The cheapest infusion of power to a Windows XP computer can now be had for a mere $24.99.
It's not a faster processor or more memory but a well-done book titled Degunking Windows. While the book focuses on speeding up and troubleshooting Windows XP, many of its tips also apply to earlier Windows versions.
Degunking Windows, just published by Paraglyph Press ( www.paraglyphpress.com ), tells you why -- and where -- gunk piles up, often without the user's knowledge, and how to eradicate it.
It offers a bundle of guidelines that not only strip the useless stuff from your machine and buttresses its weak areas but also teaches you quite a bit about the operating system.
For instance, did you know that there was a temporary file that collects trash from program installations and crashes? It can gather hundreds, even thousands of these files and needs regular weeding.
Beginners also learn how to use the valuable Windows Explorer to manage files and view your computer's contents. You can use Windows Search to find and eradicate duplicate files. And the book describes different ways to use special folders like ''My Documents'' and ''My Pictures'' to order files.
SOMETHING FOR ALL
The tips range from the rudimentary to the intermediate and, occasionally, the advanced -- without resorting to jargon. Degunking Windows orders and synthesizes the cleanup steps in a way that can help even expert Windows users.
As the book points out, the new computer you bought flaw free as recently as a few months ago will slow down and perhaps start crashing and sucking up critical memory if you don't regularly find and chuck useless files and folders, clean your desktop and Start menu for faster starts, properly remove unused programs, streamline the Registry (a critical Windows tool you will learn about) and stop unnecessary programs from starting with Windows.
Additionally, authors Jolie Ballew and Jeff Duntemann explain that your hard drive is like a music LP. Windows scatters fragmented bits of files and programs across it, making it spin thousands of extra times to pick up and produce all the parts of files and other contents when you call them up.
The authors explain how to defragment your drives so that each file and other contents are joined into wholes in one spot and concentrated around the innermost circles of the drive, minimizing the wear on it and maximizing the speed of fetching contents.
The degunking is laid out in a specific order, and, as the book wisely points out, there is a preferred order to streamlining your computer. For instance, if you defragment your hard drive, then remove unneeded hard-drive matter, it will leave holes and fragments you'll just have to defragment all over again.
OF SLASHES AND SPAM
Interestingly, the authors recommend that you first try to uninstall programs without using the Windows Add/Remove utility. Many programs contain their own uninstall files -- usually marked by an icon with a red circle and slash through it -- which do a better job of removing every remnant of the programs they include, according to Ballew and Duntemann.
One of the biggest gunk magnets are e-mail programs -- and both spam and legitimate mail contribute. The book details the clever methods that spam marketers use to get your e-mail address, such as automated ''dictionary'' programs that get hold of such domains as miami.com and create a list of innumerable combinations of first and last names in front of the @ sign.
These programs can match progers@herald.com without breaking a sweat. Degunking Windows outlines how different antispam programs work to solve the problem.
It also points out how easy it is to let real e-mail pile up. For many such problems, Windows offers many tools to help. For other problems, the book recommends specific utility programs available on the Web -- often for free -- to help you shed virtual pounds of gunk.
