I do a great deal of work online - in fact I nearly live online at times. But I don't have a fast fancy bleeding edge machine. I work on a 5 year old laptop that I bought factory reconditioned. It's got a decent enough CPU at 1.3MHz and I did put 512MB of RAM in, but it only has a 30Gigabyte hard drive.

I do hook it up to a second monitor so I have a really large desktop to work on since I almost always have multiple programs running. As you might guess anything that slows the machine is not good - there isn't a lot of slop in the system so it's important to keep it clean and optimized.

I used to do the regular stuff. Run a fire wall and an anti-virus. Keep my Recycle bin clear. Compress my email. Get rid of old programs I wasn't using. Run a couple anti-spyware programs once in a while. And, fairly rarely do a disk defrag. Then my anti-virus license expired and I decided to upgrade to an all-in-one program, Norton 360, since the Norton anti-virus had been doing a decent job. It turned into an absolute horror show and after removing it and re-installing it, it didn't get any better and my machine was basically unusable. Maybe it was my particular configuration, I didn't care. I got my money back and went looking for alternatives.

I also realized that I really hadn't been maintaining the machine all that well. Some things I just didn't do at all or didn't do often enough. Some of my anti-spyware hadn't been updated in a while and I hadn't spent the time to learn some of the XP tricks for optimizing.

That's when I found Fast PC Secrets by Tiit Raag. The weird thing was that I recognized the name since I'd read some of his posts on forums. Anyway, I decided to go ahead and try out his system - it was a lot less than Norton 360 and it provided more features and laid out a step-by-step process both for the initial full clean up and then for on-going maintenance. It didn't require purchasing any additional software or paying any monthly fees and it cam with full video walkthrus of everything. Since sometimes video tutorials make me crazy I checked and sure enough it also included full pdfs of the material. I usually prefer to read and maybe look at the pictures - I always feel like I ought to be taking notes with videos and with the pdfs I didn't have to worry about that. I did, of course, watch the videos first and they're good - professionally produced and recorded.

So that's how I ended up with Fast PC Secrets which is about enough for this one post. Next time some more about how it worked for me (it did and it still does work great, but I'll provide a little more detail than that).