Ever have a friend ask you to help them repair their computer only to find that its so bloated with malware that you think they should just nuke the site from orbit? Some recent malware can be quite difficult to remove. In these sorts of situations you might try an alternative approach: boot from a CD-ROM or DVD and run the repair tools while the virus-laden operating system (OS) is offline. There are other recovery tasks most easily performed while the OS is offline, but I spend more time helping people with malware than doing anything else for them.

How to create a bootable disc? You could do it with Linux, but then you’d have to learn another OS, I prefer to stick with Windows. Besides, there are a lot of useful tools already available for Windows. You may have heard of the Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE or simply PE) that has been available to computer vendors for years. Microsoft made it available to everyone a few years ago, and I’ve found it to be extremely useful. There are several ways to create a customized Windows PE disc, the simplest approach is to use the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) that some colleagues of mine in the Solutions Accelerators Team (SAT) at Microsoft created. You’ll need several gigs of storage space to download and use everything described below, make sure you have enough room before you start!

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Ever have trouble remembering where to find specific Control Panel applets? How about the one for configuring  Windows Defender in Windows 7? Its not on the Start menu. By default its not visible in Control Panel either. There are two ways you can get to those hidden or misplaced applets:

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I go on and on about how important backup up your data is. All hard disks fail eventually, and when they do, you’ll lose all your stuff–including your personal pictures and home videos.

So, you need to backup. I tell most people to buy a USB drive a bit bigger than their computer’s C:\ drive and use that for backups. That works well and protects you from a failed hard disk or accidentally deleted files–but it doesn’t protect you from fire or theft, because you’d lose your backup drive, too.

Businesses do off-site backups for disaster recovery. Basically they take their backup drives or tapes to a different location that they can get to if something goes really bad. That doesn’t work well for people, though, because even if you buy a second external drive and take it to a friend’s house, you’ll forget to do it regularly. For the home user (myself included), backups must be automated or they’ll be forgotten.

Enter online backup services, which copy files from your computer to a server on the Internet. When you lose your data, you download it back from them. I checked out the major online backup services and found one that’s working for me.

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Firefox 3.6 has a couple of minor improvements. The one user’s will most appreciate is instant previews of personas, which are skins for Firefox. Basically, it shows a picture over the unused portions of your browser window. Go to GetPersonas.com to check them out.

As I detail in that video, there are also many behind-the-scenes improvements. Performance is up about 15% compared to Firefox 3.5, and the new version has support for several new types of Web content, including full-screen video (without using Flash), gradient backgrounds in CSS, Web Open Fonts Format, drag-and-drop support, and the ability for Web pages to interact with your computers accelerometer (if you have one, like the new Macs do).

I also cover how to fix incompatible add-ons. Basically, grab the Add-on Compatibility Reporter add-on and restart Firefox. Easy.

Over at the Official Google Webmaster Blog, Matt warns that Google might (someday) factor in page load times when returning search results. In other words, if your website is slow, it might fall off the search rankings.

He pointed me to a site I hadn’t seen before–webpagetest.org. It’s fantastic. I’ve used many different website optimization tools (including Web Page Analyzer, Google Webmaster Tools, and Page Speed), but WebPageTest provides several different sources throughout the world, and different bandwidths, with different browser versions, and a fantastic user interface.

I used it to examine the performance of two of my sites–www.vistaclues.com and www.northrup.org. Northrup.org was pretty good already because I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing it, but I did discover that simultaneous connections with older browsers was limiting the page load time a bit (despite the fact that I already use parallelization), so I juggled the locations of images around a bit.

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Here’s how to check which updates have been installed on your Windows 7 computer:

• Click Start, type installed updates, and then press Enter.

As shown above, Windows displays all the Microsoft updates that have been installed (including those for Microsoft Office). To check your service pack level, do this:

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If your computer seems slow and you’ve already upgraded your memory (say, to 2GB or higher), your next step might be to upgrade the hard disk. First, check out your current hard disk’s performance using HD Tune. Write down the average transfer rate and access times so you’ll know how much better your new disk is. If you’re running Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can use the Windows Experience Index to get a rough estimate of your disk speed.

Now, figure out what type of disk you want to buy. Write down your choices as you go:

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