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Welcome
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 Welcome to another edition of Keep Your PC Healthy, Raxco's newsletter about PC health for the "everyday" computer user running Windows. We've designed this newsletter for those of you who aren't computer experts, but just use your PC for fun or to get your job done. As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions.
This week, we look at recapturing space from the Recycle Bin and removing traces to protect your privacy.
Thanks to everyone for reading and thanks for the great feedback.
Here's to your healthy PC! |
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| Recycle Bin - Out With The Old |
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 The Windows Recycle Bin can be a godsend. Maybe last night, when you had one eye on the big game or American Idol and the other on your computer, you deleted that letter you wanted to send to your staff because you thought it was no longer needed. But you woke up today kicking yourself because you realize you did need it after all. The Recycle Bin comes to the rescue and bails you out.
So, it's a safety net when deleting files or folders. Delete a file or folder, and it goes to the Recycle Bin. But since you can still recover those files and folders, they remain on your computer, taking up valuable hard disk space. When the bin fills up, Windows automatically cleans out space to make room for the most recently deleted files and folders. But, absent that, your bin is likely to just fill up and waste space.
If you are running low on drive space, or just want to keep your computer clear of things you no longer need, empty the Recycle Bin. You can also restrict the size of the Recycle Bin to limit the amount of space it takes up. If your drive is partitioned, or if you have more than one drive in your computer, Windows allocates one Recycle Bin for each partition or hard drive. And, you can specify a different size for each Recycle Bin.
To empty your recycle bin, follow these simple steps:
1. On your desktop, double-click Recycle Bin.
2. On the menu, click Empty Recycle Bin.
If you only want to remove some of the items in the Recycle Bin, rather than all items, hold down CTRL and then click each item you want to remove. When you have finished selecting the items that you want to remove, on the File menu, click Delete.
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| Reader's Forum |
From Peter F. : Hi, Thanks for your newsletter. Re "NEVER forget your anti-virus", while having used three of your recommendations over time may I respectfully suggest you could have included what I use, namely, NOD32. It's the best I have ever used, so much in fact that I purchased a second copy for my laptop as well.
Of course your software is not bad either!
Kind regards,
Peter F.
From both Peter B and Peter P. : Good Newsletter for my users; Great for a home user on a budget.
I found 2 free anti-virus programs I like: The free version of Grisoft's anti-virus programs, for personal use with Windows or Linux.
http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1
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| Mind My Own Business |
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Your PC or laptop tracks your activities, so you have a record of what you've been doing. This information is stored on your hard drive, and therefore is available to others who might be curious as to what you've been up to. And that's a privacy problem.
A bunch of stuff is out there:
- Websites you've visited
- Cookies - Cookies are small text files placed by websites on your browser to keep track of your online activity throughout a site. They can be useful (for example, making it easy to sign in when you visit a site) but also are a potential privacy problem, so you may want to delete some or all of them.
- Recent files you've used - Word documents, spreadsheets, pictures, etc. - they are all saved so someone can see what you have been accessing.
- Internet cache and temporary Internet files - Your browser saves any web sites/pages you've visited to your hard drive. It even saves the images on the page, even if you didn't click on that particular image. This saves you time the next time you visit that web site, so all that information doesn't have to be re-downloaded. But, if someone else uses your computer, they can see which sites you've been to.
Whichever web browser you use, it will have some limited privacy protection, but not as robust and easy to use as they might be. There are tools out there that can help in this area, and we'll get into that in a future issue.
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Volume 1 Issue 5