You WASHED THE DISHES, MADE THE BED? Well, CLEAN THE DAMN PC!

Sluggish PC? You think it’s badly designed, dying, needs replacing. NAHHH. It’s just cluttered inside. Rotten cookies. I know you don’t eat cookies! But listen to this: Every day you are on line, you ‘collect’ without meaning to a lot of photos of different websites, -- cookies they call them. You want to erase them, every night before you leave. I find I’ve got 300 files a day to erase and I BARELY surf the web AT ALL!!! It’s amazing. This clogs up the PC and makes it slow moving. So you think your PC is no good. NO WAY JOSE.

Let’s do a file clean up. It’s easy.   Fastest WAY TO CLEAN a SURFING PC of TEMP files is to HIT "MY COMPUTER" icon on your desk top. SEE the C: drive sitting there? Little square thing? Right click on it. Then hit  "properties" then hit DISK CLEANUP and reassure the robot, hit OK. Straight to the toilet with what PC considers junk. I do it daily.

ANOTHER WAY: Turn off everything, ZONE ALARM and all your WINDOWS thingies and get offline. Disconnect your DSL. Now, do SCANDISK. How? See that START button at lower left? with a windows rainbow on it?. Click on it, and your WINDOWS MENU appears. PICK "RUN" Then write in scandisk or maybe it's already there. Scan the C drive. Let machine do that, takes a while. Half hour. Then when it signals it's done, come back hit START, hit RUN and do 'defrag'. You just write that word,click enter and let it defrag C drive. TUrn off machine, plug in the DSL and all, start it up again.

ANOTHER way to clean PC. Go to the TOP OF THE MENU and pick EXPLORER. At this point as you can no longer read my letter here, hit the minus to minimize it and come back to my letter. (The windows will slide into task bar at bottom of screen, don’t worry, minimizing won’t make it go away!) read my letter some more. Then hit the task bar windows that says EXPLORING.

Now, again, You’ll get a picture of all your directories. And by the way at this point you get a read out on how many mgs are left on that drive. At the bottom, a gray line runs across screen in it, it will say 70 megs left or something like that. READ it in MEGS. That’s millions of bytes. If you have less than 20 million you’re running sluggish.

On left side, a map of your C drive’s directory, look for THE NET which is your EMAIL and internet connection. That’s the thing that fills up the most daily. The other is the FAX sender which in my case is on D drive. But let’s do the NET FIRST.

You’re reading this long string of directories that is how your PC is stacked. OK, run down the column with cursor and Hit the PLUS OR MINUS so it opens up. Then it will tell you the contents, your COMMUNICATOR, your USER NAME, mine is astrology, whatever your USER name is... and you hit on the things to see what’s in them. SOMEWHERE you’ll see a string of thousands of files with m’s, like MA2844.gif or jpg/GRAPHICS, but thousands of them. You have to erase them. First, highlight one, then use SHIFT KEY AND THE ARROW KEY. DOWNWARD ARROW and or/ right arrow, you’ll see the HIGHLIGHT slide down like green jello and include all these files.

THEN HIT the delete key. BINGO. They go to your OBSOLETE file. Mine is called "RECYCLE BIN" and has a puff fish icon which I can view on my desk top. When the fish is thin, it’s empty. IT BLOWS UP fat when it’s full. This is literally your PC’s waste paper basket. Letters, email and files you erase from WORD go in there.

For me, as I have a shortcut to the Recycle Bin on my "desk top" that’s the pretty main page with all your icons on it... I usually GO IN THERE FROM that main page or desk top, and erase everything in it nightly. Or you do it from explorer.

ERASING FROM EXPLORER: Let’s go down the list of directories to where RECYCLE FOLDER is, click on it to highlight it so that the MENU of its contents is thrown up on right side of screen. HIGHLIGHT one, then SHIFT KEY AND DOWN ARROW, so green lime jello covers it all, and then hit delete key. Bye Bye clutter. It’s vaporized like space jello hitting an alien!

Wish Windows could clean my whole house this way! Spray and the clutter just disappears! Century 21, that’s what’ll exist. Spray vaporizer. Wish we could do it to our intestines and hips as easily. All cookies, even VIRTUAL cookies stay so damn stuck to the butt. But NOT TO THE ole BILL GATES SPECIAL. YASSIR. Let’s hear it for BILLY BOY! He’s mah man!

If I’m going to surf the net that day, I don’t erase the fat.db file. If you erase it, you can’t get back online. But if you want to delete it as it’s too enormous, you’ll erase it, THEN REBOOT to be able to surf after a reboot. A fat.db is well named. IT grows fat if you don’t erase it from time to time. But do it when you quit at night, and when you turn machine off, what you don’t see is that Elves inside rebuild the FAT.db so that next time you boot up, it’s there by magic.

Now, my D drive has FAX software on it. GETS FULL OF MY FAXES REAL FAST. Before I had to hand erase. FINALLY I realized that the FAX SOFTWARE had its own easy use menu but I was too much of a bozo to see it. No more going into THE FILE MANAGER to erase faxes in the FAX SOFTWARE. It can be done, but it's dangerous. Hit the liver or heart, the thing crumples up and DIES.

I hit the main directory and hit the minus or plus sign so it opens up. Then I go down to the collection of NEW FAXES. I TAG EACH ONE. The good thing about ZTREE which is my file manager, of preference is that I can just RUN DOWN them and tag ‘em all, and do CONTROL D for delete and whammy. Ask me for my file on ZTREE. When you erase on a fax software directory, Make sure you get the right directory. There’s a danger that you’ll erase your FAX software, the exe files so check the dates. It has to be the dates of the last faxes you sent. Obviously something dated l997 is probably the original programming. But the 2000 stuff that’s new has to go. That’s ONE way you can tell the difference. Another is to read your fax software manual but who does that?

NOW, there is one more file that is cleaned up by going into it. You must do that with EXPLORER or ZTREE. Your PC was given explorer at birth. ZTREE you have to download for free online. You want to erase your FIREWALL's logs. See, I  just learned something about ZONE ALARM and I've had it for two years. You have to erase its logs! THEY WILL STACK UP In the millions.
Jam the pc, slow it down bigtime.

I went into ZTREE, like explorer but better, you go into the labryinths beneath in DOS, saw
C:\WINDOWS\INTERNET_LOGS had an ungodly amt of temp files!

Took 'em all out and forty million bytes were restored to my C drive! Now, probably that can be done from the ZONE ALARM MAIN MENU only hey I downloaded it for free, no MANUAL, so I have to feel around its functions like a blindman but you might go investigate with explorer, or download ztree free for thirty days, greatest graphic interface of your pc guts you ever saw. DOS WORLD RULES! It's like the dwarf caverns underneath Tolkiens worlds. CITIES beneath. Full of clutter you want gone!

Again, THE EASY WAY TO CLEAN a SURFING PC of TEMP files is to HIT "MY COMPUTER" icon on your desk top. SEE the C: drive there? Little square thing? Right click on it. Then hit  "properties" then hit DISK CLEANUP and reassure the robot, hit OK. Straight to the toilet with what PC considers junk. I do it daily.

THE MAIN reason to erase all these things is clutter which makes a slow moving PC, because you LOSE space and that slows you down. Things move at a creaky pace. As it happens slowly, incrementally, you don't notice it, either. Just like old age does the same thing to your body.

But there’s a great second reason. Just imagine some night, Your sweetie boots up your 586 and  without thinking, they're going into the files, the trees and seeing all this clutter, and BOOM in a second, they’re checking your clutter? Letters you wrote back in the fifties?

That sounds rank to me. Like maybe they’re going thru every letter you ever wrote and seeing what you SAID about Them? Or, maybe it’s the other way around. Say he surfs at night. And next day, you can see every damn website he went to!!! YIKES!

Or imagine this scenario. You're an anti-war activist and one day the CIA confiscates your PC. Or you pad your expenses and imagine THE IRS confiscating your entire PC and checking your letters to your tenants at those ten houses you own in your Uncle's name??  There are all kinds of scenarios that suggest regular ERASING is a great idea!