By Mitchell Crawford
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I have two items I think you might find of interest this month. First, open up your web browser and go to www. zillow.com. Type in your address, and bang! You will see a satellite picture of your neighborhood and an estimate of the worth of your home, your neighbor’s homes, plus a lot of other information. I just looked up a friend’s home in Chandler, Arizona. Without going past the first page of information I was able to see what her home was worth, when the home was built, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, square footage of the house, square footage of the lot, when it was built, and when it last sold. The estimate, which Zillow calls a Zestimate, is based on information provided by county agencies. It turns out, in a historical comparison of their Zestimates and the actual prices of the homes that sold, 66% of the Zestimates in Los Angeles County were within 10% of the actual selling prices. So, it can be used as a guide to determine the value of your home, but with a grain of salt. One of the amazing aspects of Zillow for me, besides the vast amounts of data that are available, is the accuracy of their mapping. If you type my home address into many computer mapping systems, they put my house about 3 or four houses away from my actual location. But Zillow has accurately located my house, and all the houses I have checked. So, now you can check your friends’, relatives’, and bosses’ home values. My next item might be of interest if your PC is running slow. I have a utility that might make a big difference in helping your PC run more efficiently. PC World magazine had a short review of a free utility called Ccleaner. You can read about it at pcworld.com by typing in ccleaner in the search box and then click search. The PC World review also contains a link for downloading the software. |
Why does a utility like this make your PC run faster? Over time, your PC becomes littered with useless files, and obsolete references in the Windows registry that can slow your computer down and also cause it to work incorrectly. Ccleaner examines your PC and eliminates the files and corrects the Windows registry entries. My favorite PC utility, Norton System Works also does this, but apparently, not as effective as Ccleaner. I have used it on about 20 machines and in each case, the PC ran faster. In one case, I was at my wits end trying to get a modem to work with the PC. I ran Ccleaner, and the modem snapped back to life. After running Ccleaner on my laptop, it became remarkably speedy. The software is free, and if you like it, you can, and should, send the author a donation. Have an idea, comment or question? You can e-mail me with your questions, comments or ideas for future columns at mlcrawford@sandimasnews.com. You can also visit the San Dimas Community News at www.sandimasnews.com where prior Personal Technology columns are posted. In addition, visit the official City of San Dimas Web site at www.cityofsandimas.com and the San Dimas Chamber of Commerce Web site at san dimaschamber.com. |