You don’t always have to reinstall Windows ?

One of the most persistent myths about Windows is that you need to reinstall the operating system regularly to keep it running at top performance. Let’s take a look at the real problem and how to fix it.

Today we’re talking about the myth that Windows slows down over time, and how to solve the problem. The reality is that Windows doesn’t slow down if you just take care of your PC a little more. Follow these procedures, and you won’t have to wonder if spending hours backing up data, installing from disc, and re-installing your essential applications is really necessary.

What Does Slow Windows Down Over Time?
I’m not going to sit here and tell you that your Windows PC will never slow down—because for many people, they almost always do. What actually slows your PC down are too many poorly written applications that stay resident in memory and waste CPU cycles, having too many badly written low-level applications that hook into Windows, or running more than one antivirus application at a time. And of course, if you’ve run your PC’s hard drive out of space, you can hardly blame Windows for that.

If you aren’t getting the picture, the problem is usually the person behind the keyboard that installed too many junk applications in the first place. More gently put, it’s often that (very well-meaning) person’s gradual easing of their safeguards and cleaning regimens as time goes by.

Stop Installing Junk Applications
Installing software should be thought of like feeding your PC. If you constantly feed your PC garbage apps, it’s going to get sick and won’t be able to run fast anymore. These poorly written applications clutter your drive with unnecessary DLL files, add always-resident Windows services when they don’t need to, bloat up your registry, and add useless icons to your system tray that waste even more memory and CPU cycles. Usually you can get away with using a few terrible applications, but as you continue to install more and more of them, your PC will slow down to a crawl.

Be Smarter About What You Do Install
We feature and recommend a lot of software applications around here, but you should keep in mind that we aren’t trying to tell you to install every single one of them at the same time-just install the applications that you actually need and you’ll generally prevent the dreaded format and reinstall.

Here’s a few tips to help you know what applications you should be careful with:

Apps that function as an Explorer plug-in, because they directly hook into the shell and any problem will make your entire PC slow or in the worst case, crash repeatedly.
Antivirus applications are notorious for slowing your PC down, and you should never, ever, ever use more than one real-time antivirus application at a time. We recommend Microsoft Security Essentials as a free, fast, and awesome antivirus tool.
Anything that says it will “Speed Up Your PC” or “Optimize Your RAM” will most likely slow it down, or best case, do nothing at all. Avoid these like the plague.
Make sure to install official system drivers from the manufacturer website. Drivers have a huge impact on performance, and you want to have stable, updated drivers.
Registry cleaners are a mixed bag, and really aren’t going to speed up your PC in most cases. The biggest problem, however, is that too many of the commercial registry cleaners set themselves to run at startup in the system tray, wasting your memory and CPU cycles.
You should strongly consider the idea of using portable applications wherever possible, since their self-contained nature means they won’t clutter up the rest of your PC with things you don’t need.
Keep Your Computer Clean and Trim
Once you’ve rid yourself of your junk application habit and resolved to only use healthy, useful applications, you’ll want to make sure to keep your PC clean of any remaining clutter that doesn’t need to be there. You can set up a shortcut to manually run CCleaner silently with the push of a button, but your best bet is to set up CCleaner to run automatically on a schedule, so you don’t have to remember to do it.

Since CCleaner is only going to clean up temporary files, you’ll still need a good solution for keeping the rest of your PC clean-and Lifehacker’s own Belvedere can help you automate your self-cleaning PC or automatically clean up your download folder.

With all of this automated file deletion going on, your hard drive is likely to get a bit fragmented. If you’re already running Windows 7 or Vista, automatic defrag comes out of the box and probably shouldn’t be messed with, but Windows XP users will need to use Windows Tasks to setup a schedule and automatically defrag their drives.

Use a Virtual Machine or Sandbox to Test Software
If you still want to test out all of the latest software, including apps that look a bit rough around the edges, your best bet is to use a virtual machine to test out anything before putting it onto your primary operating system. You can install all of your software in an XP or Windows 7 VM just like it was a real PC, and with the latest VMWare player releases, you can even enable Windows Aero in a guest VM. If you are new to the idea and need some more help, you should check out our beginner’s guide to creating virtual machines in VirtualBox, or Windows 7 users can check out our guide to using XP Mode. If you don’t want to go the virtual machine route, Windows XP and Vista users can alternatively use Windows SteadyState to protect their PC and roll back all of the changes on a reboot.

Norad tracks Santa Claus with Google Earth!

Santa Claus was over Japan early Thursday and heading south toward Guam, the Marshall Islands, New Guinea, and ultimately Australia, according to a special, Google Earth-powered Web site established by the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
From Australia, Santa was expected to head east to cover Asia and Europe, before arriving in North America Thursday night.

In addition to the tracking maps, the Web site, NoradSanta.org, also features interactive tools that allow children to explore Santa’s village at the North Pole, play holiday-themed card games, and see what’s going on at Santa’s bakery and workshop.
NORAD has been tracking Santa ever since 1955, when a Colorado newspaper ad misprinted a phone number that was supposed to connect kids with the jolly Christmas elf. Instead, the number was the NORAD (the agency at the time was known as the Continental Air Defense Command) Commander-in-Chief’s hotline.

Not wanting to disappoint children who called in, then operations director Col. Harry Shoup instructed his staff to “track” Santa’s progress on radar and provide children with updates over the phone.

NORAD’s official position is that, yes, there is a Santa Claus. “Based on historical data and more than 50 years of NORAD tracking information, we believe that Santa Claus is alive and well in the hearts of children throughout the world,” the agency said.

NORAD, a bi-national organization, consists of U.S. and Canadian military personnel tasked with monitoring and protecting North America’s air sovereignty.

Each year at Christmas, the defense agency gives Santa Claus the green light to pass through Canadian and American air space so he can deliver presents to children who’ve been nice, and not naughty, throughout the year.

Chat using LogMeIn Express

Windows: LogMeIn Express is a screensharing tool from the makers of the popular remote-desktop software, LogMeIn. With this new offering, sharing your desktop is as simple as sending your friend or associate a URL.

Only the person doing the screensharing needs to download anything. The sharer only requires a small application from LogMeIn, the viewer only needs to visit the LogMeIn Express site and plug in the number that the sharer has given them.

Once they plug in the number you’ll approve them for viewing and—if you desire—remote control. You can send them files, chat with them via the LogMeIn Express control panel, pause the screencasting, disconnect individual users, or shut down the screen sharing all together.

The connection is secured using 256-bit SSL encryption and you can share with up to 100 users. On our test machine no setup or firewall tweaking was required to connect to remote machines and transfer files. LogMeIn Express is free and requires Windows XP and above.

Google’s Nexus Phone! :)

Google Phone mania has hit the Webberlands. If the rumors are to be believed, Google is on the verge of introducing its own mobile phone called the Nexus One. It will be built by HTC, use Android 2.x, be available for use with any U.S.-based GSM network (like T-Mobile’s or AT&T’s), and be sold directly by Google starting in January.

This story all started with TechCrunch’s insistence on the gPhone’s existence a few weeks ago, and then got ignited by a handful of tweets from Google employees over the weekend. Like this one:

A friend from Google showed me the new Android 2.1 phone from HTC coming out in Jan. A sexy beast. Like an iPhone on beautifying steroids.

From there, the story snowballed. Citing “people familiar with the matter,” the Wall Street Journal has given its stamp of approval to the basics outlined above.

There are even pictures of the phone which — surprise — looks identical to the HTC Passion, which has been out for a while. Some wags have even suggested the Nexus will cure all known diseases and replace Viagra as a recreational drug of choice. (We think maybe they were kidding.)

All Google has had to say on the matter was that they were feeding their employees a diet of “Android dogfood” over the holidays. HTC has said even less.

So let’s assume all of the above is true. Here’s what I want to know.

If this phone were truly so earth shattering, would Google just hand it out like party favors to employees without forcing them into a vow of silence, or at least locking up their Twitter chastity belts? Would the company really be starting a large internal test just weeks before the thing was to be available to consumers? And how would Google, whose only previous hardware product is enterprise-level server appliances, ramp up from no retail operation whatsoever in order to sell a consumer device, in just a few weeks, while most if not all of its employees are on holiday break?

PC Mag’s Sascha Segan seems to be the only blogger who’s not hyperventilating about the topic. He writes:

The barbaric yawp of desire from Twitter for the “Google Phone” really comes down to another hot, trending Twitter topic last week – something called #attfail. The idea that gets everyone hot under the collar is that Google may sell a phone directly, magically compatible with all U.S. carriers, but somehow without the restrictions and bindings that U.S. carriers place on devices.

What this desire really comes from, of course, is Americans’ desperate wish (and it is all about Americans; the rest of the world doesn’t have this problem) to see the iPhone on a carrier other than AT&T.

(Kind of like what I said last week about Ma Bell’s bastard offspring.)

Segan adds that, even if Google were planning to get into the mobile phone business — thus ticking off all the Android hardware OEMs and its Open Handset Alliance partners — this would hardly be earth shattering news. All it would mean is that Google is distributing an unlocked phone in the U.S. just as Nokia has, and as Apple has done in Europe.

Guess what, campers? Unlocked means unsubsidized, and that means expensive. Each iPhone is estimated to cost AT&T between $500 and $600, and they’re buying in bulk. One can only guess what a gPhone would cost at retail. You’d really have to be an Android Fandroid with cash to burn and an overpowering desire to be the first geek on the block to own one.

To me, this all sounds a lot more like internal testing of features that will appear in a future Android handset — most likely from HTC — some time next year. Maybe that will be sold directly by Google, maybe not. Maybe it will be unlocked and unsubsidized, or maybe not.

Google going directly into the phone business still seems totally whacked to me. They’re not in that business, which is already dominated by very experienced players fighting over very low margins. Consumer electronics vendors are hurting. Mobile ads, however, are booming. Why change your business model now?

It’s like sitting on the golden goose and deciding goose fertilizer is the market you really want to be in. I don’t think Google is that stupid. Do you?

Would you buy the Nexus One? If so, what’s the most you’d pay? E-mail me:cringe@infoworld.com. (And please, keep the goose poop to a minimum.)

This story, “Get your Google Nexus phones while they’re hot,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in mobile computing at InfoWorld.com.

Windows 7 download Tool is back

The Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool, which Microsoft admitted last month contains copied open-source code, has been released under the General Public License after a short delay.

The tool, developed to let netbook users without a disc drive download Microsoft’s new operating system, now is available again from the online Microsoft Store and from CodePlex.com. Users can create a bootable USB drive or DVD off of which to install Windows 7.

Microsoft combed through the code after a blogger raised concerns that it violated the GNU GPLv2. Raphael Rivera Jr. found that part of looked suspiciously like it was lifted straight from an open-source program called ImageMaster.

The company announced it would comply with the GPL by open-sourcing the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool. In late November, Microsoft said the process was taking longer than expected.

Now an open-source tool, it includes three executable files instead of one, Microsoft’s Peter Galli wrote Wednesday on the Port25 blog. Now users must first install the .NET Framework and IMAPI to get the tool to work.

More information is available here.

Black Screen of Death?

A recent security update released by Microsoft reportedly is causing “black screens of death” for some Windows users.

According to U.K. security company Prevx, the problem is caused by changes in the Access Control List, which manages the permissions of a given Windows user. The changes invalidate the Windows registry keys of some applications, Dave Kennerley of Prevx wrote in a blog post.

“The symptoms are very distinctive and troublesome,” Kennerley wrote. “After starting your Windows 7, Vista, XP, NT, W2K, W2K3 or W2K8 PC or server the system appears normal. However, after logging on there is no desktop, task bar, system tray or side bar. Instead you are left with a totally black screen and a single My Computer Explorer window. Even this window might be minimized making it hard to see.”

Prevx, which makes security software, released a fix for the “black screen of death” that anyone can use. The fix is only for this recent up-cropping of black screens caused by the Microsoft security patches released Oct. 10; there are other causes of black screens.

The free fix and step-by-step instructions are available here.

Microsoft said it is aware of the issue and sent seattlepi.com the following statement:

Microsoft is investigating reports that its latest release of security updates is resulting in system issues for some customers.
Based on our investigation so far we can say that we’re not seeing this as an issue from our support organization.
The issues as described also do not match any known issues that have been documented in the security bulletins or KB articles.
As always, we encourage customers to review the security bulletin and related KB articles and test and deploy security updates.
If customers do encounter an issue with security updates, we encourage them to contact our Customer Service and Support group for no-charge assistance. Customers can contact CSS using the information at http://support.microsoft.com/security.

Would you buy a Data-Only cellphone?

There’s an eyebrow-raising rumor that Google’s toying with a cellphone that could work on any data network and make phone calls through its Gizmo5/Google Voice package. Are you ready to leave standard voice channels behind for the wireless data frontier?

There are a handful of clues that, strung together, seem to point toward Google offering its own phone-like VoIP services. The Google Voice project and its Gizmo5 acquisition, the Android phone OS, of course, and a deal that lets them re-sell wireless data. Then again, regardless of whether Google’s ready to jump in, some phone provider could, at some point, could make this kind of offer—unlimited domestic voice calling, cheap international calls, and a data-friendly a phone that works with any data contract.

If Google or some other firm offered a (presumably) subsidized, affordable phone with an internet calling package and any data package you want, would you nibble?

Kindle comes to the PC!

After getting a shout-out from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer during the Windows 7 launch Oct. 22, the Seattle-based e-retail giant on Tuesday released Kindle for PC. It’s a free application for browsing, purchasing, reading and syncing books to the Kindle.

Kindle for PC opens up Amazon’s digital-book store to a much larger audience – until now, Amazon’s e-books could only be read on a Kindle, Apple iPhone or iPod Touch. Now, they’re readable on any PC.

“Kindle for PC is the perfect companion application for customers who own a Kindle or Kindle DX,” Ian Freed, vice president of Amazon’s Kindle division, said in an announcement. “Kindle for PC is also a great way for people around the world to access a huge selection from the Kindle Store and read the most popular books of today even if they don’t yet have a Kindle.”

Amazon said it offers more than 360,000 books for digital download, most of them for less than $10. Kindle for PC also syncs bookmarks and annotations so users can pick up their Kindle and pick up where they left off, Amazon said.

Courtesy of Amazon
A screenshot of the new Kindle for PC application. Click to enlarge
On Windows 7, Kindle for PC supports touch-screen gestures for zooming in and out of a page. A future release will include the ability to turn a page with a finger swipe, Amazon said. It also will soon be available for Mac.

Last month, Ballmer said Microsoft would not look to get into the e-reader business.

“We have a device for reading,” he said then. “It’s the most popular device in the world. It’s the PC.”

New Dedicated Twitter device!

A new gadget designed specifically for people who want to tweet on the go was launched Tuesday by gadget maker Peek.
The device, dubbed TwitterPeek, does one thing and one thing only: it lets people tweet. It doesn’t access e-mail. It doesn’t make phone calls. It tweets. That’s it.
TwitterPeek, which looks like a smartphone, features a QWERTY keyboard and comes in black or aqua blue.
The idea behind TwitterPeek is simple. After buying the device, users need only to input their Twitter credentials to get going. The gadget lets them tweet, reply, retweet, send direct messages, and download followers. It supports one account at a time. Users can also view TwitPics by clicking the “view content” option from the TwitterPeek menu. The company claims its battery lasts three to four days with average usage.
Included in the price of TwitterPeek is a service plan. According to the company, users can access Twitter nationwide through Peek’s own “mobile network,” which accesses mobile-phone networks. If users choose to pay $99 at the time of purchase, they will get the TwitterPeek device and six months of Peek service. After that, they need to pay $7.95 per month for network access. If customers plunk down $199, they’ll get the device and service for the life of the product. In either case, TwitterPeek allows for unlimited tweeting.
It makes sense that a device designed exclusively for Twitter would come from Peek. The company already offers the Peek and Peek Pronto, which are designed exclusively for mobile e-mail and text messaging.
But TwitterPeek, while an interesting idea, will need to convince consumers that it’s really necessary in the marketplace. There are a slew of mobile apps that allow people to tweet while they’re on the iPhone, some BlackBerry models, and Android-based devices.
It’s also debatable whether even the most ardent Twitter users will want to pay $199 just to have access to a tweeting gadget. Evidently, the gadget was built for people who don’t have access to mobile Twitter apps. It may also be useful for people who access Twitter from their mobile browser; that experience tends to yield more headaches than value when people want to post a quick tweet.
If you’re interested in picking up a TwitterPeek, you can buy it exclusively on Amazon.com for $99 or $199, depending on your desired service plan.

Google Voice can now use your existing numbers!

Until yesterday, signing up for a Google Voice account required you to pick a new phone number — not a pleasant option for those who have kept the same digits for years. Now Google has enabled users to keep their existing phone numbers and get (most of) the features Google Voice offers, including Google’s excellent voicemail service.

When you sign up for Google Voice — which is still not widely available to the public (you need to get an invite or request one) — you can either choose Google one-stop phone number or keep your own for a more pared-down experience. Keeping your old digits gives you:

Online, searchable voicemail
Free automated voicemail transcription
Custom voicemail greetings for different callers
Email and SMS notifications
Low-priced international calling
Going for the full-throttle Google experience gives you all of the above plus:

One number that reaches you on all your phones
SMS via email
Call screening
Listen In
Call recording
Conference calling
Call blocking
If you already have a Google Voice number, you can add the voicemail option to any mobile phone associated with the account. Some of the awesome benefits are explained in Google’s YouTube explanation:

Since voicemails are transcribed and placed online, even made publicly available for sharing purposes, there has been some danger of said voicemails appearing in search results. Happily, Google circumvented this problem earlier this month.

These new features are both freeing and limiting: you can keep your number but sacrifice some of the goodies that make Google Voice a powerful contender in the telephony business. Full number portability is likely coming in the future, after, of course, Google deals with AT&T, Apple, and the FCC. But some have high hopes that eventually the opposition will grow to accept and embrace Google Voice.