How can you determine which programs are hogging this precious memory and bogging you down, often causing a slow and unresponsive system? Some are chugging away in the background without you even knowing about it!

Windows has a very useful little application called the “Task Manager”, which pops up a little window on demand, showing you just this! Here’s how you can use it to your advantage.

Right click on an empty area in the task bar at the bottom of your screen and select Task Manager from the menu that pops up:

The Task Manager will open.

Now click on the tab labeled “Processes”:

This shows a list of all task running, but you want to be able to see which are using the most of your precious memory (RAM).

So click on the heading of the right hand column where it says “Mem Usage”. Click right on those words – now do it a second time! You’ll see that the tasks running are now nicely sorted with the most memory-intensive ones at the top of the list:

This gives you a better idea of what may be using large chunks of memory without you even being aware of it.  In the above example, the Carbonite online backup program is currently doing a backup and hogging lots of memory. One can easily just open Carbonite and pause it to free up that memory if required.

Try this out and see what is running and what is using memory. If you are not sure what the Processes in that list do, simply Google them and you’ll be able to read that up.

We’ll be talking about some Outlook hassles and how the Task Manager can help you solve them in a future post!

The router I ended up buying was the Cisco/Linksys WRT160N. I’ve owned Linksys routers for years and have always had a good experience with them.

After a simple and quick install I was up and running wirelessly, or so I thought. After a few minutes my wireless connection started giving me problems. The connection would drop every few minutes and then pick up again a few seconds later. This was annoying and rendered the router completely and utterly useless.

Having your wireless router drop the connection on a regular basis is a fairly common problem. You may encounter this problem after many months or even years of good use out of the router. Of course there is always the possibility that something is faulty with the router itself. There is, however, one important step that may fix the problem and get your router back on track. It worked perfectly in the above-mentioned scenario and has worked for me numerous times in the past.

The first thing you need to do is to check whether you have the latest version of the router firmware! If you don’t, then you should upgrade immediately!

Updating your wireless router firmware

In simple terms, the word firmware denotes the program or software that controls the hardware. The best place to look for the latest firmware is the manufacturer’s site. In this case I went directly to the Linksys website and searched for it. To install the latest firmware you’ll have to log in to your router’s admin control panel (typically done through a web browser) and then to go to the section that allows you to perform the upgrade. After the firmware has been upgraded the router is rebooted and then things are hopefully in good shape. I’m writing this article after hours of uninterrupted wireless internet connectivity.

There is one more important steps that you must take to ensure the most reliable Internet connection: Go to your computer manufacturer’s site and make sure you have the latest drivers for your wireless card. Even after upgrading the firmware, you need to ensure that your device is not partially responsible for the problems. So go ahead and download and install the latest drivers for your computer’s wireless card. This step is just as important as the firmware upgrade so don’t be lazy and ignore it.

Happy surfing…

What do I do now?

but it was working fine last night!!

Most times the fix is a simple and highly successful one….restore the computer to the exact situation it was in before the problem arose!
This is the magic System Restore fix, so useful and so easy to use!

Here’s how you do it:

• Click on the start button down in the left hand corner of your screen
• Click on ‘All Programs’
• Move your mouse up to ‘Accessories’….then move it over the menu that pops up ’till you reach ‘System Tools’…and in the next menu that comes up….click on ‘System Restore’
• On the Welcome screen that you see next make sure the “Restore my computer to an earlier time’ button is selected, and click Next
• On the calendar that pops up, look back a day or two to a point where you are sure your computer was behaving itself and click on that date, and then on ‘Next’
• A screen comes up telling you that you will not lose any data by doing the restore, and that it is completely reversible should you change your mind later!
• Now click ‘Next’ and let Windows do its magic! Be patient it takes a few minutes…

When your computer starts up again you should be looking at a nice fresh screen exactly the way it was when the computer was doing things exactly the way you wanted them!

Next time you run into one of these hair-raising problems, try this great fix. It has worked wonders for many thousands of others just like you!