3 Essential Tools to do Family Tech Support

No matter how much you deflect the inquiries, you eventually will have to do free technical support for friends, family and others.

Perhaps a larger business deal or relationship may be on the line, or maybe you are just tired of being nagged.

The most common complaints I get are about pop-ups, the computer running slowly and the "my computer has a virus" issue.

So far, I have have found three tools that go everywhere with my on my thumb drive:

• jkdefrag, for rapid and efficient defragging, http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag/
  
• Clamwin A/V to clean off the viruses, http://www.clamwin.com/
  
• Spybot Search and Destroy, http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html

Do not go over to someone's house and run these, unless you want to spend about 6 hours staring at boring status bars.

Usually, I run Spybot S&D first, use Advanced Tools to disable useless startup items (expand the info bar on the left for detailed explanations of what the startup items do). Do not forget to download the updates before starting the scan.

Then I run Clamwin A/V.

Finally, I run JKDefrag. At this point the system is running remarkably better in most cases.

Of course, I also check to see that the Windows Firewall is up and running (as a minimum).

A good resource for putting tools on your thumb drive is http://www.portableapps.com

In the next few segments I want to cover various tactics for avoiding work in the first place, then I want to discuss some jiu-jitsu that will greatly diminish the work that has to be done when it is required.