From the Webmaster
Over the years we've had numerous visitors to the website ask us for information that is really not pertinent to Circle Sanctuary but very pertinent to website surfing in general. This page is intended as an FAQ of sorts on handling some of the topics that we get asked about which are not Circle-specific but Internet technology specific.
Question: My system runs a lot slower now when I surf the web than it did when I first bought it. How do I get my speed back? Webmaster: You never lost your speed. Your system is running as fast as the day you bought it. However, it's very likely that you're now asking it to do double, triple, or 20X the amount work it did when you first bought it and so it seems like it's running more slowly.
If you've been installing things on it since the day you bought it (like patches, hotfixes, plug-ins, updates, new software with automatic updating features, etc), then chances are pretty high that you're asking your system to do a lot of things it was never designed to do, and it's also probably doing a ton of work in the background these days without you even knowing it. A lot of folks, especially when they're browsing websites, get asked (either by the operating system they have loaded, or by the websites they visit, or by the various plug-ins they use) if they want to update or add new versions of these programs to their system so that they can use or work with newer content formats (9 times out of 10 this is multimedia-related). The manufacturers of these technologies, urging you to update yourself, are assuming that your home system is somehow magically using the very latest hardwares and utilizing the very latest operating systems with the very latest softwares. Not so.
Your system was designed to efficiently run the operating system and application versions it originally came with. If maintaining a fast system is more important to you than adding new functionality, stick with the OS and the applications that were originally installed on your system when you bought it. Otherwise, adding newer functionality is more than likely going to "slow things down" on your system. That's the basic tradeoff.
So how do you "get your speed back?" How do you balance adding newer technology to an older machine without sacrificing your system's performance? How do you get it running like it used to when it was new? Perhaps a whole new way of thinking about how you work with (and store) your data is in order. Consider this:
About 10 years ago, most computer manufacturers stopped shipping their systems with operating system CDs. Instead they started shipping them with "Restoration" CDs. The reason was simple: if they shipped operating systems with computers and something went wrong with them, then they had to spend time with customers training them on how to diagnose or install operating systems (a fairly complicated and time-consuming process). However, using a restoration CD is simple: you put it in, run the only option available to you, and it rebuilds your harddrive exactly the way it was shipped from the factory. All the right drivers are installed, all the original applications are installed, everything works as fast as the original demo did (which got you to buy the system in the first place). The major drawback to using restoration CDs: all of your personal stuff on the harddrive is usually wiped out or compromised when the rebuild occurs.
But what if you stopped storing your personal stuff on the harddrive altogether? What if you did everything... say, off a USB flash drive instead? Think about this idea seriously for a second. If you did use a flash drive (or something like it) to store everything you really care about on your system:
if your system's hard drive ever went bad, you wouldn't 'lose' anything.
flash drives (and other external media) are incredibly cheap now. 8GB flash drives run $15 these days: you can't get a hard drive that cheap anywhere.
flash drives are portable. you can take them anywhere and have your entire personal world with you anywhere, workable on any system you hook it into.
your work is never at risk if you physically remove it from a system which is at risk.
if you ever do get a virus, a trojan, a worm or other nasty or your system, or if it just plane crashes and you need to rebuild or replace it, your personal files are safe and ready to be used with whatever rebuilt or replacement system you get. it's ready to work with on anyone else's system too. instantly. no sifting thru hellish subfolders scattered all over your system required, trying to find everything you care about.
Suppose you want your original performance back. If all your personal stuff has been stored on a flash drive (or any external drive other than your system's harddrive for that matter) instead of the harddrive, from the get go, you simply restore your system with the original restoration CDs and then plug that external data source back in when the restoration process is completed. Things don't get much simpler than this in personal computing.
If you want to see if a newer technology is going to work or not, you can experiment by installing it on your system at no risk to the files you really care about because (hey!) you can always 'restore' your system if things don't work out. If your system ever gets infected, your work files can be safely removed, instantly, and the system wiped clean. Flash drives are big enough and fast enough these days (USB 2.0) to work directly from, like any other hard drive partition. By isolating what you really care about from your system, you gain every advantage possible over *your* data. All it takes is pointing to a removable external data source (like a flash drive) instead of a folder on your harddrive whenever you save something that really matters to you.
The Internet: where keeping valuable data completely 'safe' usually means keeping it physically disconnected.
