Stop Clicking

A good deal of problems can arise from blindly clicking. Clicking hastily on or "offline" is not a wise thing to do but many people do it. Why I am not sure. Hopefully I can cure most of you of the habit by showing just a few examples of places, products and services that take advantage of these clicking jitters people seem to have.
First off I have to say that I had to disable my adblocking service & delete my host file in order to capture these images. I will tell you what I use later on but I must say that I rarely see ads online.
Downloading plugins & then some
This image I captured from adobe's flash plugin. The extra install changes from time to time but one thing I have noticed, especially with Internet Explorer, is that it takes a moment for the "also install" dialog to show up. So if you click the install now button to quickly you never even see the extra install. This extra install bit happens with several broswer plugins and for the most part is harmless it is also unnecessary. Usually consisting of toolbars and virus scanners.


Downloading Programs
Most of the programs installed on computers today
are downloading online first and then installed. There are a good deal of legitimate sites that host these files for legitimate companies. Download.com & Tucows.com are examples. However they both pay bills with advertising. Often times those ads use methods like the one above. Large DOWNLOAD NOW buttons knowing that you are there to do just that but not for what they are offering. Be patient and wait for your download to start and always read what you are downloading and how to do so. While these downloads are usually not viruses they usually useless and often annoying. You are usually taken to a different website once you click the banner but it often just displays another download button that starts the download. The programs while harmless are annoying and often want you to pay for services that others offer freely and better.
Free stuff
Free music, movies, apps and even porno. When it comes to this, especially the later, people are much more eager to click to get what they are looking for and free. Advertisers know this and so do those writing malicious programs. More often than not whatever you want for free may cost you if you are not paying attention. While there are decent places out there for such things there are always ads & apps that get by even the best of places.

Advertising & Websites The image to the right came from an ad from a legitimate website. I ran a search for AVG and these were the sponsored results. Only on of them lead to AVG's website the other two were companies I have never heard of before. One had fake AVG logos and wanted my credit card number. These sponsered results show up everywhere and despite the best efforts from companies to filter them out there are others still that work to put them in front of all others. In this case the ones that may seem legit may not be and like the others always look and read.


Applications

Once you have downloaded your program you still have to mindful of what you click. Run through the install to fast and you could miss all the extra adon's the program is installing. Usually companies get paid to add toolbars, change your start page, change your default search engine or add extra programs to the install. If you don't read through the install carefully you could end up with a browser that looks like this. I myself use Firefox with adblock plus and/or Chrome with adblock as well as editing my host file with the help of http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
Keep in mind the sites that you frequent often and enjoy using pay their bills with advertising often based on a pay per view ad deal not just pay per click. So try to remember to disable the software for your favorite sites, just be careful what you click.

Free up space on your hard drive

Recycle Bin
Reduce the size the recycle bin uses. It's capacity is based on hard drive size and seems rather unnecessary to use 10% of your drive.
To view or change the settings 1st right click on the icon and then select properties. After that you should see the properties window for the trash bin. As you can see most of you will be using a couple gigabytes or more which is unneeded if you lack the space. To change the settings for XP and older select "Configure drives independently" and then select the tab for your hard drive. If you have more than on partition or hard drive letter you will have a tab for each drive. Unfortunately XP & older will only let you select down to 1%. Vista and newer will allow you to enter any value you want. I usually select about 600-700mb which is about the size of a cd and still higher than you may need.

Browser Cache
Change the size of your browsers offline storage. IE settings used to be fairly high and often times can be set to 1gb or more. Useless for highspeed internet access. The settings for each browser differ but chrome, firefox and Safari usually set it to 50mb. For IE first go to the tools menu, then internet options and in the window that comes up select the settings tab under browser history. 1mb - 50mb is a decent amount.

System Restore
Change your settings for system restore. It too also uses a percentage of your hard drive. Most people never even use this feature though it can be handy if you install faulty drivers or software. You can get to the settings in the control panel under the system icon or performance and maintenance or by right clicking the "my computer" icon and selecting properties. For XP and under it will be under the tab for system restore. For vista and 7 you'll have to select "advance system settings" on the left side of the properties window. From the system restore/protection tab select the drive you want to configure and adjust the amount of hard drive space being used. I usually set it between 5-8gb but 1gb is suitable for most people. If you have more than one hard drive or partition it can be turned of for those drives as long as it is not being used to run programs. You have to restart for the settings to take effect.

Temp files.
Rather than go through every location they are kept use CCleaner to clean them up for you. You can download from http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner The install takes up less than 3mb and using the application I have seen it remove more than 1gb worth of temp files.
Another place to check for files you don't need that CCleaner does not check is your download folder. Most of the files in there should be files you have downloaded from the internet like the CCleaner install file if you downloaded it. Check to make sure you don't have various pictures or email attachments in there but if it is anything like mine with 500mb of install files they can all be deleted.

Applications
Removing any unused programs will free up space. Most desktops and laptops come preconfigured with lot's of software most of which is rather useless or, if you have had the machine for a few years, really outdated. Getting rid of a couple of programs you no longer need can free up quit a bit of space and speed up start time if some of those programs are set to run at startup.

Cloning
If you really lack hard drive space or are just looking to upgrade having your hard drive cloned to a larger new drive allows you to make an exact duplicate of the hard drive. You end up with a larger drive for storage and never lose a thing. The older drive can then serve as a permanent backup from that point, an extra drive if you have room in your machine or can be made into an external USB hard drive. The whole process can usually be done in a day. Visit me @ http://RadicalType.com/tech.html for more info or to schedule an appointment.