This is a reprint of an article from my Ask a Geek column in the Mount Vernon Register-News. It is written for a general audience, and I hope you like it.

You’re sitting in front of your computer after booting into the operating system and cleaning out your extra startup junk. Now what do you do?

If you are like most people, you either start a web browser or email program. Even if you open a web browser first, most everyone I know goes to check their web-based email. I think that we still get excited at communication with others, even if it’s just letters on a screen. Just like people get excited when they get a package in the mail, we get excited at email from friends and family.

So what do you use for email? There are a great many programs that would like to be your email handler: Outlook Express or Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, Opera Mail, and others. Each of these have their positives and negatives. Some are expandable, heavy, light, built-in to browsers (Opera) and everything in between.

Everyone has their own preference about how they like to access their email, and deciding on a client may require you to try out a few different applications before you figure out what is right for you. I’ll give you my opinions and some overviews here, but try them out and see what you like to use.

Outlook Express (Mail in Vista) is the free client that Microsoft includes in Windows. It is effective at downloading your email and keeping together for you. OE is not a grand program by any means, but it will download email from Hotmail (now Live), which is a big plus if you use that service. Otherwise, it is an extremely simple program that does not do much for you.

Outlook is Microsoft’s professional email program, and rightfully so. I am not a fan of giving Microsoft money, but their Outlook software is excellent. Outlook can keep track of your email, mark it for follow-up, keep track of tasks, and archive your email in files so that you can store them however you need. All of this it does out of the box, and many companies make plugins for Outlook so that you can do even more. Put simply, if you have the money, this is an email program that you should check out.

If you don’t have the money to invest in Outlook, I strongly recommend Mozilla Thunderbird (http://mozilla.com) as an alternative. Thunderbird is a free and open-source email program with many add ons that help it be more productive. Out of the box, Thunderbird is a lot like Outlook Express, but it is expandable by the many add ons available. The great thing about this is that you can add in only what you want or need instead of taking it all in a giant lump like with Outlook. Realize that if you take Thunderbird for a spin, it is not quite as polished as Outlook, but Thunderbird 3 is due soon and promises to be much improved.

There are some quick takes on a few email clients. Each of them has their own unique way of handling email, and one may be more suited to your tastes. I would suggest trying them out and finding what is best for you. Let me know what you prefer.

This is a reprint from my Ask a Geek column that appears weekly in the Register-News. It is written for a general audience, and I hope you enjoy it.

Once your computer has booted into the operating system, most people think it is just sitting there waiting for you to tell it to do something. This is not quite the case.

Many programs are already active and doing things you may not even know about. For example, your antivirus and firewall (you do have both, don’t you?) start automatically with the operating system. That is great and they are protecting you just as they should, however there are other programs that you might not even be aware of that do the same thing and slow down your system.

Adobe, RealPlayer, iTunes, Google products, etc. all install onto your system and are free to download. Unfortunately most or all of these programs also make a setting in your operating system that automatically starts them without your input. They do this under the logic of ‘checking for updates’ or ‘quick-starting’ so that you don’t have to worry about these tasks. Unfortunately every one of these tasks will eat up memory (RAM) and processing power that your computer should be using to do whatever YOU want it to do.

The easy way to see this problem is to look in the lower-right corner of your screen by the clock. Almost every one of those little icons is eating up power that will make your PC run slower than it did before. The sneakier of these programs will not even have an icon in the corner, but will run ‘in the background’ without any easy way to see what it is doing.

Personally, I dig into the Windows’ registry and delete these items so that they don’t start automatically, but there is an easier solution for anyone to use: CCleaner (http://ccleaner.com). CCleaner has been mentioned here before to clean out temp files and help clean out your PC, but it will also clean out these ‘autostart’ or ‘startup’ entries so that you can have back the power that your computer has been robbed of without your knowing.

When using CCleaner, you do so at your own risk. It is generally safe to use so long as you read what you are doing, and it even offers to make a backup before performing tasks so that you can restore if you break anything. Still, you can break things if you are careless.

When cleaning out startup programs, everyone will have different choices to make about which programs to remove or keep. For example, you should keep the startup entries for your antivirus and firewall, but probably not Adobe or Apple Update. Some entries will not really say what they do or what program they are associated with in any way. It is advised that you DO NOT DELETE those entries. It is safer to leave something there than to delete it and then have to go back and fix it later.

When you go to download CCleaner, they ask for a donation. No donation is required, but they ask so that the development can continue. If you can, drop them a buck or two if the program helps you. Thanks to Ms. McClintock for reminding me about this fact via email.

This is a reprint that originally appeared in my ‘Ask a Geek’ column for the Register-News. This is written for a general audience, and I hope you enjoy it.

Your computer is stupid. Yes, for all the wonderful tricks you can accomplish with it, your computer only understands two things ‘1’ and ‘0’. On and off. Yes or no. Computers at their simplest are binary switches that do a certain thing in response to 1, and another in response to 0. That’s it. There’s your explanation of how a computer works. Everything that you accomplish with a computer is based upon those ones and zeros.

The first part of your computer to use those ones and zeros is the Power On Self Test (POST). When you power on your PC the first thing you usually get is a tiny beep before anything happens most people understand. That beep is your POST completing successfully. It signals that ‘all systems (or pieces) are go’ and the computer can start loading information from the next part.

The Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) is the second phase of your computing experience and may be completely hidden from you. As noted above, your computer is stupid. The BIOS contains simple commands that tell your hard drive, monitor, and everything else connected to the computer how to ‘talk’. You could almost call it a ‘translator’ for making everything communicate.

Once the basics are out of the way, your BIOS points to a ‘bootloader’ that then points to your operating system – Windows, Apples’ OSX, Linux, or even BSD. At this point, most of you will see your operating system’s loading screen showing the Windows or other logo.

From there you will be taken to your graphical user interface (GUI) where most everyone is used to interacting with their PC. This is where you open your email, surf the web, write on the Register-News forum, or perform any other task you need to get done.

When you add a printer to your PC, you must usually install drivers. Drivers are instructions to tell the operating system how to talk to the BIOS so that the printer or other device will do what you ask. So, the path of communication goes – Program > Operating system > Driver > BIOS > Device. I warned you that the computer is stupid, and that long trip to print a report or picture proves it. Four steps to accomplish one task. Still, I think we all can agree that computers make our lives much simpler and easier.

There you have a simple explanation of how your computer talks to itself. There is a lot more ‘behind the scenes’ action, but hopefully this will get you a working understanding of how your computer operates on the inside.