Keep It Clean!

Alright, here it is, a blatant plug for one of my other sites and my workshop/demo session.

I have been doing a conference session and 1/2 day workshop for the last three years, showing teachers how to reduce the clutter on their computers, to get control of their start-up sequence, clean and tweak the registry, eliminate adware/spyware, and generally improve the performance of their PCs. The sessions have been well received at conferences in Illinois (IL-TCE, IETC, Mt. Vernon), Tennessee (TETC), and Missouri (METC), and attendance at the sessions has actually been increasing each year.

There is currently a commercial running on TV for a website that offers to help users improve their PC's performance by offering free scans to identify the problems, but if they want their computers to Finally run Fast, they have to come up the with registration fee(s) for the software. You may have even seen similar ads online, offering a free scan, showing you all kinds of errors on your system , (some, reportedly give false positives), and then telling you how much it will cost you to fix these errors.

My point here is that my sessions and workshops use only readily available freeware. My follow-up site has links to all the titles used in the sessions, and my Diigo bookmarks has lists of utilities, as well as freeware available online! Does the freeware work as well as something you pay for? Not always, but there are several programs available for each of the clean-up tasks, and what one may miss, another may catch!

Maybe I'm just tooting my own horn here, but I believe people need to know that there are alternatives to paying high prices for software.