Ted:

The following tips for better PC performance may be useful to EC members.
Please take a look. If you agree, please issue it to all EC members.

Sing Lin

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Clean Up and Re-Vitalize Your PC

Problem: Have you been experiencing the "aging" of your PC in the sense that
after one or more years of use, your PC seems to become slower and slower in
both start-up process and regular operation? Furthermore, your PC seems to
get frozen-up or lock-up more often lately. Have you been suffering such
"aging" problems of your PC? If so, read on about the cause and the
solution.

Cause of the Problems - After the PC is used for 1 or more years with
substantial interactions with the outside world, it accumulates many
non-essential software programs that all get started each time when the PC
starts. But we do not really need all these non-essential programs every
time we start our PCs. For example, when I downloaded and installed AOL
Version 8.0 into my PC, the AOL 8.0 program is so aggressive that it
registered at least 6 sub-programs to be started each time my PC starts.
However, my main e-mail system is Monmouth Internet e-mail system and I use
AOL e-mail system occasionally only as a backup. For this reason, I do not
need the 6 AOL sub-programs to be started each time when I start my PC.
These started non-essential programs use a lot of resources in the PC and
leave smaller amount of resources available for you to operate the program
that you really want; slow down the operations of the PC and may even cause
lock-up or freeze-up of the Microsoft Windows operation system when the
available resources become too low.

Solution - The solution is to prevent these non-essential programs from
getting started each time when the PC starts by turning off these
non-essential programs in the list of start-up programs in the PC. You can
achieve this goal to clean up and to re-vitalize your PC by using the
following two small programs, "Start Up Control Panel" and "StartUpMonitor"
which are available for free download at the following website:

http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml

The program "Start Up Control Panel" enables you to turn off (i.e.,
un-check) the non-essential programs on the list of start-up programs in
your PC.

Furthermore, as you use your PC, if any new program, coming into your PC
from outside, attempts to set itself up in the list of start-up programs in
your PC, the program StartUpMonitor will pop up a dialog box on the screen
to alert you and to ask you if you will grant permission for such attempt by
the new program. If you answer No, then the new program will be turned off
in the list of start-up programs in your PC.

These 2 programs developed by Michael Lin are available for free download
from the website listed above. They are zip files that you need to have
un-zip capability in your PC to un-zip and to install them in your PC. About
one million people worldwide have downloaded and have been using these two
programs to clean up their PCs.

In case if you need to use those non-essential program(s) occasionally, you
can always turn them on by: Clicking on the "Start" button on the lower left
corner of the screen, then clicking on "Program" which will give you the
entire list of all programs in your PC. Then you double click on the
particular program that you want to get it launched.

Sing Lin