These days people who design circuits usually do so on a computer, the days of pencil and paper are almost all but gone. The issue is that your computer is probably working harder on useless background tasks than it is running your design software. We will go through some of the things to take back control of your computer so you can get some productive work done rather and hopefully avoid a few coupon popups and browser toolbars.
In the video I mentioned that I was installing a piece of software that I had ensured was genuine. Turns out that there is a bit of a twist there also, I needed a piece of software that would allow me to determine the color of any pixel displayed on my computer. My need specifically was to determine the actual color of a background of a website. I had used this type of software in the past but could not remember the name. I did a search and came up with a site that was doing some reviews of this type of software. I selected Just Color Picker by Anny Studio to try out. You can see in the screen capture below that as I scrolled down the page I accidentally clicked on a Google Ad that took me to an install page for Image Editor with the familiar download button. At the bottom of the Image Editor page you can see that they mention that there is some bundled software with their product. At this point I am still angry, at myself for not seeing that this was a Google Ad that I clicked on, at Anny Studio for placing Google Ads on the page (can’t say much with this though since I also run Google Ads), at Google for allowing deceptive ads to be run in this way and at the company behind Image Editor who is clogging up peoples computers with adware just to make a buck.
Now just because I was tricked into installing this software don’t put your guard down, this might have had the most occurrences of adware that I have ever seen but you can typically find 2 to 4 of these pieces of software being snuck into many legitimate installations of software.
If someone just clicked next on each of the items this is a list of the software that would have been conveniently installed for them.
- My Search Dial
- Webget
- Find Coupons
- Linkey
- My PC Backup
- RegClean Pro
- Optimizer Pro
- Discover PC Cleaner
- Price Meter
So how do you see what is slowing down your computer and what can you do about it?
- Go through the Add Remove Programs in your Windows Control Panel and uninstall everything that you will never use again and have a good look for programs that got snuck in here without your knowledge.
- Look at all of the programs in your Windows tray, things such as Skype might not be needed to start automatically. A Windows program called Autoruns can help you determine everything that is starting up automatically so you can make the decision what you would like to launch only when you need it. Of course you can still use the tried and true MSCONFIG by typing that into the run dialog.
- Remove useless toolbars that have been installed into your browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc)
Hopefully some of these tips ads a bit of productivity to your day and takes away from some of your slow computer frustration.
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