The Daily Procrastinator

 There’s good procrastination and there’s bad procrastination. Waiting for your computer to boot up is bad procrastination. Follow the steps below to get your computer back to top shape:

1) Defrag your system. Download this: jkdefrag-screensaver-and-pagedefrag file (JkDefrag ScreenSaver and PageDefrag.zip), unzip it and follow the instructions.  It will install two free programs on your computer.  One will defrag your system in place of your screensaver, so it only runs when you’re not using the PC (don’t be afraid to interrupt it when it’s running either, it’ll just start up where it left off the next time it runs).  The other defrags system files when your computer reboots.

2) Scan for spyware. Download the free version of SuperAntispyware.  After it installs have it update and run a full scan on your system.  When it’s done and you’ve deleted anything it may have found go into the “Preferences” and untick the “Start SuperAntispyware when Windows starts” box and the “Show SuperAntispyware icon in the system tray” box.  This way the program will only be running when you want it to.

3) Clean junk files from you hard drive and Registry. Download CCleaner (stands for Crap Cleaner).  It’s free, just pay attention when installing it as you’ll need to uncheck the option install a Yahoo toolbar.  After it’s installed run the “Cleaner” option and then the “Registry” option.  When it’s about to make changes to the Registry it’ll ask you for a place to save the backup file.  I just put mine in the same folder I installed CCleaner to.

When you run CCleaner it’s best to close any open browsers first so it can properly clean out your cookies.  Some websites, like Yahoo! Mail, use cookies to keep you logged in, though.  So if you like that option you can make CCleaner keep specific cookies.  The best way to do it first run CCleaner and delete all your cookies.  Then open your browser and login to the sites you want to keep cookies for.  Open CCleaner -> Select “Options” -> Select “Cookies” and then simply select the few cookies you want to keep.

4) Reduce the number of programs that start with Windows. Lots of programs try to be “helpful” by preloading when Windows starts.  Some will also load update checking modules when windows starts as well.  Most of the time they do not need to be running at startup (Quicktime, Adobe Acrobat, etc.).

Download Autoruns from Microsoft.  The program doesn’t need to be installed, but you should place it in its own folder before you run it.  This program is going to give you a list of everything that starts when you computer boots.  The list is huge and can be intimidating.  You really only need to concern yourself with one of the tabs.  So after the program starts click the “Logon” tab.  Any program that does not list Microsoft under the “Publisher” column is pretty much fair game. If you don’t want it to start just untick the box next to it.

If you are not sure what a program is just left click on it and select the “Search Online” option to see if you can get info about it on the internet.  If you think you’ve made a mistake just start Autoruns again and tick the box.  It’s that simple.

Additionally, some programs will have a setting for preventing it from starting up with Windows in the program’s own Options or Preferences settings.

5. You should also run a check disk on your drive(s). When you do it select both options (“Automatically fix file system errors” and  “Scan and attempt recovery of bad sectors”).  After you click “Start” it’ll tell you that it can’t run right now, so it’ll offer to run on the next reboot.  Accept that and then reboot your computer.  DO NOT MAKE ANY PLANS TO USE YOUR PC FOR ANYWHERE FROM ONE TO FOUR HOURS.  It’s best to start this before you go to bed at night. DO NOT INTERRUPT THE CHECKDISK PROCESS ONCE IT HAS BEGUN.

6. One last thing you can do (after running the defrag and checkdisk) is to make sure you hard drive is running in DMA mode. Whenever your computer loads data off the hard drive it runs error checking on the data.  If it detects too many errors it will slow down the data rate by putting your drive in PIO mode.  Here’s some info on checking your hard drive’s transfer mode and how to change it back to DMA. If it is in PIO mode doing the maintenance I’ve previously mentioned should allow it to run in successful in DMA mode.

If your system keeps switching your drive back to PIO mode you’ve got a problem.  You may need to replace your hard drive.

7.  One final tip:  uninstall all the programs you don’t use. If you never use it I’d uninstall JAVA and then disable its use in your browser.  If you do get rid of JAVA you should also uninstall the version that comes with Windows by running this tool.

Getting information is too much work. There’s no need to browse around to multiple web sites and reload CNN.com every few minutes to get the latest and greatest anymore. Let me show you how to let information come to you, so you can spend more time relaxing, reading and most importantly, procrastinate more.

RSS - (Real Simple Syndication). On most sites these days, you’ll see this image:

RSS Link

This means that you can subscribe to the information the site publishes and pull it into an “RSS Reader”. An RSS reader can be Bloglines.com (my fav), Google Reader or any of hundreds of different software readers out there you can install on your computer or phone. By just using any of the above, you’ve just saved yourself a ton of time by not having to check, or bookmark any of the individual sites that you used to visit. 

Twitter – For real time news, sign up for Twitter. Then follow the people / items you want. Be it Oprah (who for some reason is tweeting to Ashton right now) or CNN. If there’s a topic you’re interested in following in detail, simply go to Twitter Search and search for it and add it to your RSS feed from above. Twitter search also allows you to see in real time what people are talking about on their home page. Besides having Twitter on your phone as an application, you can set Twitter to SMS/Text you Tweets you want in real-time, or you can get yourself a Twitter desktop client.

For Windows users, I recommend Digsby, which also allows you to set up IM accounts for Yahoo, Facebook, MSN, AOL, etc so you don’t have to have multiple IM clients installed.

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That’s all you need. By using these tools available right now, you’ll save time and be more informed when it happens, without having to refresh your browser even once. 

I am in the unfortunate situation of having bought a new car. Unfortunate, you ask? Yes, because I’m getting 2-3 auto-calls per day from companies trying to sell me a worthless extended warranty. This is a known scam and not even being on the Do-not-call list stops them from calling.

Fortunately, there’s a solution for those of us with iPhones. The Blacklist application for $1.99 in the iTunes App Store.

Blacklist creates an iPhone contact named “Blacklisted Number” full of thousands of numbers (over 30,000 and growing) belonging to US telemarketers, scammers, and prank callers so that when one of these numbers calls, you know not to answer because it displays the caller as “Blacklisted Number”. 

Blacklist connects to callerdb.com’s extensive database of problem callers every time you sync. Since I installed it two days ago, I’ve avoided four calls. Installation and sync is painless if you’re on a high speed wifi connection.

With the minutes it saves you, Blacklist will pay for itself. If you’re getting telemarketing calls to your iPhone, you need this application. Why isn’t Vonage doing this?

I use the coolest tool for managing projects and generally organizing the stuff that I need to do my work. It’s called Scrivener, and this thing rocks.

A client sends me a project. As my resource material, I have five websites, three PDFs, a slide deck and four Word docs. Normally, I would have to bounce back and forth between my browser, Adobe Reader and the Microsoft applications as I tried to distill the essence of the message. With Scrivener, it’s all in one place. I import all of the links and documents into the project (slides need to be converted to PDF first, a minor nuisance) and they’re conveniently tacked onto my project corkboard so that I can flip back and forth between them with ease. If I want to organize the project into sections or chapters, they get tacked onto a separate corkboard, and I can arrange and rearrange them to my heart’s content. If I need an outline to guide my writing, I simply select it to appear on the right side of the screen, and it helps me to keep track of my progress. All of this for the bargain price of $39.95.

Scrivener isn’t a word processing program, so if you need to format the text (endnotes, etc.), or if you need to send it along to someone else, you need to copy and paste the text into a Word document. But for the actual writing and research phase, Scrivener is an amazing tool. I wish I’d had access to this years ago.