AA 12-Step Rehabilitation Plan
What does the "AA" part stand for? "Adiposity Anonymous" - The Mirriam-Webster Dictionary defines "adiposity" as being fat or heavy, from the Latin adiposus and the French poids. It's time to admit that your PC is suffering from computer bloat - it has become fat and lazy! It's time now for your PC to confess that it has forsaken its former sleekness and leanness of its youth, and it has accumulated loads of big programs and files that you don't need and are holding it back from running efficiently. It's time to "cast off every weight and the sins that so easily beset it, and run the race!" So we've developed the following AA 12-Step Plan to rehabilitate your PC:
1. Acknowledge a Higher Power
2. Secure Your Data
3. Use PortableApps
4. Backup Your Files Locally
5. Backup Your Files Remotely
6. Increase Available RAM
7. Keep Your Programs Up-To-Date
8. Take Out The Garbage
9. Remove Old Checkpoints
10. Defragment Your Hard Disk(s)
11. Install Internet Security
12. Protect Against "Zero-Day" and "Drive-By" attacks
(Disclaimer: the author receives no financial or other material benefit from recommending the free programs he mentions on this page. They have been carefully selected over several years, and are listed here solely for your benefit. May God bless you!)
So you need to acknowledge that there must be a Higher Account that you don't use for your day-to-day work. If you haven't already done this, you need to go to Control Panel → User Accounts and check to be sure that the admin account is protected with a strong password using a mnemonic device, such as taking the first letters in a phrase and including a special character or a number or two, for example: "I graduated from University of Minnesota in 75!" that becomes "*IgfUoMi75!" (without the quotes, and don't use this one because hackers probably have visited this web page!). Next, if you're running Vista or Win-7, set up a new admin account with a new strong password, jot down these new passwords on a piece of paper, and only login to this new account when you really need to, change your old admin account to a "regular user" account for day-to-day work, and do not stop here - go to Step 2!
But if you're running XP it might get a little sticky because XP doesn't always change permissions on all your files and folders automatically: you may have to set up a new "limited" personal account in XP for your day-to-day work, also with a different strong password, and be sure to begin using your personal account after finishing Step 1. Jot down this new password on a piece of paper. Then if viruses or other malware try to invade while you're logged into your personal account, they can't penetrate into the Windows Operating System and Program Files. So let's do this right now!
If you had created lots of documents in the old XP admin account's "My Documents" folder, while still logged in as admin, move them to the All Users' "Shared Documents" folder. If you downloaded your email from the Web to your computer, your email folders are probably tucked away in some cryptic-named folder - you'll have to search for them - and move them to an All Users folder. Then logoff, login to your personal account and copy those documents from All Users to your personal "My Documents" account. You might also have to create icons on your new desktop to run your favorite programs. Login again as admin, and delete those files in the "Shared Documents" folder. If you need to use the admin password later for installing programs, in XP you can right-click on the setup- or install-program and then select "Run As" to use the admin name and password; or in Vista or Win 7, a UAC (User Access Control) window will pop up asking you to enter the admin password. The admin account has to exist so that you have an admin password for things like this, but don't login to that account unless absolutely necessary. Wait! Don't stop now, be sure you at least do Step 2 below...
So go to C:\Documents and Settings\[your login name]\ in XP, or C:\Users\[your login name]\ in Vista or Windows 7, and create a "PortableApps" folder there. Next, go to http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/keepass_portable, download and install Keepass Portable to the "PortableApps" folder you just created. Run the KeePass program and click on the blank-page icon (the first one on the left) to create a new master password using your regular user account password (this way, if you have to give your admin password to a computer service person, he can't access your password vault), designate the KeePass folder as the place to store your password vault file, then press Ctrl+Y to create new records in KeyPass where you enter your new admin and regular user passwords, save your new password vault file... and destroy that piece of paper! Passwords written on paper are a great gift to snoopy "friends", pickpockets and burglars. Another free password vault is Lastpass at https://lastpass.com/: it's a Web-based app, especially good for people who might not have their own PC and can't run programs like KeePass from a flash drive on a public PC due to the computer's security settings.
Along with a password vault, you need a secure place outside of your PC where you can store your other data files. Download SafeHouse Explorer from http://www.safehousesoftware.com/SafeHouseExplorer.aspx, install it, and copy the SafeHouseExplorer.exe and SafeHouseExplorer.chm files from their Program Files folder to a new flash drive. If you don't have a flash drive, plan on buying one with at least 4-Gigabyte capacity. Meanwhile you could use a DVD. Run SafeHouseExplorer and click on "New Volume" to create a password-protected encrypted volume 3.9Gb in size on your flash drive or DVD. (I suggest using your regular user account password again, but if you use a different password for this encrypted volume, enter it in your KeePass password vault.) You can use the SafeHouse Explorer file manager on any Windows PC such as at an Internet cafe to open files with your regular programs, or drag-and-drop files to and from the encrypted volume. You have the option, however, of installing some drivers on the computer (this requires entering an admin password), which will make the new drive letter visible to that computer. Then this encrypted volume will appear as a new drive letter, and is where you'll store the backups of your documents and portable programs (see Step 3).
3. Use PortableApps
I strongly recommend PortableApps - see our 29 Aug 2009 issue of CN.Net-News about the PortableApps and other programs that I recommend. This way, you can have your most important programs, settings, email messages, documents and your password vault at your fingertips, even if you're away from your computer, or if it breaks or gets stolen. You can use these programs and your documents on any Windows PC, and without knowing that computer's admin password. Go to http://portableapps.com/download, decide which basic PortableApps setup module you want, "Suite Light" or "Suite Standard", download and install it to the "PortableApps" folder that you created in Step 2. There are lots of other free PortableApps programs, such as Skype and the Google Chrome browser made portable - take a good look at their website!
Here's what to do: First, keep your documents, web browser and email files and settings, etc., in sync between your C: drive and flash drive by downloading the FreeFileSync program from http://sourceforge.net/projects/freefilesync/ that can copy new or changed files to another location. Install it in the "PortableApps" folder mentioned in Step 2. Now you need to start with an identical set of files on both drives. Go to the "[your login name]" folder in Step 2, and you'll see a new folder called simply "Documents" that the "PortableApps" setup program created: copy that folder, the new "PortableApps" folder and the "StartPortableApps.exe" program to the encrypted volume on your flash drive, along with any other folders on your hard drive that you want to keep in sync with your flash drive.
Next, start FreeFileSync, and on the left side of its window just under the words "Drag & Drop", enter the folders on your C: drive such as "My Documents" that you want to keep in sync with the corresponding folders on your flash drive, then just opposite this field on the right side of the window, enter the corresponding folder on your flash drive. To add a second set of folders, click the little green circle with a "+" in it on the right side of the window. Click on the "gear" icon in the upper-right and select "mirror." To actually synchronize your drives, first click the "Compare" button on the left, then click the "Synchronize..." button on the right. If you need help setting it up (it gets a little technical), please contact us at www.ComputerNerds.Net.
On a daily basis, or at least just before you go on a trip without your PC (or just before it crashes or gets stolen ;-) ), use the FreeFileSync program to mirror-sync your new and changed data from your C: drive to the flash drive. Keep your flash drive on your person, not in your desk next to your computer! When you return from your trip (or when you repair or recover your PC), simply click the double-ended arrow in the middle of the window to reverse the direction, and mirror-sync your new and changed data from your flash drive to the C: drive. Synchronizing your files on the C: drive with your flash drive, however, is not a complete backup system, because you really should keep incremental backups, as explained in Step 5.
5. Backup Your Files Remotely
I've been raised in the "old school" that believes my information belongs to me, it defines my identity, and I don't want to give away my identity or have it stolen - we've experienced identity theft once and it hurts! - so I'm the person primarily responsible for keeping it safe and secure. I've done my own backups for over 20 years and I have identity theft insurance. The next few paragraphs (through Step 5) describe how I kept my own files backed up and in sync all those years. But I've now realized that it takes 10 minutes/day to do partial backups and 45 minutes/week to do a full backup: that's at least 8 hours/month to manually do my backups - and if offsite backups cost under $5/month, that means I was paying myself less than $0.60 per hour to do my backups manually. So I now use and recommend IDrive (on my Offsite Backups page - free for up to 5 Gigabytes of backups), to automatically backup my files to their remote servers: consider whether this option is right for you too!
A complete backup system should provide a version history: let's say today is Saturday and you remember that you added some information to a file on Tuesday, but then you changed it again on Thursday. Now you need to recover Tuesday's info... but your C: drive and your flash drive only contain Thursday's info. Or the file somehow got corrupted, so your sync copy is corrupt too. Or you were cutting-and-pasting some text when the phone rang and it was an emergency, so you left your desk and your computer evetually turned itself off. "Stuff happens!" This is why you need a version history for at least the previous seven days, or the past 30 versions is even better. IDrive offers this!
If you've set up your offsite backups, you can skip down to Point 6. But if you decide to do your own backups, the Windows Backup program in Windows 7 can make incremental backups, which is what you want. The Windows Backup program available only in the "Pro" versions of Windows XP defaults to backup your your whole hard drive: very time-consuming and unneccessary! If you really want to do a complete system backup and only have Windows XP "Home," you can use the free Easus ToDo Backup program (http://todo-backup.com). But you don't need to do this: just make a copy of your Operating System from the hidden "Recovery" partition and copy your programs to DVDs, not to another partition on your hard drive, because it can fail and you lose all your programs and data. Test those DVDs so that you know they are good copies, and also keep the registration keys for your OS and other programs on your flash drive and on your backup DVDs. Windows-7 Backup can let you create a weekly "Normal" full backup for folders you specify and a daily "Incremental" backup for new or changed files in those same folders. But be careful! If you need to restore a file, Windows Backup defaults to restore everything in the archive, which can overwrite changed files that you didn't want to restore, thus destroying any new data in those files - "That's a real Duh!" as teenagers say. Store these backup DVDs somewhere safe, away from your PC!
But if you decide to "do it yourself," I recommend Personal Backup (http://personal-backup.rathlev-home.de/) - free, it lets you make both full and incremental backups, it uses the standard *.zip format, and it lets you restore individual files. Once you set up weekly (full) and daily (partial) backup routines, all you need to do is click on the desired backup icon to run it to save your files locally, or upload them to your own website. Also, if you have a home network, you can first run your backups on other people's computers, then run the backups on your nominal "home server" (which can be your regular PC) and then have Personal Backup automatically run a batch file to copy each user's files to your central backup hard disk, DVD and/or flash drive. Here are copies of my backup *.bat files that I used for several years. Before doing your weekly backup, insert a different DVD, and let the batch file erase the month-old daily backups and move the 2-week-old backups to the 4-week-old folder: this will allow you to keep at least a one-month version history of your partial backups on the previous DVD. Businesses often keep daily backups indefinitely, but I can't remember what I did each day more than a month ago anyway, so a one-month version history is good enough for my purposes.
Otherwise, if you have lots of "little" processes that all together add up to a huge amount of memory, there may not be enough RAM (Random Access Memory) for all of your active programs and modules, so the operating system swaps some of them out to a "page file" on your hard disk. But the hard disk access time is 100 to 1000 times slower than the PC's electronic RAM. When you have too much paging going on, the operating system is "thrashing" around, spending most of its time moving modules between the RAM and the page file, which really slows down your ability to get any real work done. The solution is to add higher-capacity RAM chips. Download CrucialRAMChipScan from http://www.crucial.com/systemscanner/index.aspx, run it, and it will tell you how much and what kind of RAM chips your computer should have for today's programs, and help you order them.
7. Keep Your Programs Up-To-Date
Perhaps you've occasionally seen a little window pop up saying "an update is available" when you run a program, and you're busy so you decide to "do it later" - but "later" never comes. Those program updates, however, very likely include security patches! A free little program that periodically scans your computer to see if you have programs that need security updates is SecuniaPSI. Login again as admin, download it from http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/, run it, and it will show you which of your programs need to be updated and how to do it. As the slogan says, "Just Do It!" Also jot down the names and version numbers of the old programs you're updating. You'll need to login again as admin periodically, let's say once a month, to run SecuniaPSI and check for obsolete programs.
8. Take Out The Garbage
Now it's time to "cast off every weight" and clean out those unneccessary programs and files. Go into Control Panel → Add and Remove Programs, and uninstall the old version numbers of the programs you've just updated. Then scan down the list in Add and Remove Programs for programs you haven't used in several months, and uninstall them too. This can free up several Gigabytes of disk space. Then download the free CCleaner program from http://www.ccleaner.com/, install it in the "PortableApps" folder mentioned in Step 2, and run it to clean out dead temporary files in various locations and orphaned entries in your Windows Registry. This will speed up your boot time as well as free up much disk space. Then copy the "CCleaner" folder from your C: drive to your flash drive.
Hopefully, you're running an up-to-date firewall and anti-virus program. But if not, or if you're disgusted with having to pay out money every year to renew your license, let me recommend Microsoft's highly-rated, free security package, Microsoft Security Essentials: http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/ - much smaller in size than many others (no built-in "Pro" version that they try to upgrade you to) and it works quite unobtrusively. Also consider the COMODO Internet Security program (http://personalfirewall.comodo.com/download_firewall.html). I've tried five or six other free Internet Security programs over the years, and this was the best all-in-one internet security program I've found. Also, it doesn't bug you or try to trick you into upgrading to a costly "pro" version, like many other such programs do.
First, download Microsoft Security Essentials or Comodo. Next, disconnect from the Internet and uninstall your old firewall and anti-virus program(s), if any. Then if you're running Win-XP, right-click on the Microsoft Security Essentials or Comodo (or other) installation program and select "Run As" to use the admin name and password, or if you have Win-Vista or Win-7, simply click on the installation program and Windows will prompt you for the admin password, to install and run it. Now reconnect to the Internet. At first the program will update the virus database, then you may have to restart your computer, and it will be fully functional. Here are several other free Internet Security programs: http://windowssecrets.com/2008/06/26/05-Get-top-flight-antivirus-without-spending-a-dime.
But whether or not your anti-virus program finds anything, there's a small chance that a "rootkit" might have installed itself at a very deep level on your computer (the "root" level, before Windows fully boots up) and thus is invisible to most anti-virus programs. Download SpyDLLRemover from http://portableapps.com/apps, install it into your "PortableApps" folder and run it, which may take several minutes. It will let you delete any "rootkits" that it finds. It's advisable to run this program periodically, about once per month.
AVG has just come up with a brilliant solution to this threat: "Link Scanner," and you should download and install it right now for free from http://linkscanner.avg.com. It guards against well-known but infected websites, and also rogue websites hiding behind a "http://tinyurl.com" or similar link - those extra-long website addresses that can be shrunk down to a tiny URL - people love to use these short URLs on Twitter, etc. But hackers also realized right away that they can hide their malware websites behind these shortened web addresses, or by displaying a descriptive name on a web page instead of the actual web address it's linking to.
Link Scanner will prevent you from going to these websites that can infect your computer simply by opening up the web page. On the very same day that I installed Link Scanner it found an infected website hiding behind a tiny URL, and it prevented my browser from opening that web page - it really works! Also, if you use the Firefox browser, or if Link Scanner conflicts with other programs on your PC making it run too slowly, you can have similar protection (even on a Mac): see "10 Firefox extensions that enhance security" at http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=1160&tag=nl.e055 - one of them, WOT (Web Of Trust), right away found an infected website as I was about to open its home page.
What is a "Drive-By" attack? It's another sneaky, nefarious way that cyber-crooks have devised to steal your passwords, credit card or bank account numbers. It could be a "Zero-Day" infection of a reputable website, or any rogue infected website that pops up a little window looking almost like a Windows system message and asks for your admin password, or a warning from your anti-virus program saying your computer is infected and asking for your credit card number to download a program that will supposedly remove the infection. Often the English is poorly written, indicating some Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Russian, etc. cyber-crooks wrote the program: that's a good clue it's malware.
DO NOT even move your mouse pointer into this popup window, or click on anything in this popup! HTML can interpret merely moving your mouse pointer over a window or clicking the red "X" in the popup as your agreement to perform an action, such as installing something on your PC. Instead, close your web browser immediately, by carefully moving your mouse pointer away from the popup to the red "X" in the upper-right corner of your browser and clicking on it. If your browser won't close, shut down or reboot your PC. If by mistake your computer does get infected, contact us and we can tell you how to remove the malware.
I sincerely hope this AA 12 Step Rehabilitation Plan has been helpful. If you need assistance with these steps, or have other computer problems, please call or email us, or go to our Online PC Support page and contact us. Some computer service people recommend reinstalling Windows once a year to get rid of computer bloat, but my experience has been that a good computer cleaning every six months can avoid the painful work of backing up everything, then reinstalling Windows and all of your programs, settings, and documents, which can take a few days to get everything set up the way you want. Only if you have the original setup files and registration keys for Windows and all of your programs, drivers, etc., and if the above 12 steps and any other attempts fail to resolve your computer problems should you consider reinstalling Windows.