Maverick Ramblings

Dear Maverick Solutions, I just wanted thank you for your purchasing, installing and trouble shooting my new computer.  It was very important to me to have a machine that would work with all my existing devices.  Your recommendations worked out perfectly. Also your quick response to my numerous emails as well as in person consulting, [...]

• 

Virii are not data (like pictures or documents); they are programs – they do things. In order to install a program on your computer, you need a particular level of authority, and without it, you can’t install programs, good or bad. Once you have one, the IT “textbook answer” is to reformat the machine – it’s the only way you can be certain that the virus is removed. Once you repair or replace your computer, we recommend the #1 anti-virus strategy that no anti-virus company would ever share with you.

• 

A lot goes on during the summer to prepare for the first day of school; to help ensure that important issues aren’t overlooked, here’s a checklist of items to complete for the start of each new year.

• 

Now that you’ve identified what parts of your PC need to be upgraded, you need to decide how to deal with it. Some issues can be overcome by minor upgrades, but others aren’t worth the cost or trouble, and are an ideal opportunity to replace the PC.

• 

Maybe now it’s finally time to upgrade your PC, but what should you upgrade? The whole system? Just some components? When faced with limited resources, we have to make decisions about the best ways to employ them. How can you tell what to do?

• 

Besides hard drive data storage, there is another area in which computer performance may become degraded, appearing to be due to age: increasing demands on the processor and memory. This may be resolvable without upgrading your computer.

• 

In the previous section, we discussed the concepts behind computer optimization and hard drive fragmentation. After fragmentation, the next issue to discuss about how hard drives slow down our computers is the increasing volume of data being stored on them.

• 

Many people are under the impression that a computer’s performance deteriorates with age. I’d like to disspell that myth: computers are mostly solid-state technology that is largely unaffected by age. I’m not saying that older computers don’t run more slowly, but once we correct the notion that the slow-down is caused by its unalterable age, the problem becomes one that can usually be remedied without buying a newer computer.

•