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Computer Tips

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These are for people with Windows XP as their operating system unless otherwise stated.

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This is for anyone with any email. Never, ever open an attachment unless you know who it is from and are expecting an attachment. So many viruses and worms get started by people clicking just to see what it is . . . Just say no, and be safe!

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To defragment your harddrive - From your Start Menu bottom at the bottom left corner, go to All Programs, Accessories, Systems Tools, Disk Defragmenter. A button on the left-hand side will read 'Analyze'. Do that, and a popup screen will tell you if you need to defragment or not. If it recommends that you defragment, do so when you have a couple hours if you haven't done this before. I try to do it weekly.

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Have you ever cleaned out your cache? If you haven't, you should know how to, as all that extra 'stuff' stored on your harddrive can make it run slower and uses up valuable memory space. This is an easy one, too. On your toolbar at the top of the page, on the right hand side, there is an icon that reads 'Tools'. It's a dropdown menu, scroll to the very last choice that says 'Internet Options'. Click on that and you'll get a new pop-up window. There is a list of tabs, go to 'General'. In the middle of that page, it says 'Browsing History'. This will bring up a list of things you can delete - Temporary Internet Files, cookies, history, form data and passwords. It's perfectly safe to delete all of these, but you don't want to delete 'form data' or 'passwords' if you have information stored that you might not have written down or remember. Otherwise, chose 'delete all' and the computer will clean out a lot of stored junk. It may take several minutes if you have never done this. I try to do it every other day, but at least once a week.

~Sheila Hoag, webmistress~

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