Timeline your chance for a Facebook do-over

— -- On Tuesday, Facebook announced it had begun enabling its new Timeline interface for all of its 800-million-plus active users. Facebook users who have not yet opted into Timeline will soon face a seven-day countdown before this new look — and its vastly easier access to your older posts — becomes visible to their friends.

Yes, this is yet another forced upgrade by the social network. But in this case, it also gives you a do-over: With judicious editing of your own Timeline, you can engage in the kind of self-airbrushing usually reserved to people with their own PR agents.

A few suggestions, based on my own testing of Timeline and how I've seen friends use it since:

—First scan through the default "Highlights" view — if you don't see this choice, click on a prior year from the right-hand column — to see if Facebook has spotlighted anything embarrassing or irrelevant. (In my case, it gave too much space to posts from friends in which I'd been tagged). To hide an unwanted item — or delete it outright — click the pencil icon at its top right. To "feature" it in large type, click its star icon.

—If you ever plan to run for office, select "Activity Log…" from the Highlights menu to see everything you've ever done on Facebook. Yes, including those snarky comments on friends' updates you posted late at night after a few beers; to delete one, click the circle icon to its right.

—If you don't have a good "cover photo" for the new, banner-sized spot atop your Timeline, skip it. Better to have some blank space on your profile than a shot with people's heads cropped out of the frame.

—"Life Events" — key moments in your personal saga that you can prominently cite on Timeline — are public by default. You'll have to limit the visibility of each one to "Friends" to avoid telling the world about your first date with your spouse.

—Remember to leave some mystery about yourself. There's no penalty for not documenting your life from birth onward, contrary to Facebook's pitch. The same goes for the new crop of apps that automatically publish to your Timeline. Less is more.

Q. Why does Adobe require a system restart after updating its little Reader program?

A. It doesn't — well, not most of the time. Adobe rep Wiebke Lips wrote that the San Jose, Calif., company's free PDF-display software won't force you to restart Windows if none of its background components are active. That matches my experience.

But, she added, if Windows detects a Reader process "locked by the system," you'll see the usual "Restart Now" dialog box instead. That also matches my experience, as well as gripes from other Reader users. You can still click that dialog's "Close" box to deny the reboot request, but in doing so, you'll postpone getting whatever security and stability fixes came in the latest Reader update.

Since many malware authors target Reader, knowing its nearly ubiquitous presence in Windows, it's foolish to hold off on a Reader update. That's especially true if you somehow still haven't upgraded to the vastly-improved Reader X release Adobe shipped in November of 2010.

(If you use a Mac, you generally don't need to fuss with Reader: Apple's Preview application, a part of Mac OS X, should be all the PDF software you need. In OS X and Windows, Google's Chrome browser includes a built-in PDF viewer of its own. Windows users who just can't stand Adobe Reader can also switch to alternatives like the free Foxit Reader or the free, open-source Sumatra PDF reader.)

The basic issue here is not confined to Reader or even Windows in general. When a program has to run inside of other application or plug into core parts of an operating system, it never really quits. Updating this sort of system-level code without stopping the surrounding software can be like trying to replace the timing belt on a car with its engine running. It's theoretically possible, but why take the chance?

So Reader users have to put up with the occasional system restart — as do users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer in Windows and Apple's Safari on Mac OS X. It's rare to find a complex, Internet-connected application that, like Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, still exerts a sufficiently light enough touch on the system that you can update it without having to sit through a system shutdown and restart.

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Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based in Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.