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To: ms.smartest.person who wrote (930)	1/4/2002 12:46:27 AM
From: ms.smartest.person	Respond to of 5140

The year is over! Time to clean up your computer Stephen Howard-Sarin, Editor, ZDNet Thursday, January 3, 2002 It's the winter version of spring cleaning: You use the time off work at the end of the year to add some fit and finish to your home computers. The first thing you want to get rid of? Online ads. AnchorDesk's C.C. Holland kicked out the jams with a recent column on how to eliminate pop-up ads. And last week, 8 of the 10 most popular search terms on ZDNet related to the topic. My conclusion: Never underestimate the annoyance of advertising. STREAMCAST NETWORKS also caused a stir by pre-announcing Version 2.0 of MusicCity Morpheus. The file-swapping program's not available yet, but apparently a few thousand of you rushed out to search for it anyway. As a result, "Morpheus" hit the No. 2 position in this week's Tech Index. Other software you searched for to tweak your PC: ZoneAlarm, Adobe Acrobat, and NetMeeting. Even Internet Explorer 5 got a flurry of interest. The eternal icon of year-end lassitude also made an unexpected appearance on our tally. "Television" and several variations on the term surged in interest as the Bowl games descended upon us. Top Searched Terms 1 Pop-up killer -- AnchorDesk provided one New Year's resolution everybody can accomplish: Eliminate annoying pop-up ads! 2 Morpheus -- The peer-to-peer company last week announced a 2.0 version of its file-swapping software, sending users rushing to download ... Version 1.3? Read the details first. 3 ZoneAlarm -- Everybody's favorite personal firewall added support for Windows XP and AOL 7 in late November. 4 Power Tweaks -- Folks, don't waste your time updating IE5--jump to IE6 (or off the bandwagon entirely with Opera). 5 Desktop themes -- People used vacations to dress up their PCs. (Few takers for the Britney Spears Theme 1.0, though.) 6 DVD player -- There's a lot of 'em out there, but this seems the most popular. 7 Televisions -- Big-screen, flat-screen, plasma-screen; everybody's mind turns to the Boob Tube around New Year's. Memo to couch potatoes: the Super Bowl is in February. 8 NetMeeting 3.01 -- Nothing like a late-November Service Pack--and integration with MSN Messenger--to get prosaic NetMeeting on the top of the to-do list. 9 Drivers -- Modem, printer, video, sound, Windows, DVD, mouse--it's the tech equivalent of finding extra screws after assembling Junior's bike. 10 Acrobat 5.05 -- Oh, you wanted to read our online documentation for that new gadget? XP users needed this mid-December update first. How we calculate the Tech Index: Each week ZDNet analyzes our search-engine logs to see what users are looking for. We then rate the search terms and phrases that are gaining popularity. Consistently popular terms do not show up. Instead, the Tech Index reflects significant changes in the number of times people search for the given terms. A term must be used a minimum number of times each week to make the lists. zdnet.com