When your computer begins slowing down or performing poorly, the first advice they give you is to reboot.

And unless my PC is crashing in the midst of me typing, say, this column and I'm about to lose all my work, rebooting my machine is pretty easy and painless and it often does bring better results.

What about when a television or film property is slowing down, or performing poorly? Is a re-boot as easy and effective?

Reacting to my recent column in which I wondered how new Trek czar J.J. Abrams could shoe-horn too many new adventures of Kirk and Spock into the existing timeline prior to the action of classic Trek, several readers said that I had ignored the potential for a Star Trek re-boot.

"Rebooting" a TV show or film franchise is basically shorthand for basically just taking the original concept and perhaps names of the characters from the source material and then essentially just starting from scratch.

Characters, for instance, may have the same name but may have entirely different personalities, or even genders, than they had in the originals.

The "rebooted" stories are then tied no further to the events or personalities portrayed in the original.

Readers point out "Battlestar Galactica" was so re-started, as was the Batman film franchise, and the James Bond franchise will soon be re-booted. (The success of the 007 reboot, however, is far from a sure thing, with Bond fans already rallying to organize a boycott of the next film.)

Trek fans should not fear a reboot of our own.

A rebooted Star Trek will never erase the years of great episodes we have enjoyed from the original series, "The Next Generation," "Deep Space Nine," "Voyager" and "Enterprise," even if future Trek never acknowledges they existed.

They will stay with us -- on DVD and in our imaginations -- forever.

If new Trek were to have the same quality of say, "Nemesis," then I hope the franchise lies fallow forever. But if Abrams and others decide a reboot is the means necessary to get good quality Trek again, then I say, "Make it so."

A Star Trek reboot, however, may look a little different than, say, the "Battlestar" restart.

A new direction for Trek will be as much a business decision as a creative one.

That direction will be based on what Paramount Studios executives think they can sell, not just to hardcore fans, but the broader, more casual public as well.

So, sure, any new Trek probably will not hew as closely to existing continuity as did the past incarnations. Only we fans worry about the niggling details anyway, and the corporate suits will be marketing any new Trek well beyond the existing fanbase.

Following years of fan shrinkage as demonstrated in declined ratings and fallen box office sales, they will have no choice to do so if Trek is ever to be profitable again.

That said, the executives may find limits to how many changes can be made to the basic nature of Trek and still have at the end of the day a product that that public will buy.

Star Trek, after all, was once appreciated by folks well outside what we consider Trek fandom. After four decades, Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and the rest are not mere characters, but rather cultural touchstones and even non-fans continue to hold expectations about what Star Trek will be like.

Those non-fans will accept other actors playing younger versions of the familiar characters and they will likely not even notice or care when new, rebooted Trek violates some bit of original canon or tramples some bit of former continuity.

Even non-fans, however, will not accept the sort of wholesale changes Ron Moore made in reviving "Battlestar Galactica."

They will expect Jim Kirk to essentially be the same essence of Kirk they remember. Same with Spock, Dr. McCoy, Scotty and the rest. They won't buy, for instance, Abrams casting a woman as Spock or Scotty in the way Moore was able to substitute a female as Starbuck, for instance.

So we may well be in for a Trek reboot. But in computer terms that differentiate between different types of reboots, a Trek reboot likely will not be a "hard reboot," but rather a "soft reboot."

A former entertainment journalist, Scott Nance is a member of the USS Chesapeake, an independent science-fiction and Star Trek club in the Washington, DC, area. He is a columnist for Airlock Alpha, and can be reached at scottnance@airlockalpha.com.