Net Witt Computer Consulting

Free Adult site and Phising site filtering

OpenDNS has a free option to block adult and phishing web sites from all the devices in your home that use your home router for internet access.  The free version blocks all sites coded as adult in their coding system, for $19.99/year you can select which of their 50 categories you want to filter.  Or, for easier setup, you can choose a filtering level: low, medium or high.  The low filtering level blocks just adult content, where the high filtering level blocks adult content, social networking sites, video-sharing sites and more.

The OpenDNS website will walk you through changing the settings on your specific router by allowing you to pick from a selection of popular retail models and giving specific instructions for each model.  Changing the DNS settings will  effect all devices in your home (Macs, PC’s, Playstation, Wii, DS, Xbox, iPad, and even their iPhone while in the house).  If you are comfortable changing the settings on your router the addresses to use are:

208.67.222.123

208.67.220.123  Www.OpenDNS.com

Clean your computer to make it run faster

A great free utility to clean the temporary files off of your hard drive is CCleaner.  CCleaner will go through and remove the files that programs leave behind but never use again.  This will speed up accessing files and free up space for new files.  Newer computers are not as space restricted as older computers but they can still benefit from removing unwanted files.

CCleaner also includes a registry cleaner that will optimize and remove unnecessary registry entries to speed up processing file requests.  CCleaner can be downloaded for free from www.download.com or www.filehippo.com  

Speed up old XP machines, Vista and Win 7

Do you have an old XP machine that runs like molasses?   MyDefrag will tune up that machine so it runs like new.  MyDefrag is a shareware version of defragmentation software like DiskKeeper.  It analyzes which files are used first when a computer boots and moves all of those files to the fastest part of the hard drive as well as defragging your files.  MyDefrag will also speed up Vista and Win 7 machines.  If you have never defragmented your hard drive you will need to run the program 4 or 5 times at first to get everything tuned up, after that you can let the nightly and monthly installed scheduled tasks keep the system in tune.  You can download MyDefrag from  www.mydefrag.com