Erasing your name from Google can be easy or require a court order

Q How does a person delete entries in their own name that are currently posted on Google?

REBECCA LINDQUIST,

ST. MICHAEL, MINN.

A There's no single easy way to erase your presence on Google.

To prevent your name from showing up in Google search results of non-Google Web pages, ask the owner of those pages to remove it.

To delete your own post on Google's blogs, see tinyurl.com/4zhv54l.

Deleting your name from someone else's Google blog posts is harder. Google won't delete "personal attacks or alleged defamation, parody or satire of individuals, distasteful imagery or language, or political or social commentary" without a court order.

But Google sometimes deletes posts involving hate against specific groups, pornography, dangerous and illegal activity, online crime or impersonation. To report these behaviors, see tinyurl.com/nkbacv.

Q I've seen TV commercials for software found at "MaxMySpeed.com" that allegedly cures a slow computer. Could this, or competing programs, be effective for our Dell 8250 with a Pentium 4 (speed 2.53 gigahertz) 512 megabytes of memory and a 120 gigabyte hard drive?

GEOFF KING, OTTAWA

A This type of program, which cleans up malicious or advertising software, can modestly improve PC speed. But it can't make up for the fact that your PC was introduced in 2002, and as a result runs more slowly when it uses newer software for things like Web browsing or virus protection.

If you want to see how much you can speed up your PC, there are many cleaning software programs at tinyurl.com/5ubdetu. In addition, I've been recommending the free software at malwarebytes.org.

You also might make your PC run a little faster by adding more Random Access Memory (RAM). But I question whether it's worth the investment of $80 to $160 to add a gigabyte of RAM (see tinyurl.com/5fopav) when a new and much faster desktop PC costs less than $400.

Q Recently I've been unable to delete messages from the in-box of my Microsoft Outlook Express 2003 e-mail program. Instead, I have to manually move them to the junk mail folder. How can I fix this problem?

FRANK DOMURAD,

WHITE BEAR LAKE

A You can solve it by getting rid of the troublesome "deleted items.dbx" file. For directions, see tinyurl.com/d9jg45.

E-mail tech questions to steve.j.alexander @gmail.com, or write to Tech Q&A, 425 Portland Av. S., Minneapolis, MN 55488. Include name, city and telephone number.