After you've installed the software, and restarted your computer, you'll see a little MIS compass in the System Tray (usually in the lower right-hand corner near the time). Double click it. You should open to the Acceleration tab, as below. Good Quality has a good balance between image quality and speed. We recommend you start here. If you want faster speed, use a lower quality image rating. If you'd like to stop animated gifs and Flash animations, then check those boxes as well.

 

The Advanced Tab has the settings to accelerate POP (incoming mail), NNTP (newsgroups), and FTP (for uploading and downloading websites). It makes sense to have these all on.

 

This is the Ad Blocker tab. We would recommend having both these options on, and then experimenting with the aggressiveness.

 

The Parental Control enables you to allow only certain sites, or to block certain sites. If you enable this feature, you will be asked for a password. REMEMBER THE PASSWORD YOU CHOOSE! You will need it to make ANY changes to the Accelerator software. (MIS also offers a filtered proxy server, which actively monitors website content, so you don't need to add addresses to a list. Info on that free service is here.)

 

The Anti Spyware tab allows the program to scan for spyware, and keep it from accessing the Internet. We advise turning both of these on.

 

The Tools tab has the Privacy Protection option. We recommend you leave this on. This tab also has the "Manage Auto-Start Applications" feature. Running this will show you what applications start every time you turn the computer on. We recommend turning off everything you don't absolutely need at startup. For example, leave your anti-virus software on. Your Quicktime application, though, you should probably leave off. This will cause your computer to start faster and run faster.

 

Here's the Antivirus tab. We'd recommend you turn on "Check incoming e-mail." We'd also recommend you "Quarantine" any found infected files, and have the software update its database at least every week.

 

The Status Tab will give you a read-out of how the system is working. For privacy purposes, we've removed our access code. Your personal access code will show up in that line.