Faster Startup

By thawes | Published: May 13, 2009

After having your computer for some time, and installing and uninstalling software, you will notice a significant downgrade in how fast your computer starts up. This is because many programs you install set themselves up to auto-start when your computer starts up. You can significantly increase the start-up speed of your computer, by eliminating many of these programs from starting up automatically.

If you are running Windows Vista, it is pretty straight forward. Go to the windows menu, and type ‘msconfig’ and hit enter. A window will popup that looks like this:

Then just click on the Startup tab and uncheck all the programs you do not want to startup. When you are finished, it will prompt you to restart your computer for the changes to take effect, but if these programs have already been shutdown, then restarting is not necessary.

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Antivirus and Spyware

By thawes | Published: May 13, 2009

You have to be careful when surfing the internet. No one would install a program without having first run a virus scan on it, or at least know what it was they were installing. But spyware and adware will come to us on the internet, and ask us to give it permission to scan our drive, or test our system to make sure it is running optimumly. Don’t fall for these gimicks, they are often ploys to get you to give them permission to install something on your computer, and it might not be what you think.

Spyware and popup ads slow computer performance down. You have to be careful though, as there are a number of anti-spyware programs that will offer a free scan, and give you a false positive just to get you to purchase the software. These programs will often contain Adware as well and slow down your computer. Sometimes these posed cures are worse than the disease! Here are some you can trust will be scam and adware free.

  1. Noadware (Highly recommended)
  2. Spyware Nuker (Recommended)
  3. AdwareAlert (Recommended)

 

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The Registry

By thawes | Published: May 13, 2009

The Windows registry is a database Windows uses to keep track of settings and options for Windows and also for software that you install. It is an integral part of Windows. After installing and uninstalling software, over time, it is not uncommon for this registry to have something left over from the software that is no longer installed. It could be referencing data that is no longer valid or there. This can slow your PC down considerably.

The best option is to have a registry cleaner program to tidy up things in the Windows registry, so they are running like new once again. 

  1. Registry Easy (Highly recommended)
  2. Registry Fix (Recommended)
  3. Error Fix (Recommended)
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If only my hard drive were rocks in a bucket…

By thawes | Published: May 13, 2009

The way a computer stores information to your hard disk may seem like rocket science, but it is not all as complicated as it may seem the first time you think about it.

The temptation is to think of hard drive storage the same way one would think of rocks in a bucket. Everytime we save data to disk, we just add more rocks to the bucket, and when we delete something or uninstall something, we take the rocks out, and whatever was on top of those rocks just fell to the bottom. However, disk drives do not work this way.

If we used the floor to represent our hard drive, and dump our bucket of rocks on the floor, this would represent a little more closely how data is stored on our hard drives (not a perfect analogy, but bear with me). At the moment the rocks are dumped on the floor, all of our data is fairly compact on a single area of our hard. As we remove files, and uninstall programs, our data becomes more fragmented. There are gaping holes of unused floor that appear. And every time we use the data still on disk, our programs will be searching these empty gaps for our data.

Over time, disk fragmentation like this, can significantly slow your computer down. In fact, this really is the leading cause for computer slowdown. The disk defragmenter that comes with Windows is sub-standard at best, and does not optimize the drives very well. There are solutions to this problem below:

  1. Adavnced Defrag (Highly recommended)
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Disk Partitioning: The safety net

By thawes | Published: May 13, 2009

Disk partitioning can enhance your computer’s performance. Disk partitioning is splitting your hard drive space into separate partitions or drives. This serves two purposes. One is that, on computer’s using Windows, the disk information is read more quickly on smaller partitions. And second, it is generally good practice to have at least two partitions, one for the operating system and applications, the other for data and documents you keep on your computer. This protects you should your system crash and you need to re-install windows, or still get into your system if you need to perform data recovery for your files on a damaged file system or partition.

Disk partitioning is typically done when you first install your operating system, because if you try to partition an installed system, you will destroy the data on your computer and even make it un-bootable. There are, however, a number of disk partitioning tools available for partitioning your drives without destroying your data.

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