en Passant not letting life just pass on by

I just received the latest joke/hoax/chain-mail from a family/friend/co-worker regarding some new issue, scam or sentiment. When this person forwarded along the message, I had to skim through pages upon pages of valid e-mail addresses to get to the actual message, which ended with "forward to all your family and friends".

Thanks to this person, I made $$$ with very little work. How? I extracted out all 200+ (validated and real) e-mail addresses, then forwarded the file off to a website that collects e-mail addresses. (Spammers pay extra for validated e-mail address like these, you know!!)

Now that you've been using that computer for awhile now, it is now slowing down, to a crawl, and you don't know what to do.. I've put together this short article to cover some of the basics that I check for with slow computers.