The SC Drupal User Group meets the second Monday of every month at the IT-Ology building in Columbia, 1301 Gervais St, 2nd Floor.  http://it-ology.org Our next meeting will be Monday, Aug 12, at 6:00 pm. IT-Ology is on the 2nd floor. If you park in the garage and walk across the bridge, you will be there.

The giant world that we once knew has become a lot smaller in the past several years. Customers who were once distant our now just a click away, and customers who would have never met are now joined together over the web discussing the quality of our business. The economy has crushed us with tighter lending and lower consumer demand. Society has made a shift towards supporting small and local businesses.

These changes feel a lot like a small town. Small town businesses have long been dealing with customers sharing their personal experiences at the local coffee shop, tight local lending and low consumer demand.

So if the business world is more like a small town, can we learn anything from small town businesses that would be useful? Yes! Here are seven specific principles that work for all small business today.

Based on the number of pranks Google has pulled over the past... four years, (at least), it should be no surprise that they kicked it in full gear this year. If your like me, however, with no knowledge of past pranks, it's possible you got fooled too. Or no, am I alone in this?

The first video I saw, as a subscriber to Google's youtube channel, was this:

Gmail Blue

For a product that actually was launched on April 1st (2004), you’d think Gmail would come up with something a little more involved than turning its interface blue.

So ofcourse, I instantly took to social media. "Is it just me, or is this an incredibly passionate, serious video introducing a product that's only difference... is that it's blue?" Not just blue, but completely blue. The video description did in fact make me lol, "Fast. Beautiful. Powerful."

When you start your computer, you may notice several programs launching themselves along with Windows. Maybe you want them there or maybe you don’t, but some applications run silently in the background every time you boot the PC that you may not even know about.

All of these automatically opening programs consume system memory which can drag down your PC’s performance.

We found an easy way to manage these startup programs so you can see what is running on your computer and disable the items you don't need.

Use the System Configuration Utility (MSConfig)

The System Configuration Utility, also called MSConfig, is a very useful tool for understanding and controlling startup programs. By following these 5 easy steps, you can decrapify your PC and increase the start up speed in no time at all.

1. Open the Start menu and type msconfig into the Search box.

2. Click the msconfig search result. The utility will open in a new window.

3. Click the Startup tab. You'll see a list of programs that start when your computer starts.