Hands off help online

Tech tips - In my past columns, I have given you many suggestions on how to troubleshoot your problematic computers, laptops and home networks. A lot of my recommendations require you to download something or check some setting manually. Not everyone wants to take this type of "hands on" approach.

If you are one of those guys looking for one-stop answers, you might want to check out www.pcpitstop.com . This site will, for free, run a gamut of tests on your machine over the internet. Now, don't panic, no settings are changed during the tests and no private information is accessed from your hard drive.

You can become a member of this site or, you have the option of running the test anonymously. Before you click to run the test though, turn off pop-up blocker and third party firewalls like ZoneAlarm if installed.

The free test examined my video, memory, cpu and hard disks. It also tested my internet bandwidth, upload and download speed. When the test is complete, you will be presented with an online report listing your system specs, installed hardware, recommended fixes and your computers ranking against other tested computers. All very interesting and informative!

My laptop for example, had a really good showing for memory and processor, but my hard drive, video and internet access are well below average. That's pretty much what I had expected.

The fixes tab of the report had helpful suggestions. It told me it was time to defrag my hard drive, to disable Firefox saved passwords and to remove some of the craplets I had running.

In case you are curious, craplets are unnecessary background programs that startup automatically. These programs use up system resources like memory while not offering much in return. Craplets are often responsible for a slow running computer.

The fixes tab also has one more excellent feature. It tells you what device drivers are out of date for your installed hardware. It correctly identified that newer network, modem and sound card drivers were available for the machine I was testing.

A ton of other useful information was provided in the test results. It even identified my virus scanning software as the top user of ram and cpu during the test.

This site is worth checking out. I must warn you though that PC Pitstop is a commercial site. They do sell products and some of the results will advise you that one or more of those products can improve your computing experience.

But hey, I am certainly willing to wade through a bit of self-promotion to get to the free stuff.

toddmusseau@gmail.com