Wipe your disk

Time was a re-formatting of your hard drive was a task to be avoided like the plague. It would take hours on the telephone with Tech Support. For some reason, Tech Support would practically jump to that conclusion: "You should scrub your hard drive."

Nowadays, a lot of computer companies give you a "Recovery" disk that you simply insert into your drive and, in the case of Toshiba at least, simply hold the "C" button down when booting.

Our three-year-old Toshiba (Windows) laptop has been on a steady decline lately. The "blue screen of death" was becoming a daily happening. Finally, after setting up my new Apple network, the Toshiba quit connecting wirelessly to the net at all. So, after backing up all the music and photos to an external hard drive, we decided to scrub the Toshiba's hard drive.

It was amazingly simple. Took about one hour. And, voila, after scrubbing, the Toshiba now connects instantly to the Apple network and stays there. The boot-up and shut-down sequence now takes under one minute, when it was taking up to 10 or 15. And the internet connection is faster than its ever been. It could always be faster (see the Krugman article below), but we'll take what we get for now. And now that we've wiped all the clutter we've accumulated after three years with the machine, the whole thing responds better. It's like we have a brand-new machine.

So, don't be afraid, citizen. Do a good backup, and wipe that disk.