Nov 14

Why

Programs that start automatically when your turn your computer on or sign in can use memory and processing resources that can slow your computer down.

If your computer is running slower than normal or you just may want to do a little maintenance, either way, it is a good idea to stop unwanted or unneeded programs from running when you start you computer or sign into your profile.

This tip will show how to stop some programs by using the Start menu. This is a basic method and may not stop all programs from starting up, but it is a good start. In future post, I will show some more advanced techniques to get the other programs from starting up.

How to Find and Stop Programs from Starting with the Start Menu

Look in the System Tray for icons of programs that you do not use or need running all the time. You can right click the icon and shut the program down but that will not prevent the program from starting automatically.

sys_tray.jpg

Go to Start , click the All Programs menu, and then click the Startup folder. Look in the Startup folder for icons in this folder. Icons of programs in this folder will start automatically.

startup_menu.jpg

To remove a program from the Startup folder, just right click the icon and select Delete . That’s it, that program will not start automatically again.

Note: You may want to check and see if there is another icon for a program in the All Programs folder before deleting it. If another icon is not present, instead of deleting the icon, just drag the icon out of the Startup folder into another location in the All Programs folder or on the desktop.

Don’t worry , the program is still on your computer, you have just removed the icon from the startup folder.

Oct 25

This week’s reader question.

I think what you are talking about is what is call “optical character recognition” software. OCR is the software that takes the image of a document from the scanner, reads the text in the image, and then translates the image into characters.

OCR is needed because a scanner captures an image or an electronic picture. If you took that image and put it into your word processor, it would appear as an image and not text.

The OCR software takes that image, scans the image looking for text or characters and then translates and places text into you document.

OCR software is available commercially but can be found for free. A free OCR program that I use and recommend is SimpleOCR. SimpleOCR can be downloaded at http://www.simpleocr.com/Download.asp.

SimpleOCR is easy to install and use. Just download, install and follow the instructions and start scanning documents that you can edit and save in your word processor.