Use NewEgg so you don’t get ripped off.

Building a computer isn’t necessarily difficult, but it does involve a lot of things to remember and there is really nobody to blame if something goes wrong because it’s up to you to determine what component failed and to replace it. Also, Always wear electrostatic protection when touching electronic components or at the very least ground yourself by touching some exposed metal such as the power supply.

Now, let’s get started. First, let’s have a look at your case. When you get your case, it should come with a box including a variety of screws, proprietary connectors and sliders (if applicable), and most importantly, motherboard mounts.

(Brand new computer case.)

The motherboard mounts are incredibly important and a real pain to fix if you mess them up, so pay attention and don’t mess this up. Open the side panel of the case and lay the motherboard down so you can see all of the holes. Unwrap your motherboard and look closely where the screw holes are (or review the manual if you’d prefer). You’ll see there are usually between 6 and 8 screw holes.

(A plethora of screw holes for motherboard mounts await you.)

There are essentially two different types of motherboard mounts, metal (brass coating) and plastic. I strongly suggest the metal ones and to avoid cases that come with the plastic ones. This is mostly personal preference, I believe that the plastic ones just won’t hold up.

Once you have screwed in your motherboard mounts into your case, it should look something like this:

(Motherboard mounts screwed in successfully.)

I also suggest that you tighten them with pliers just enough to ensure that they won’t loosen up after a number of years. Remember that even the slightest motherboard grounding issue can cause a tremendous amount of unexplainable and likely intermittent problems in the future. Grounding issues can cause the computer to seemingly randomly shut off, have video card malfunctions, BSODs (bluescreen “stop” errors) and the like, so this is a critical time to double and triple check your work. Make sure nothing is loose!

(Note that your motherboard manual should show you the location for all screw holes. Use this as your guide.)

(I/O panel shield successfully installed.)

Install the I/O panel shield that comes with the motherboard. If your case came with one, do not use it if the motherboard already comes with one.

Look carefully over the motherboard to ensure that you’ve screwed in every screw tight, but not too tight as to strip the screws.

(An AMD processor in a box.)

This particular processor came with a stock heatsink. You may want to use your own custom heatsink if you plan to overclock or just to reduce temperatures further. Do not touch the processor on the top or bottom. Your fingers contain oils which will disrupt the integrity of the thermal grease necessary to dissipate heat. If you are adding your own heatsink you will need to apply thermal paste; since this system I assembled here already came with a stock heatsink, the thermal grease is pre-applied to the heatsink.

(Installing the AMD CPU.)

Different CPUs have different ways of being installed. These AMD CPUs have a “gold triangle” corner which you line up to the CPU socket which makes it easy to identify which way to line up the CPU. Be sure to read the manual for your CPU prior to installation and do not drop the CPU!

(Thermal grease on the underside of the stock heatsink.)

Install the heatsink carefully. Don’t let it slide around. It’s best if you can avoid lifting up the heatsink after initially placing it. Lifting it up causes the possibility of “bubbles” in the thermal paste which can also adversely affect the performance of the heat dissipation. So, to avoid this risk, read the manual on your heatsink and understand it prior to placing it on the CPU. Don’t rush it, it will only take a minute.

(Plug in your CPU fan. What good is a CPU fan without power?)

Most motherboards have a preferred order they want the RAM (Random Access Memory) sticks installed. Check the motherboard manual to see where to place your RAM sticks. Obviously, if you have four sticks then it doesn’t matter. But in this case, I had a 1×2GB stick and had to be sure to place it in the correct slot.

Every computer case comes with front panel I/O headers. These little wires plug into your motherboard (usually the lower right corner) and tell the computer which button is responsible for turning it on/off, reset as well as which lights are to be used for flashing the HDD activity LED and power LED. In addition, there is usually a connector for the “PC speaker” which will give a single POST (Power On Self Test) beep if the system is OK when starting, or Morse-code style beeps if something is wrong, such as a video card failure. For that reason, I recommend making sure that your motherboard actually has a PC speaker built in, or if not, be sure to plug one in and stick it on the corner of the case somewhere, away from your hard drives.

The front panel I/O headers are one of the most aggravating aspects of assembling a computer for me. They require you to look at the tiny print that tells you which pins are for which function and it is never really clear which wire is the “ground.” The white wire is ground, and the colored wire is the positive connector. Start by plugging in the bottom row first, then do the top row to avoid having to look under your previous wire. It’s much easier. Moreover, leave yourself room and work carefully around these I/O headers after you’ve plugged them in because it’s easy to hit a snag and unplug all of them by mistake and it’s a real pain to start over.

(Antec brand power supply (PSU) installed.)

Install the power supply. Different cases have different mounts for power supplies but no matter where it’s supposed to go there’s always a slot in the rear of the case that will accomodate the back end of the PSU. There are two cables that are generally the most important; the first being the CPU power (12v cable, 2 black and 2 yellow) and the second is the main motherboard power cable (big thick connector) which must be plugged in or else the computer won’t start at all — so don’t forget ‘em.

(CPU power cable, this goes directly into the motherboard.)

(Main motherboard/system power connector. This, like most connectors, only fits in one way so it’s fool proof.)

(Most peripherals these days are SATA, but most motherboards these days still have at least one IDE port.)

So, now you can begin plugging in your CD/DVD/BR drive. Then your HDDs which will likely be SATA. Note the fragile front I/O cables below.

(A common OEM hard drive.)

OEM hard drives are swell. They usually cost a bit less than a retail boxed drive and are perfectly fine. Sometimes, however, they don’t come with any screws so it would be wise for you to always have extra standard octagonal screws for just such an occasion.

Most computer cases these days are “tool-less” and require you to screw in little sliding thingies to make it easy to swap hard drives and CD/DVD/BR drives. Call me oldschool, but I still prefer using just regular screws. Anyway, the slider thingies come with your case and look like this:

(Hard drive tool-less slider thingy.)

(Hard drive installed and plugged in.)

These days, molex connectors on hard drives have been replaced with SATA power, which should come with your power supply. If not, use an adaptor… or get a different PSU. Another note, be sure not to plug your drive into the wrong SATA bank. Some motherboards have SATA sockets reserved for RAID — plugging them into the wrong SATA bank may prevent the OS or BIOS from detecting the drive properly.

(Final touches. Install the case stands.)

Install any case stands that may have come with your case. For my systems, cold cathodes are a must — so I always install them:

(Cold cathodes installed.)

You’ll note that this particular system doesn’t have a separate video card. That’s because it is primarily for office use — no games. So, a video card would be overkill for such a system. It runs Vista Ultimate x64 and it’s lightning quick for just about everything; but no, I haven’t tried to run Crysis on it if that’s what you’re thinking. =)

(Clear side window put on. System complete.)

Now for the final-final touches. For all of my systems, I perform a battery of tests — the first being a full level-4 SpinRite 6 hard drive scan to ensure that every last bit on the drive is performing as it should. The second is a full memory test using the Windows memory diagnostic tester (comes with Windows Vista (F8), or can be downloaded for free.) When you run the Windows Memory test, make sure that you run the extended tests. Also, go into the BIOS and set the computer to boot from the CD drive first. This makes things like running tests from SpinRite and the Windows disc easier in the future. It just makes more sense for the computer to check the CD drive first before trying to boot from the OS.

Get into the BIOS by hitting usually either F2 or DEL right away. Hit up the forum with any questions or e-mail me if you need any help.

Over the years I have found it is pretty rare to find memory defects, but when they do exist, your system can become incredibly erratic. Having faulty RAM can cause your system to give you BSODs, lock up inexplicably with no warnings or error prompts, restart endlessly in a loop, not boot at all and can even cause a loss of data if you are able to run the system and a piece of software is attempting to access the faulty area(s) of RAM. I am not necessarily suggesting you purchase ECC (Error-Correcting Code) RAM, but I am suggesting that you take the time to test your RAM at least once — and test it the right way.

What’s the right way to test your RAM? I suggest using Microsoft’s own “Windows Memory Diagnostic” [vghz perma-link, ISO] utility. Once you have made your boot disc or floppy disk and the memory test has begun, you must tell Windows Memory Diagnostic to run extended tests by pressing the T key. Yes, it will take longer, but it’s time well spent. Let it run at least 10 passes, if there are no failures or errors, then you know it’s good to go.

Several years ago, I was having a very difficult time with a system. It was running WindowsME and was a catastrophe. I formatted it and installed WindowsXP and it ran for a brief period of time, after three or four reboots, however, it was back to inconsistently crashing for no evident reason. I suspected the power supply, the motherboard, and then finally performed an extended memory test. Here were the results of that memory test:

(121 errors detected. Notice how these errors are part of the extended tests only? The basic tests would have said the RAM is just fine!)

You can use this tool to weed out a bad memory stick. Just because it flags errors doesn’t mean that every memory stick is bad. Take out all the RAM and put in one stick at a time and test and re-test until you determine which sticks are bad.

Finally, when you determine a stick is bad, get rid of it; I don’t happen to know of any way to fix a bad memory module. If you do, comment below.

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This time around, I decided I’d go with Runtime Software’s GetDataBack (NTFS) because I have had such dismal results with other recovery suites such as Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery and a few others that I probably shouldn’t mention. After futzing around with trying to set up a remote connection using GetDataBack’s HDHost, I realized it wouldn’t work since I couldn’t even boot into even the most basic of Windows, nor would I want to, since it could conceivably corrupt the data on the disc even further. So I did it the old fashioned way, as I mentioned in my post entitled, How to Recover Data From Old Laptops, I took the drive out using my toolkit and plugged it directly into my spare laptop.

(As I mentioned in the past, most laptops have their own proprietary connectors, but once you remove it, it’s either SATA or IDE — not such a big mystery.)

(Laptop HDD plugged into spare laptop, note the SATA connector and Molex-to-SATA adapter as well as the clear-cover external HDD on the left)

Plugging a laptop HDD directly into a computer running Windows Vista is a mistake if you intend to perform sensitive data recovery such as forensic data recovery — you must have a write-block in place to prevent the possibility of writing data back to the drive or altering its contents in any way. For my purposes, I wasn’t too worried about it.

With my mobile recovery rig in place, I set the parameters to recover all it could find — I cannot tell you what settings to choose here because your needs depend on what you are trying to recover and what level of file damage your drive has sustained.

(GetDataBack searching for file systems)

(GetDataBack indicating a found file system; note the “show recommended” option at the lower left)

(After GetDataBack found the partition, it began loading the data into a easily navigatable GUI tree view)

(The data recovery process for a 200GB+ drive is lengthy)

This was a 200GB+ drive which was recovered completely by GetDataBack. Although it took quite some time (over two hours for just the initial scan, and another three to four hours for the recovery portion), GetDataBack performed very well. At all times it was stable, reliable and surprisingly informative.

I checked the reliability and completeness of the scan. Sure enough, every single file that had been lost was recovered in its entirety. My experience with GetDataBack has been nothing short of positive and I will continue to recommend it.

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My hard disk activity LED is going crazy, the actuator arm is thrashing back and forth crunching away for hours at a time. What is my computer doing? How can I find out what exact data is being retrieved and what program(s) are responsible? We need to identify just what, exactly, is running. For this purpose, look no further than Microsoft Sysinternals’ Process Monitor (procmon).

ProcMon is capable of quite a few things, but its key feature is identifying and listing in detail what each process is doing — in realtime.

To stop/start the auto-scroll feature, hit CTRL + A. You may need to do this frequently because your computer is doing a lot and very quickly, probably a lot faster than you can read.

With this software autoscrolling, you can see the individual processes that are racking your hard drive or occupying CPU threads.

It’s important to not only take note of what processes are running, but to identify if they are actually necessary or not. For example. qttask.exe starts every time you boot windows, but according to various process tracking websites, it is hardly necessary.

Using the Windows Defender Software Explorer feature, you can — and should — terminate this task from ever starting in the first place. To track and control startup processes, I also recommend Sysinternals’ Autoruns program, which essentially does the most comprehensive root-canal of your Windows startup programs ever. As I understand it, Windows 7 no longer contains the Software Explorer feature of Windows Defender, I am unclear as to why they would remove this useful feature, but you should use Autoruns in its place.

Of course, identifying what is loading and occupying RAM is only going to get you so far — if, for example, you are running an old Pentium 4 with 512MB of RAM and are attempting to run Vista Ultimate with Firefox, Flash, anti-virus, and rendering an HD scene with 3d studio max — you can forget it. No amount of optimizing is going to help you.

I’m talking about bare-bones Internet and office work, this is where computers have really outpaced themselves. It’s very possible to run a Pentium III with a stripped down version of XP (and a lot of unnecessary services stopped), at blistering speeds for an average Internet user. These are the kinds of folks who do not need upgrading, but rather an optimized computer. Think of it as a 30,000 mile service — for your PC.

(Sysinternals’ Process Monitor showing everything on my PC in realtime.)

Here, I can track down anything that is unnecessarily sucking away at my PC’s performance and do something about it.

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