The Cost of Ink

Computer Care: Don't let printers soak you for high cost of ink

By Arthur Glazer
arthur@glazerthepctech.com

POSTED March 6, 2010 1 a.m.

Not all printers are created equal. Nor are the inks they use. The main thing to consider when you buy a printer is what the cost would be for replacement cartridges. And not all of them are the same.

I recommend buying a printer with more than a black and a tri-color cartridge. With them, if you run out of yellow, the whole cartridge is trash. My Epson Photo Stylus has six cartridges, each at a (retail) cost of about $15. When yellow runs out, that's what I replace.

I also have a Lexmark wireless All-in One that I failed to research properly prior to buying it. I now know that when the color runs out, it will not print at all, not even in black. It's a good question to ask at the store.

Some printers cost less than $50. They come with a starter cartridge that is usually less than half full. But to get a refill for it could cost the same as the printer itself. It's like the razors at the drug store. They give you the handle and a blade and then charge $20 for four more blades.

Most of us use either ink jet or laser printers; some businesses still use dot matrix. There are photo printers, wide formats, all-in-ones and wireless. You can now purchase a printer, scanner, fax, copier combo with wireless for just more than $100. Again, the replacement ink is where they get you. But don't be intimidated by the manufacturers telling you that you need to use costly OEM (original equipment manufacture) ink only. You don't.

There are after-market cartridges that are fine. You can also use kits to refill them yourself. A $20 kit from the supermarket will fill 10 cartridges. Considering most ink jet replacements cost $20-$30, that's quite a savings.

The stores that sell the new expensive OEM products also offer alternatives. Office Depot for example, will give you a $3 credit per used cartridge that you bring in and then offer a 10 percent discount on new purchases. You can bring in five per day.

Walgreens will refill your cartridge for $12.99 and Cartridge World will sell you a pre-used refilled cartridge, refill yours or provide an OEM for you.

Another alternative is bulk ink systems. Instead of have three to six cartridges with 20 ML of ink each, you could have tubes running to bottles adjacent to your printer, each holding 60 ML (or more). You can get more than three times the ink for less than a quarter of the price. Again, that's a good savings.

There are a few more things you should know about ink and cartridges. When your printer tells you that you need ink, you don't. Not yet, anyway. I can use mine for two weeks after I get the initial warning. I keep using it until the printout has white spaces in it.

Remember, HP, Canon, Lexmark, Kodak and Epson make money from ink, not from printers. So don't be a hurry to toss a cartridge that may be 20 percent full. But if you let it run completely dry, you could damage the printer. Monitor the ink levels carefully.

When you do replace a cartridge, do it soon after it is used up. The residual ink will dry on both the print head and the cartridge if you don't swap them out as soon as they are empty. They can be cleaned and some kits will even provide a solvent to use for just that. But it's extra work that can be avoided.

Most cartridges can be refilled at least three or four times, often times even more than that. There are certain types that can't be refilled at all.

The Internet is another place to find deals on ink. A good online resource is inkguides.com, an independent site full of useful information about ink for your printer. It will direct you to sites like 123refills.net, 4inkjets.com, inkcartridges.com and others. Some even offer free shipping along with heavy discounts.

A great piece of related software is Ink Saver from inksaver.com. It is better than using draft mode for reducing ink costs. For each document you are about to print, you'll get a pop-up with a slider, asking what percent of ink you want to save on that document. The last I saw, it was about $30, with a trial available.

The manufacturers all make $49 printers as well as $849 models. Some may use ink that is better for photos or that is quicker drying. Some may include bells and whistles that others don't have. Some have a fax incorporated in it, while others are wireless.

Just like Internet Explorer and Firefox, both get you to the Internet; all printers will get the job done. Some may do it better or cheaper than others. Some last longer or have more gadgets.

The bottom line is, get what you need and what you can afford. But don't be bullied into buying expensive ink.

Arthur Glazer is a freelance writer and computer technician in Gainesville. His column appears biweekly. Arthur welcomes your computer questions and ideas for future columns.

Storage in the Cloud

Computer Care: Cloud storage an easy way to back up your data

By Arthur Glazer
arthur@glazerthepctech.com

POSTED Feb. 20, 2010 1 a.m.

Hard drives fail. It's not a question of if, but rather when. I've had them last eight years; one failed in less than eight months. If you place value on your data, you should find a secondary storage device for it.

Everybody has photos, spreadsheets, documents and other forms of digital matter that they would prefer not to lose. I back up my images to DVDs, my programs to an external hard drives and ghost my operating systems. There are various ways to back things up using different types of media.

Programs exist that will help, from Acronis True Image to Norton Ghost. Even within the programs you have choices. Do you want to make copies of your documents or only your system files? Would you prefer to clone your entire hard drive?

After you make these decisions, you need to have a place to keep them. For obvious reasons, you don't want your backup on the same drive as the source.

There are optical discs such as CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray. Then there are secondary internal hard drives. Most desktops have sufficient room for at least one additional drive, sometimes more. These would show up under My Computer (or Computer) next to the "C" drive, as the "D" drive, moving your CD drive down one, to perhaps the "E" drive.

Next are the external devices, whether portable or not. These include the small keychain-sized thumb drives to the pocket flash drives and the desk drives.

The price of these devices has dropped incredibly in the past year or so. You can get a 500 GB drive for just over $100 now. That's a lot of pictures of the grandkids. Why stop there? Terabyte drives are now all the rage. That is 1,000 gigabytes.

The next wave of storage (and computing) though, is not in your pocket or on your desk. It's on the Internet and is called cloud storage (and cloud computing). This comes from the cloud image that represents the Internet on flow charts.

You may have seen ads for Internet-based products like Mozi or Carbonite in magazines or on TV. This is the new wave. Most offer a gigabyte or two of free storage space in their cloud. For additional fees you can get more storage.

I have a free Mozi account and for less than $5 they offer unlimited storage. Both Mozi and Carbonite offer pricing for home and business accounts.

There are some advantages to cloud storage. You don't have to purchase and maintain a physical device, so there is nothing to wear down, break or lose. It is generally less expensive; it grows with your needs; it is more efficient and more secure than the way you are storing your data now.

Just as with the Acronis or Norton products, the off-site storage arena offers scheduled uploads to their clouds. All data is also encrypted so nobody can see what you are storing.

What I like is the fact that you are not tethered to a box and a cable. Wherever you are, you have access, 24/7 to you data. All you need is a computer and your password.

In a case as this, I suggest a strong password. This is a prime example why you shouldn't use the same term for all of your accounts. If someone hacks your e-mail account, then now they can enter your storage area as well. Choose an eight-character, alpha-numeric password, not your dog's name.

But just as with any product or service, caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware. Research the cloud service that you are about to send your valuable information up to. I would stick with one of the better known, big guys. Should you go for say, Carl's Cloud, it may turn out to be Carl's Con and you‘ve lost everything.

You might inquire if they have redundant servers. Do they have more than one copy of your data, should disaster strike them?

Remember, hard drives fail. It's a fact of computing. Generally, they last anywhere from three to five years. Even new ones can stop working. Sure, you'll get a replacement, but your data will still be gone.

I extract data from crashed drives on a regular basis. Often, though, it's not possible. Some drives are too far gone to get anything out of them. I can tell by the look on clients' faces that they have no other copies of what is on the drive.

Backing up data is not difficult, time-consuming, nor does it have to be expensive. Simply choose a method and a device and as they say, just do it!

Next time you decide to back up your data, consider the cloud. The sky is the limit.

Arthur Glazer is a freelance writer and computer technician in Gainesville. His column appears biweekly. Arthur welcomes your computer questions and ideas for future columns.

Internet Wars

Computer Care: The right ISP, browser can make Web surfing faster

By Arthur Glazer
arthur@glazerthepctech.com

POSTED Feb. 6, 2010 4:16 p.m.

How do you connect to the Internet? You use a browser connected to an Internet service provider, your ISP. In Gainesville, that usually means most of you use either Internet Explorer or Firefox browsers with AT&T’s DSL (digital subscriber line) or Charter’s cable, both considered to be broadband connections.

If you still have a dial-up connection, stop reading now and call one of those ISPs to upgrade. It’s the second decade of the 21st century. There is no reason to be on a slow dial-up connection anymore. Your browser should show images instantly, not load them line by line.

So which is faster, DSL or cable? It’s like the current cell phone ads. They each claim to be the best.
Actually cable is faster than DSL, but there is a caveat. There is a bottleneck with cable; the more users online in your neighborhood, the slower the connection. DSL, on the other hand connects at a slower, albeit constant speed. If you check your e-mail just before dinner, DSL will probably be faster. But wait until after midnight when there are fewer folks online and cable should prove to be faster.

They are both fast, fast enough and way faster than dial-up, including optimized dial-up.

No matter which service you subscribe to, your modem will fail to forward a signal every now and then. When that happens, it is time to reset the modem. This may occur in bad weather or when local construction or maintenance crews are in your neighborhood causing service to become intermittent.

To reset your modem (cable or DSL), just unplug the power cord from the back of the box for about half a minute. Plug it back in and refresh your browser. You should be good to go.

If you have a wireless router, unplug it for 30 seconds as well. After the time is up, first plug in the modem and wait for the lights to settle down, about 15 seconds. Then plug the router back in. When its lights settle down, refresh your browser and try to get online again.

You could of course, call your ISP’s tech support and wait on hold for 40 minutes only to eventually get an agent. They will tell you what I just did. Why the ISPs don’t make this fix general knowledge, I’ll never know.
Unplug the modem and router if you have one. Wait 30 seconds on each before plugging them back in, and then refresh your browser. It is that simple.

Speaking of browsers, I prefer Mozilla’s Firefox to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. It is faster, more secure and highly customizable. It has a Google search bar built in and it is even customizable. There is a plethora of add-ons and themes for Firefox, all free to download. It will even save your passwords if you want it to.

For those of you who just use vanilla-flavored browsers, add-ons allow you to customize page appearance, your connection speed, the tabs, your bookmarks, not just making things look pretty but making practical improvements while enhancing your browsing experience.

Internet Explorer just recently jumped on the tabbed bandwagon with its new versions. Other browsers like, Opera, Safari and Google’s newcomer, Chrome, are also good options. The latter claims ease of use and efficiency with movable tabs. So if you’re stuck with Explorer just because it came with Windows, take one of the others for a test drive. You may be pleasantly surprised.

The Google search bar is not just for searches. You can convert times, weights, currency, languages and more. If you want to look up a word, simply type in the box “define: your word” and hit Enter. It is very useful.

However wonderful a search engine Google is, Dogpile is better for research. It combines the resources of Google, Yahoo, Ask and Bing, offering a thoroughly comprehensive response to your query.

Whichever service you use to search the Internet, you can fine tune it by using a Boolean search. Click on the advanced link to find it. With a Boolean search, you can add search terms like “and,” “or” and “not.” This drastically cuts down superfluous page hits.

If you’re looking at Greece for example, to search for an upcoming vacation, by adding Boolean terms it can save you from scrolling through dozens of useless hits. Use “Greece not history” or “Greece and tourism” to save time.

For now there is only one Internet. Eventually, the folks who made it will make another and keep it to themselves, leaving the likes of us out of it. They built the information superhighway and are now working on the HOV lane with restricted access.

Could you blame them? They are trying to communicate about particle theories and avoiding cosmic collisions. We clutter it up with You Tube videos and spam.

So whichever search engine, browser or ISP you use, it’s all good. It will all get you there. It will also be a lot faster than it was a few short years ago in the last millennium.

Arthur Glazer is a freelance writer and computer technician in Gainesville. His column appears biweekly. Arthur welcomes your computer questions and ideas for future columns.

Speed Up Your PC

Computer Care: Steps to help clean out and speed up PCs

By Arthur Glazer
arthur@glazerthepctech.com

POSTED Jan. 26, 2010 12:24 p.m.

So you bought your spouse a new computer last month and now you realize just how slow yours really is. Or maybe you already knew it wasn’t as fast as it used to be. Even that brand new laptop may be bogged down with unnecessary enhancements. We’ve gone over some of this before, but talking about making your computer faster is worth repeating.

To make some basic adjustments, you don’t need a technician. With a few mouse clicks, your system could be more responsive. There are some trade-offs though. You may have to do without a menu fade or a transparent window. It sure is cool to see your folders spin by on your desktop like a Rolodex, but you sacrifice speed to do it.

What Microsoft calls visual enhancements, I call smoke and mirrors. All it really does in the end is leave you with less system resources to do what you need to do: compute.

Let’s start with XP. Go to My Computer and right-click on it. Go to Properties and choose the Advanced tab and then Settings. Choose Best Performance from there. Then add checks in the boxes with shadow options, leaving the rest unchecked. It just makes it easier to see the pointer and icons with shadows.

Click Apply and then OK. While you are there, look at the General tab to see how much system memory you have installed. About midway you’ll see something like 512 MB or 2 GB RAM. Make a note of it and go back to the Advanced tab where you can adjust the virtual memory.

Click on Change in the center of the box and set both values to 1.5 times what your RAM is, that figure you just wrote down. Click on Set, Apply, OK and close that box. It will then tell you that you need to reboot for it to take effect.

In Vista, right-click the desktop and choose Personalize and then go to Appearance, then Effects. Keep only the shadow option checked.

In Windows 7, right-click on Computer, go to Properties and then Advanced system settings, then first settings option.

A huge resource hog is the Sidebar. If you don’t really need it, you’ll reclaim much lost speed by turning it off. In Vista, click Start and type sidebar and then click on sidebar properties. Uncheck the top box to disable it.

In Windows 7, gadgets are independent of a sidebar. To customize or terminate gadgets, right-click on the desktop and then choose Gadgets.

Some techs don’t believe in defragmenting the hard drive anymore or using registry utilities. The arguments are that with the huge size of today’s drives, it just isn’t necessary to defrag like we used to.

I would agree if you have a 500 GB drive that is only 10 percent full. But there are still 60 GB drives out there and users with huge music and photo collections. They fill up a drive quickly. A hard drive likes contiguous free disk space to operate efficiently and that’s what defragging does. So unless you’ve got scads of empty space, I’d keep doing it.

Speaking of full hard drives; your system won’t run properly if your drive is almost full. Windows needs 15 percent of the disk to create virtual memory or a swap file in order to operate efficiently.

As far as the registry goes, it is indeed a dangerous place to go if you don’t know what you’re doing. In a few clicks of the mouse you can turn a new computer into a doorstop.

But if you use a registry utility cautiously, you can delete unneeded values and reduce the overall size of the registry by defragging it. But know what you are deleting as there is no undo button in the registry.

Consolidate your icons. If you have lots of addresses, docs or pdf icons all over your desktop, create folders for them. Right-click on the desktop, choose New, and then Folder. Name it and just drag the icons into it.

Remember to empty your Recycle Bin regularly and dump your temp files and system caches. There are many utilities that will do it for you.

A bloated system will also slow down to a crawl. If you have programs installed on it that you don’t use, get rid of them. Go to Control Panel and remove them from there.

The best way to speed up your system is to add more physical memory to it. It is inexpensive and (relatively) easy to do. If you’re not comfortable with popping the cover off and looking for your RAM modules, go to crucial.com or memory.com. Those sites will tell you how much memory you currently have, how much your computer can handle and what it would cost to upgrade. In many cases you could double your RAM for $50.

Even if you don’t add RAM, these few adjustments will add responsiveness to your computer. There are more tweaks as well as services to turn off, but like your computer, this column has reached capacity.

Arthur Glazer is a freelance writer and computer technician in Gainesville. His column appears biweekly and on gainesvilletimes.com. Arthur welcomes your computer questions and ideas for future columns.

A Technology Retrospective

Computer Care: High-technology use has exploded in the last decade

By Arthur Glazer
arthur@glazerthepctech.com

UPDATED Jan. 2, 2010 1 a.m.

The first 10 years of life goes by the slowest. Think about it. You’re a child and you go to school. Every day is pretty much the same as the last. The monotony seems to go on forever. Every decade thereafter though, seems to quicken the pace somewhat.

In contrast, this past decade flew by. It seems like we were just anticipating the new millennium and here we are looking at 2010. But look back on what technology has given us in the last decade.

The cell phone grew up, along with personal computers and Internet use. We put iPods in our pockets, Bluetooth to our ears and plasma in our televisions. We love them and can’t live without them. Although it seems we’ve had this technology forever, it hasn’t been very long at all.

Consider looking back even further for a moment. We have come a long way. Post-World War II, we still had black-and-white televisions with rabbit ears and dial telephones with cords. We listened to monaural records and loved them. There were no cell phones, microwaves or space shuttles. Blackberries grew wild and computers were giant things that the government used. We are advancing at an incredible rate.

At the turn of the previous century, we were still getting used to the ideas of automobiles and light bulbs. Look how far we have come in that relatively short period of time from Edison and Ford to Jobs and Gates.

In the past year alone, our computers got smaller, faster and cheaper. We got a new version of Windows, perhaps not totally new, but a whole lot better than Vista. Google gave us the Chrome browser as an alternative to Internet Explorer and Firefox. Cell phones matured and got smarter over the last 10 years. Mobile computing has grown to the point that there are now laws against driving while texting (DWT?)

Gmail and the iPhone both grew up and grew in popularity. Facebook took off like nothing before. As of November, it reached more than a quarter-billion users. Consider it has only been around since 2003. To put that in perspective, ponder the following: Radio was around for 38 years before it had a mere 50 million listeners. It took television 13 years to gain that much of an audience. The Internet took only four years, in the U.S. alone, to reach 50 million users.

Computer use is said to reach the 2 billion mark this coming year. It hit 1 billion worldwide in 2002. The iPod sold 20 million units late this year. Facebook surpassed 300 million users in seven short years. The personal computer itself did not initially see that kind of growth.

Not everyone uses Gmail or has an iPhone, but it seems like everyone does have a Facebook account and at least one computer. We do love our technology.

So what will it have in store for us in the future? Well in the next year anyway, there will be some advancements.

Intel and AMD say we will see more cores added to our computer processors next year. We currently have dual and some quad cores. USB 3.0 will be out this spring, supposedly. It will be lots faster than its predecessors. Although backward compatible, the new hardware will come with a new plug. Just what I need; more cables.

Windows 7 will probably have its initial service pack, SP1 in 2010. All the "suites" will have their 2010 versions. I foresee Tune-Up 2010, Comodo 2010, Kaspersky, McAfee and Norton 2010, but I’m just speculating. Office 2010 will be there for certain, as it is already out in beta now.

I imagine touch screens will make more of a presence this coming year. Mobile computing will continue to grow as the ubiquitous cell phone matures.

We will undoubtedly be taking more to the road in coming years. The mobile office is the new wave.

Faster Wi-Fi and Ethernet is just around the corner. More municipalities will offer free Wi-Fi. Currently you may only find it in a few cities or coffee shops. New York City has a handful of free hot spots with more on the way. So does Seattle, Los Angeles, Denver and Cincinnati.

Even locally, until recently places like Starbucks offered Wi-Fi at a fee. But now it is free there, as well as at Panera’s, Atlanta Bread Company, Cici’s Pizza and a few other places around Gainesville.

The new multi-core Star Trek-like products will supposedly enhance our home office and home lifestyles. Many things will be tied together or networked – and not just our computers, either.

Ten years ago we couldn’t imagine hanging our TVs on the wall or communicating like Capt. Kirk. Today it’s a reality. It appears that Scotty is indeed getting ready to beam us aboard.

I don’t know about you, but I look forward to knowing what future technology lies around the corner in the coming decade. I only hope this one goes by more slowly.

Mr. Scott — Energize!

Arthur Glazer is a freelance writer and computer technician in Gainesville. His column appears biweekly.

USB Gadgets for your PC

Computer Care: USB port options run the gamut

By Arthur Glazer
arthur@glazerthepctech.com

UPDATED Dec. 18, 2009 10:09 p.m.

I am a gadget freak. This should be no surprise to you since you know that I fix and write about computers. Some of the coolest gadgets for computers come in the form of USB-powered devices. So let’s depart today from the usual "how to fix your computer" and find some practical and unusual gadgets for it instead.

A quick primer: USB is Universal Serial Bus, a device-type and port on computers, invented in 1996. It's the flat, rectangular-shaped plug. We are currently at version 2.0, which is 40 times faster than its predecessor, version 1.1. The latest incarnation, USB 3.0, is already here, but we won’t see the devices for it for a few months. They will be faster yet.

When you hear USB, you probably think of flash drives, maybe a mouse, keyboard, webcam or laptop cooler pad. But there is more than that - much more. I have portable storage devices, laptop lamps, Bluetooth chargers and hubs in my collection, and that doesn’t even scratch the surface.

The pocket flash drives that started with a mere 16 megabytes, now store upward of 128 gigabytes (from Kingston). FYI: 1,024 MB = 1 GB. You can get an 8 GB stick now for $20.

Today’s USB flash drives not only store your data, but can encrypt it, password-protect it and tell you how much space you have left on the device. There are also those with biometric fingerprint scanners or facial recognition for real security. These are a far throw from the old vanilla 2 MB drives of the last decade.

If you’re using Vista or Windows 7, alternatively you can use today’s flash drives to boost your system’s memory instead of using it for storage. This is especially helpful if you don’t have much memory to begin with. Windows will ask you what you want to do with the device when you plug it in.

It’s worth noting that not all USB flash drives are the boring black plastic type they started out as years ago. You can now get them decorated with jewels, carved from hardwood or a chunk of steel. They can be for the keychain or pocket, neck or wrist or double as a pen. You can of course, still get black plastic.

Desktop USB units are able to store terabytes of data now. (A terabyte is 1,024 gigabytes.) But more common are the 300-500 GB desktop devices and the 100-300 GB portables.

If you want fancy, there are more than storage devices built for USB. On the practical side, you might consider getting someone a laptop lamp for late night computing or USB personal fan; a multiport hub (I’ve seen from 2 to 16 ports in all shapes and sizes), a keyboard vacuum, beverage warmer, mini-water cooler or mini-fridge as a gift this holiday season. How about a smoke-sucking ashtray or an aroma therapy dispenser? All are great gifts for the desk. There are also shavers and neck, leg and foot warmers. These all plug into a USB port.

Everyone needs a digital card reader. Most have multiple slots one will most certainly accommodate your cameras card. Some even read your phone’s SIM card.

For fun, you can get a mini-aquarium, a missile launcher, TV tuner, microscope or a lava lamp, all USB-powered. Did I mention lava lamps? How about a Mr. Spock USB Pez dispenser?

The nice thing about USB as compared to other type devices is that you can hot swap them. By that, I mean you can plug or unplug them at will. With other port types (video, PS2, serial), you need to power down the system to do that. If you plug in a PS2 mouse, for example (the small round plug), without turning your computer off first, it won’t work. With a USB mouse, it doesn’t matter if you do or not.

Speaking of mice, there are always wired and wireless USB mice (and keyboards) to consider. For the wireless, you plug one part into the USB port and it talks to the device, sans cord.

So where can you find these things? Mostly online, I would guess. Look on Web sites like thinkgeek.com, cyberguys.com, coolest-gadgets.com and usbgadgets.org. The last two, especially, have an extensive listing of unique and affordable USB gadgets. In the neighborhood, check out Frys, as they always have a good selection.

USB gadgets have come a long way from just being small storage devices and printers. Swiss Army knives now have an option of a USB flash drive folded into them. You can play your old vinyl LPs on a USB-powered turntable or slip on a pair of computer-heated slippers.

I not only look forward to the upcoming USB technology, but I’d like to see what they think of putting it in next.

Keep this information in mind while shopping this week. Have a happy computing season and to all a good byte.

Arthur Glazer is a freelance writer and computer technician in Gainesville. His column appears biweekly. Arthur welcomes your computer questions and ideas for future columns.

Computer Trash

Computer Care: Take out the trash on your computer

By Arthur Glazer
arthur@glazerthepctech.com

POSTED Dec. 5, 2009 1:30 a.m.

Everyone uses their computers with little regard as to maintenance. I’m not talking about running virus checkers or scanning for malware. That was another column and we’ve already covered it. What I’m referring to is the regular task of taking out the trash.

It involves more than just right-clicking on the recycle bin. There are hosts of other places where garbage accumulates in the computer. Utilities exist to assist in this task that you may or may not have, but it can be done manually as well.

Junks files to consider deleting on a regular basis include temporary Internet files, temporary system files, the history cache from your browsers, old e-mails and their attachments, downloaded programs, music, photos and videos.

Now I’m not calling your music or video collection junk, but once you have them, it’s best to move them off of your hard drive to a safer location. It will keep your drive clean and protect your files should the computer crash.

Copy your collection of files you don’t want to throw out to an external hard drive, flash drive or burn them to CDs or DVDs as size warrants.

The more clutter you have on your system, the slower it can be. It decreases overall performance and slows down boot time.

Personally, I am a sucker for downloading free programs. I like to try new things out and among other sites, subscribe to downloadoftheday.com. It’s a great site, and every once in a while, I find a program that I can use and need to keep. It’s the others I need to be careful with. Programs can accumulate and before you know it, the desktop is full of icons and suddenly it takes five minutes to boot again.

So I’ve learned (the hard way) it’s best to immediately delete what I download and find I won’t be using. I tend to forget about them otherwise. It’s easy to tell yourself you’ll delete them later or that you might use them one day. You won’t.

A good place to look for unused programs and their installers are on the desktop, in the Download folder and in Program Files, under the Windows or Users folder, depending on which version of Windows you have.

Remember to delete both the installer package you’ve downloaded as well as uninstalling the program itself.

Think of programs you may have downloaded like Adobe Reader, Firefox, an Internet Explorer upgrade or a Windows update. Each leaves an installer icon behind after its installation. Even if you keep the program, you don’t need that installer.

If you do want to get rid of the program, use the uninstaller that comes with windows or a third-party application that uninstalls programs. You should also check the program in doubt. Occasionally they uninstall themselves. Look in the Start menu for that option. Deleting the desktop icon only does just that.

A good, free tool is Decrapifier that you can find on the Internet. It will help you delete a plethora of unwanted applications from your system.

After you’ve deleted some, it’s a good idea to run a registry tool to tidy up any remnants left behind from the programs you just got rid of. Those tidbits of data can contribute to affecting the performance of your computer.

E-mails tend accumulate on everyone’s system. It’s not just the letters themselves, but as I mentioned earlier, the attachments that come with them. The video that you downloaded and thought was initially so amusing will most likely never be watched again. Get rid of it.

The photos your mom sent you of the dog are great, but don’t need to reside on the hard drive. Move them to another permanent location.

Your e-mail client (Outlook, Outlook Express, Mail) will archive your old e-mails for you. Even if you use Web mail (AOL, Yahoo, Gmail) there should also be a choice to be able to archive your old incoming.

Your browser has a setting to automatically dump its cache when you close it. It’s a setting worth changing.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth saying again: There are almost always programs in your start-up group that don’t need to be there. By getting rid of them, you won’t necessarily cut down on system clutter, but your computer will start faster.

From the start button, click Run, type msconfig and go to the startup tab. All of those items with check boxes start when Windows does. Uncheck what doesn’t need to start each time the computer boots up.

These programs are running in the background all of the time. So it’s not just a slower boot time, but a degraded overall system performance allowing all of those items to run.

After you uncheck the one you don’t want (keep the antivirus and anti-malware ones), click Apply, then OK and reboot. When it reboots you’ll see a message advising you a change was made, Just click OK and continue.

So if you remember to empty the trash at regular intervals and run a few utilities or do a little extra work, your system will thank you for it. It will be healthier and will run faster.

Arthur Glazer is a freelance writer and computer technician in Gainesville. His column appears biweekly.