If you've been surfing the web for any number of years, then chances are good that you've accumulated more Favorites or Bookmarks in your browser than you could ever keep up with.

After time, it's inevitable that you'll end up with Favorites that point to specific pages, or even entire sites, that are no longer present. Add to this complication the common occurrence of having added a site to your Favorites more than once over the years, and you've got a real mess.

If you want to keep on top of all of the web addresses you've saved, then you've got to visit Aignes.com.

Once there, go to the Freeware section and you'll find a great little utility called AM-Deadlink that will check each an every one of your saved web site addresses to see if the pages you have book marked are still available on the web.

If not, you can highlight the dead links and delete them at once.

Click on another menu option and AM-Deadlink will instantly provide you with a list of all the duplicate sites you've stored in your browser. Again, a few mouse clicks later and you can delete the duplicate entries.

Quite a handy tool, and it works with Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Opera, too.

No-clouds startup

If you're tired of seeing the standard Windows "clouds" screen, or any of the other manufacturer branding graphics that are usually displayed when you start any Windows-based computer, then here's a little tip to eliminate them.

Start Windows Explorer and navigate to the main hard drive directory, usually C: and locate the file called MSDOS.SYS.

Right-click the file with your mouse and choose the Properties from the drop-down menu.

Then uncheck both the "Read-only" and "Hidden" attribute boxes and click "OK"

Now you should be able to double click the MSDOS.SYS file to open it for editing with NotePad.

If you're system doesn't automatically open the file, then start NotePad manually (don't use Word or any other full-featured word processor) and open MSDOS.SYS from the file menu.

Once you've done this, all you need to do is edit one line.

Under the Options section, simply change the LOGO=1 line to read LOGO=0 (or if your filed doesn't have such a line, then add it) and you're basically done.

At this point, just save the file and use Windows Explorer to reselect the "Hidden" and Read-Only" checkboxes you removed in the first step and the next time you turn on your system, the screen will be clean.