My Computer

My computer isn't exactly the speediest thing. It helped a lot when DSL became available in our area, so now we're not confined to a dial-up modem. But still, a 5-year-old computer that wasn't anywhere near state-of-the-art when we bought it,... well, it's not the speediest thing.

Today my son-in-law Nathan and my son Philip sped me up. My Norton anti-virus was about to expire. So Nathan deleted all my memory-hogging Norton programs and downloaded AVG and Zone-Alarm. Philip snagged some extra RAM from his old computer that's destined for the dumpster, and he installed that to quintuple my memory. (Oh, if only they could increase the memory in my brain that easily!) Nathan also said that my start-up menu has got gazillions of programs loading up and running in the background. Gary took care of a lot of those for me a few years ago, but Nathan knows of more that can be terminated! So he's going to email me a list of programs to disable when he gets home from the holidays.

I can't believe the difference it has made! Eighteen months ago, I would change a load of laundry while I was waiting for a new window to open on the computer. A week ago, I would set the plates on the table while waiting for a window to open, or some other activity that would use time but take less than a minute. Now ... oh my goodness! ... I can click on buttons on the computer, and the computer responds almost instantaneously. It's mega-cool!