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After starting up your computer in the morning, you go for your coffee break because you know it's going to take at least ten minutes for it to get going.

We've all experienced it at one time or another - your PC takes an eternity to boot up, load all your applications, then another millennium to open up Word or Excel. Friends will often tell you that it's because your PC needs to be defragged or you need to zip your files to conserve space on your hard drive, or delete the temporary Internet files and the cookies, blah blah blah.

With all this free advice, you might detect a common theme: keep shooting in the dark and you'll eventually hit something.

Let's look at speeding up your computer in a realistic way. For one thing, we have to reach a balance between protecting our computer from online threats such as viruses, worms and hackers and the need for speed.

Once we understand that our anti-virus software is designed to carefully examine each and every computer transaction from the moment we turn it on, we can then appreciate that all this checking takes many cycles of computer time to complete.

If you Google "Make a PC run faster", you get a few suggested steps to follow, usually beginning with:

* Free Up Disk Space (no surprise)
* Remove temporary Internet files (again, nothing unusual)
* Buy our performance improvement product (hey, wait a minute!)

In some cases, out of sheer frustration, users will break down and buy a product that sounds like it will do the job. Well heck, it's only $14.95 and it seems to be doing something. Or so you think.

The simple fact is that each computer presents a unique set of problems, mostly having to do with how it is configured and used. Think of a computer like a car. If you don't keep it tuned up, it can operate pretty much in failure mode for a while then finally break down when you least expect it.

So, back to my point about balancing security with speed. If we look at the various ways an operating system protects itself - Windows for example - the recommended security default is that the firewall is turned on. Fairly simple, right? Well, if we want security AND speed, we can't have our cake and eat it too. If we have our firewall turned on and our anti-virus software enabled, we have enough checks and balances in place to reduce your computer's processing time to a crawl.

So, to speed things up, we turn the firewall off (even though it's marked in red that it's NOT RECOMMENDED!). We have our anti-virus software to check the online

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