Number 214 - March 2001
Good Computer Housekeeping
by Joe Isaac, Central Kentucky Computer Society
    Is your computer behaving badly? You'll find some very useful things in System Tools. To get to System Tools, select Start > Programs > Accessories> System tools.

    Click on Resource Meter1 and it will put an icon on your Taskbar that will tell you when your resources (memory) are getting low. The icon looks like a graph with a green, yellow or red bars. For a readout, click on the Icon Green is good. Yellow is a warning that your resources are low and you may want to close some programs. Red means your resources are running dangerously low and you should save your data and reboot. Rebooting your system will bring your resources back to their maximum level.

    How to know when you run out of System Resources:

    1 You get a message such as "Out of memory," "Not enough memory to display completely" or "System Resources are running low," OR

    2 Your system begins to misbehave, opening blank or garbled Windows, not responding to keystrokes or mouse clicks, etc., OR

    3 Your system simply crashes and burns.

    In each case, your only remedy is a re-boot. Hope you saved your data recently!

    Use the Resource Meter if you're having problems or if you want to see how your resources are doing while you are opening a bunch of files. Don't forget: Resource Meter uses resources, too! When you're done checking, right click on the icon and exit.

    Why do you lose resources? Well, every time you open a program, Windows reserves resources. When you close the program, Windows does not give it all back.

    Scan Disk and Defrag are the most important of your system tools. If your computer is acting up, run Scan Disk2. (Disable the screen saver and your anti-virus program before running either of these tools. Every time the screen saver kicks in, it restarts Defrag. You'll never get through that way.)3

    The available tests are Standard, that checks files and folders for errors, and Thorough, that performs the Standard Test plus scans the disk surface for errors. The first time you Scan Disk, use Thorough. After that use Standard unless you think your hard drive surface has errors. Make sure the Automatically Fix Errors check box is selected.

    After Scan Disk, click on Disk Defragmenter3. Select Drive C, then click OK. For a pretty display, click on Details and select Legend (so you'll know
what's going on. [It also slows down the process a bit - ed]) This all takes about an hour depending on the size and fragmentation of your hard drive.

    As you add and delete programs and files, your hard drive becomes fragmented--your data gets scattered all over. You end up with data in different places, and empty spaces between that data. This makes it harder to read and slows down your computer. Defrag rearranges your data so there are no empty spaces.

    In Windows 98, Defrag goes a step further. Instead of just filling in the empty spaces, it actually puts like data together and places your most-used programs and data at the fastest access point on your hard drive. And that's why Win98 opens programs 29% faster than Win 95.


    TOGGLE Editor's Notes:
    If you've been paying attention, you've heard of these same steps to take before. Past TOGGLE articles, referenced below, can be accessed, not only in your hard copy of past issues, but also on-line at www.toggle.org.

    1 See also Jean Wilcox's article (from the St Petersburg, Florida group's SunCoast Beeper) Save Those Resources on page 3 of the July 2000 TOGGLE. You won't normally see yellow or red bars unless your resources are really low.

    2 If you can't get ScanDisk to run fully try going back to a bare bones system, i.e. run msconfig and temporarily disable programs that run on startup, as described in Carl Tenning's note in the July 2000 issue of TOGGLE. See footnote 3.

    3 Sometimes even though you think you have turned everything off, Defrag still doesn't work--restarting over and over again. If so, again look up Carl Tenning's note "If Your Disk Defragmenter Won't Work"about running msconfig, on page 2 of the July 2000 TOGGLE. It is also in the online version of that issue at www.toggle.org, of course. On occasion, we have even gone so far as to go into Windows' Safe Mode (press F8 while your computer is starting up), which is normally used for troubleshooting, and run defrag with absolutely nothing else running.

    After upgrading to Windows ME, the choices to disable Autoexec.bat and Config.sys as suggested for Windows 98 in Carl Tenning's article, were no longer offered. This seems to be consistent with the hint that Windows Me may wipe out your Autoexec.bat and Config.sys files.

    See what you can miss by not receiving even one issue of the newsletter? That July issue had some important stuff in it. Keep your subscription current or you may miss something you really need.
  Number 214 - March 2001