A Guide to Getting Your PC Up to Speed

Update critical software:

1-Visit www.bigfix.com on the net. Download the personal use version of the program and once you have it installed, start it up while you are connected to the net and it will bring up a web browser screen. Click on the "Subscribe" (House) icon at the top. When that page loads, scroll down and click on these two links:

>"Subscribe to the Fixlet Central site"

>"Subscribe to the Windows 98 (or whatever your OS is) site"

Once you've loaded those fixlet messages, click on the "All" (world) button at the top of the left column of Icons, then click the "Gather" (two hands shaking) Icon at the top and let that load, if at all. If you have software issues on your hard drive that the program detects that can be fixed, it will show you the link to click in the web browser screen. You may have a few things to download the 1st time you start it up and let it run to check. Just take your time and get them all when you can. Many will require you to restart your PC before you can download and install others. Just reboot and connect to the net and double click the "b" (for BigFix) icon and do that until you get them all.

2-Visit Windows Update at: http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com and make sure you have everything from there. Also, I'd recommend you get Windows Media Player 7.1, if you don't have it already. If you do, make sure you tell it to play all audio formats for your PC. WMP7.1 is the best music player, in my humble opinion...lol. And if you are running an old Internet Explorer (5.1 or less), I'd highly recommend getting IE5.5 or even consider getting the new IE6.0 now, even for Win98 users. It's been patched up a lot since it came out. Also, double check that you have the latest Microsoft directx8.1 at: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/default.asp

3-Visit this link for video problems incurred while in CNW: http://cybernetworlds.com/help/video_problems.html There's information on virtually every video card manufacturer in the world. A lot of great help and tweak information as well as newest driver download sites for them all. It's also important to get the very latest audio card drivers for visiting CNW. SoundBlaster comes out almost monthly now with new drivers for most of their cards.

4-That will take you a lot of downloading and reconfiguring so I'd say next, you should probably shut down your net connection and any virus scans and firewalls you may have running then empty out these folders in this order:

a-Temporary Internet Cache

b-Temp in Windows

c-Recycle Bin

d-Any misc protected files bin

Now run scan disk and defrag in Windows (or WinDoctor and Speed Disk in Norton Utilities). Once that is all done, shut down the PC for about 5 minutes then log back in again and visit: www.pcpitstop.com online. Read all of the links under the "Test My PC" heading in the far left column. There's a great PC diagnostic tester that will ask you to download a file (click Yes, it's OK) then tell it to test your PC. If you register (I used a fake name and a free email address I have), it will keep a record of your last score to see if the improvements it gives you to try at the end did any good when you go back to retest. Make sure that you watch it work because it asks you questions about your PC half-way through and don't move the mouse or type anything while it's working unless it asks you to.