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Archive for the ‘Performance’ Category

Improve performance by tweaking your hardware

Hardware, Performance | Posted by Admin March 2nd, 2010

PC Tips for improving performance by tweaking your hardware

Learn how your hard drive and graphics card impact your system’s performance, and dig deep under the bonnet to discover and fix hardware issues. In previous guides we have looked at improving your system’s performance by simply removing unwanted programs. The next area we want to understand is the impact your hard drive and graphics card have on your system.

Before we start examining your computer, we need to see what Windows Vista believes is possible from the system when it’s working at its best. Searching for ‘Performance’ in Start Search should lead you to the Performance Information and Tools analysis of your system. If any numbers are low, then you may wish to consider looking at these areas for replacement. My laptop has a lowest rating of 4.3, which is more than adequate, but should one number be low compared to the rest, I would consider replacing that element. If your computer is running low on RAM, for example, it will use the hard drive as an extension of memory, but this deals a fatal blow to your computer’s performance because the hard drive can be 1,000 times slower than memory. In my experience, a Windows Vista PC with just 1GB of memory will struggle unless your system is only lightly used.

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Turn your PC into a Super Computer

Hardware, Performance | Posted by Admin February 23rd, 2010

PC Tips for Turning your PC into a Super Computer

What, exactly, are supercomputers? The clue is in the name, really: they’re powerful computers capable of calculating many millions of floating operations per second (FLOPS) essentially, they’re very, very fast.

While any array of powerful computers, such as a modern-day web server which consists of several motherboards (the main circuit board of a computer) running in parallel can be considered a supercomputer, generally the term is reserved for machines that dedicate their entire hardware to one complex task at any given time.

Take the NEC Earth Simulator in Japan, for example, which was created specifically for modelling weather problems associated with global warming. Or the world’s fastest computer, BlueGene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, which simulates the behaviour of biomolecular structures and protein folding. It’s capable of 600 trillion FLOPS (tera-FLOPS or TFLOPS), whereas, the six-year-old Earth Simulator is only capable of 36TFLOPS. BlueGene/L won’t hold the top spot for long, though. Supercomputers twice as powerful will be online soon.

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Quick cures for the worst Windows 7 annoyances

Operating System, Performance, Windows 7, Windows Trick | Posted by Admin February 9th, 2010

PC Tips for Quick cures for the worst Windows 7 annoyances

If you find yourself tripping over new Windows 7 features or missing favorite old ones, I’ve got some tips that will come to your rescue.

Lost in all the glowing Windows 7 reviews and marketing hype is the fact that not everything about Microsoft’s new OS is an unqualified success. You don’t have to use Win7 for very long before you notice one of your favorite features of earlier Windows versions is changed or missing.

But if you don’t like the default Win7 interface and the features that Microsoft prefers, no problem! A few simple tweaks can let you adjust Win7 to your own liking. Even better, some of the following tips also apply to Vista and XP.

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Launch your favorite applications faster

Operating System, Performance, Windows 7, Windows Trick | Posted by Admin February 2nd, 2010

windows 7 300x284 Launch your favorite applications faster

PC Tips for lauching your favorite application faster

There are several ways to launch apps quickly, using either mouse or keyboard.

Direct method: You can assign keystrokes to launch any shortcut. Right-click the shortcut and choose Properties. On the Shortcut tab, click in the Shortcut key box and then press the keys you want to use to launch the shortcut. Click OK.

A word of warning: Be careful not to reassign other useful keyboard shortcuts you may have already assigned. Also, you can assign keyboard shortcuts only to icon shortcuts — not the actual icon of a document or application.

Search method: In Vista and Win 7, press the Windows key to open the Start menu. Then type a few letters until the search tool finds the program you want to launch; press Enter. The catch — if you have several programs starting with the same characters, you end up taking more time typing than if you simply mouse-clicked the application’s icon.

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Vista to XP Copying Performance Slower

Performance, Windows Trick, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Posted by Admin January 19th, 2010

PC Tips for Vista to XP Copying Performance being Slower

One of the issues that plagued Windows Vista when the operating system was launched in January 2007 was the slow copying speeds delivered. Over two years later, and after SP1 resolved the initial issues, Microsoft informed users that there were additional problems impacting performance. In this regard, the Redmond company noted that, while copying a file from Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 to a down-level system, such as Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, in the context in which Intel I/OAT was enabled, users would notice that the performance was significantly slower compared to when the feature was disabled.

“Consider the following scenario: you have a computer that is running Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008. Intel I/O Acceleration Technology (I/OAT) is enabled on the computer. You copy files to this computer from another computer that is running a down-level operating system, such as Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. In this scenario, the file copying is significantly slower than when Intel I/O Acceleration Technology is disabled,” the Microsoft noted.

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How to make Windows Vista boot faster 2

Operating System, Performance, Windows Trick, Windows Vista | Posted by Admin January 12th, 2010

If you have more than one operating system installed on your PC for example, you may have both Windows Vista and Windows 7 beta installed – your computer displays a menu asking you which operating system you want to load. If you don’t select an operating system within 30 seconds, it automatically loads your default operating system.

You can cut the amount of time your computer waits for your input before loading Windows Vista by going back to Msconfig and selecting the Boot tab. Where it says Timeout, change the number to a lower setting, but give yourself enough time to actually make your choice. If you only have Windows Vista installed on your machine, you don’t need to complete this step.

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How to make Windows Vista boot faster

Operating System, Performance, Windows Trick, Windows Vista | Posted by Admin January 5th, 2010

PC Tips for making Windows Vista boot faster

The time it takes for your computer to start up and run has been massively improved under Windows Vista. One of the reasons older versions of Windows, such as Windows 95 and Windows 98, took so long to boot up was because those versions of Windows were running on top of another operating system MSDOS.

With Windows Vista this is no longer the case, so start-up times are a lot faster. If you have a brand new computer or a fresh installation of Windows Vista, it will take no time at all for your PC to start up, so you can begin using your favourite programs at once. Unfortunately, after a while, with the more programs you install and the more files you have on your PC, you may begin to notice that your computer takes longer and longer to start up. Before you know it, you’ll be able to get up, make a cup of tea and drink it while waiting for Windows Vista to load. When things get this bad, you know you have to do something about it.

We recently asked visitors to the pctipsbox.com website how long it took for their PCs to start. The results varied from less than a minute to over ten!

There are plenty of factors that could make your PC startup grind to a halt, so there are plenty of tweaks to try to get your PC starting up in a flash. It’s all very well listing these tweaks, but do they work?

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Delete your TEMP files on shutdown

Operating System, Performance, Windows Trick, Windows Vista | Posted by Admin November 28th, 2009

PC Tips for Deleting your TEMP Files on Shutdown

It is really easy to set Windows XP to delete the contents of your Temp folder (or run any other commands) on shutdown. There are numerous reasons why you might want to delete your Temporary files when you shutdown Windows XP. Your Temporary files folder can get extremely large. Take a look at what is in C:\WINDOWS\Temp.
The first step is to install Xecutor. You can download Xecutor from the Xpertdesign homepage.

The second step is to create a batch file that will delete your temporary files on shutdown. To do this open up notepad and type the following line:
del /Q G:\WINDOWS\Temp save your file as tempdelete.bat. Alternatively, you can download my tempdelete.bat file if you prefer.

The third step is to configure Xecutor to run the tempdelete.bat file on shutdown. Open Xecutor, and answer no to the stream of questions
it prompts you with the first time you run it. Next choose the shutdown tab and add tempdelete.bat file. This is shown below:

After you hit OK you will now see tempdelete.bat in the shutdown tab of Xecutor.

Now just close Xecutor and it will run in your system tray. The last step is to drag the Xecutor icon from your desktop into your Startup folder located in Start >> All Programs >> Startup so that Xecutor starts when you start Windows.

You are all set, now when you shutdown Windows, your temporary files will be deleted, as well. You can add other commands the same way (i.e., delete cookies, delete My Documents, etc.).

What other commands do you think would be useful to run at Shutdown? Let us know in the comments.

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How to optimize (speed up) your Windows XP or Vista in 30 seconds?

Operating System, Performance, Windows Trick, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Posted by Admin November 7th, 2009
PC Tips for Speed Up Your Windows XP or Vista
Ever wonder how easy it is to speed your Windows Vista machine and make it run faster? Yes, its so simple that you dont need to be a computer technician to accomplish this. Microsoft has done a fabulous job to improve overall reliability as well as security in Windows Vista. I meant much better than Windows XP, and yet, there are some reports showing that Vista is outperformed by Windows XP to some extent. But dont worry, we are going to show you how to improve the perfermance of Windows Vista in 30 seconds. Yes, only 30 seconds!
Less is more. This applies to Windows XP as well. Visual effects (graphics and animation) is one of the main culprits that occupy most of the system resource and slowing your computer. By disabling visual effects, your machine gain dramatic improvement on performance. Here is how you do it in Windows Vista:

1. Right-click on My Computer (if you dont see it on your desktop, you can access it from Start->Computer)
2. Then choose Properties, and then click on Advanced system settings.
3. From Advanced, click on Settings.
4. Then check Adjust for best performance under Visual Effects.
5. Click Apply then OK.

That is it! Do you see how simple it is? You dont need to purchase the latest hardware to boost the performance on your computer!

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See all Computers from your Workgroup without Windows Freezing

Performance, Windows Trick, Windows XP | Posted by Admin October 31st, 2009

PC Tips for Browsing Workgroup without windows Freezing

I’m making this how to for those people that want to see the computers from their network but are annoyed by Windows Xp.

Why are they annoyed? When you try to access a workgroup to see it’s computers, windows explorer freezes for a few seconds while searching for computers, that sucks.
Using Command Prompt you can overcome fast and easy this problem.

1.Click Start and then click Run, a box will open.
2. Type in the box: CMD and command prompt will open.
3. Type in the command prompt box: net view
4. A list of computers in the workgroup will be shown.

NOTE: Keep in mind that computers behind a firewall will not appear in the list.

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