Myth: Nobody wants to get into my computer because I don't have anything important saved on it.

Fact: I don't care who you are or what you do with your computer, security is important. Do you want the Russian Mafia using your computer? The North Korean military? Al Qaeda?

If you're OK with that kind of vermin using your computer, then do whatever you want. I hope you don't have problems sleeping at night. If you don't want that kind of vermin using your computer, I suggest you read on.

I found a very long and comprehensive guide for using Nlite to reduce the size of a Windows installation.

The guide is geared towards an Asus Eee. But it should work well on pretty much anything that has an Intel CPU in it.

I sure wish I'd seen Wintoflash a few weeks ago.

It's simple. Insert a Windows CD or DVD (anything from XP to Windows 7). Plug in a blank USB flash drive (or one you don't mind erasing). Answer a couple of questions, and after a few minutes, you have a bootable USB stick that installs Windows. It will be much faster than CD or DVD because flash media has much faster seek times.

So what could be better? Well, slipstreamed and customized Windows of course.

So I had a chance to try a registry optimizer out on a typical PC. It's a 2.7 GHz Celeron, made by HP, restored with the factory restore discs. So it was as pristine as any consumer HP PC ships from the factory.

It helped. You'd think the opposite, of course.

I gave my Windows 2000 system a little tuneup today. Nothing major, but it feels peppier now, and didn't take all that long to do. Nor did it require any expensive utilities.

This works with Windows 2000, XP, NT4, and Vista. For Windows 9x advice, you'll have to turn to an old critically acclaimed book written by someone you've never heard of.

There've been a few times that I've met someone who was stuck in an old Windows 98 PC because it had all their software and data on it, it was set up the way they liked it, they may or may not have all the installation media, and it would take several days' worth of labor to set up a new one like the old one.

So usually in that situation I just bubblegum and duct tape the system together as best I can.

No longer. Not now that I've discovered PC Mover.

I switched to Office 2007 on Friday.

The reason given was that updates to Office 2003 were failing to install, so the remedy was to install 2007. The change happened Wednesday night. I was out of the office Thursday, so I had a nice surprise waiting for me when I returned on Friday.

If you're curious whether a particular piece of software might be spyware, or you have some other reason to believe your computer might have been compromised and might be talking to something it shouldn't be, there's a quick and easy way to find out besides using the standard netstat -an command.

I saw an XP Myths page this weekend, and although I don't agree with its assessment of XP's security, most of it seemed credible. It said XP can do fine on as little as a 233 MHz Pentium with 128 MB of RAM.

I whipped out a P2-266 with 192 MB of RAM to see.

I installed antivirus software on the Compaq today. As expected, it weighed things down--boot time doubled, to 40 seconds, and memory usage approximately doubled, to 212 MB.

I can't do much about the memory usage. But half the system memory is still available for apps, which should be fine. Upgrading the memory is always an option for the future. The boot time was fixable.