Making Your Puter Purr

Once you have a safe machine, it's time to make that machine a happy machine. A properly running personal computer can make strides of light years by you simply not running bad programs and by sticking to the classics of the trade and using nothing else.

Now right off is a sales pitch: if we didn't believe this and have empirical evidence it was true, we wouldn't mention it. But you do need our Extreme Power Tools. Sorry that it sounds like a promo, but fact is no one anywhere else will give you what we have. Sorry about that. Now, onto better things.

Where Performance Winces

The first place your puter takes a big hit is with the operating system. Don't laugh: of course we're talking about Wintel boxes all along, but fact of the matter is that most people use Windows 9x simply because it was on the box when they bought it.

Some people might choose to keep 9x because it has adequate support for games, for drivers, for sound cards and the like. That may be so. But as an operating system, Windows 9x stinks (to put it mildly) and it's only getting worse.

There are reports online already about 'Microsoft finally got it right with Windows ME'. This kind of (perhaps paid for) comment makes two things immediately obvious:

• It implies that Windows 95 and Windows 98 did not get it right.
• It guarantees that whoever said this should be removed immediately from the gene pool.

If you want to know more about why Windows 9x stinks, see elsewhere at this site.

And in general, if you are stuck inside the 9x family, any reversion at all is in your best interests. In other words, 98 is better than ME and 95 is better than 98 (you don't want to go back farther than 95 OSR 2 however).

Even good old venerable Judge TP Jackson in Washington DC could see it. He saw clearly that 'Windows 98 stinks'. 98 was a political product, don't forget: It was part of the ongoing battle with the DOJ. It attempted to nest lots of junk everywhere in the operating system so that Internet Explorer could not be removed (it didn't succeed - after all, it was Microsoft programmers trying this, and we all know how limited they are cerebrally - but that's not the point).

Things started going downhill in the world of Windows with Windows 95, and on all sides of the fence too. The culprit here is the Windows 95 shell - the Explorer. No one is saying that the old Program Manager was a flash program, or that the majority of the ideas inherent in the new shell are out to lunch; only that the implementation leaves almost everything to be desired.

As to the side effects of using a Microsoft shell (and a Microsoft explorer), again - 'see elsewhere at this site'. They drain your system. And as 95 progresses to 98 progresses to ME, they only get worse.

Whatever your OS of choice, your objective has to be to use the Microsoft explorers as little as possible. They're real killers.

Next: What Else Is There?