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.

Other hard drive problems can be caused by fragmented files. To see if your computer is suffering from this, fire up the Reliability and Performance Monitor. While this is very useful to explore, we will concentrate on the Disk section. If you open this and sort by Response Time, you can see how long some of your disk operations take. The higher the number here, the more your hard drive is being stretched. Should you see numbers above 500ms (0.5 seconds), you need to defragment your drive or add more computer memory.

You can use Task Managerto look for processes that use up a lot of your CPU’s processing power. Sometimes a disk-intensive process will show light processor usage in Task Manager, while slowing the system down through intensive hard drive access, so you need to check both tools to understand what is slowing your system down. Use Task Manager to identify any programs that are doing this. This will either point to a need to defragment the hard drive or add more memory. If this file is the Pagefile.sys file, then it is a strong probability that more memory is needed. The need for programs to access the hard drive will never go away, but a slow system with a constantly illuminated drive light always points to too much hard disk usage.

Once we have tuned the most common areas of the system, we then move on to an area that Windows Vista has stretched far more than Windows XP – the graphics card. While previously the graphics card was only stretched with gaming, it is used extensively by the Windows Aero graphics and now needs to be examined. Aero graphics hit the computer in two areas – memory and GPU (graphics processing unit) performance. To see how much memory is being demanded by Aero, look at Task Manager and search for the process dwm.exe – the memory used by this process is the memory used for Aero. Aero can also cause problems with the PC’s ability to render the screen in a timely process.

There are two tests you can take to see if the graphics card is holding back your system. The first is to switch off the full Aero experience in Windows Color and Appearence. Click on the link to open the Classic appearence properties and select Windows Vista Basic. If this makes your computer more responsive, then your graphics card is causing a problem.

The second test is to run a winsat command that stresses your system and checks to see that it runs adequately. A sample command might be ‘winsat d3d -totalobj 20 -objs C(20) -totaltex 10 -texpobj C(1) -alushader -v -width 1000 -height 750′, with the width and height numbers being adjusted to something close to your screen settings. If this is jerky, then again your graphics card is showing itself as not being great for Windows Vista.

Extreme performance analysis tools
Use the most detailed analysis tools to diagnose performance issues.

1. PERFORMANCE TOOLKIT Download and install the Windows Performance Toolkit from snipurl.com/281w4 to enable the tools that hardware providers and engineers use to diagnose deep system issues.

2. TRACING CHARACTERISTICS You need to start a trace. Begin with the command “xperf -on DiagEasy -f\trace.etl” which needs to be run from a command prompt that was started as an Administrator. Now do the things that cause your system to underperform.

3. STOP TRACE While the trace was running, you will have collected a number of statistics on your system while it was not performing as desired. You now need to stop the trace with the command “xperf-d \ final_trace.etl”, from the same command prompt as before.

4. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS The final trace file can now be loaded and examined. You will notice that the initial screen shows all the activity that was taking place on your system.

5. EXPLORE PROBLEM AREAS Now the detective work comes in. When you see a place with lots of disk or CPU activity, hover your mouse over it to see what caused it. For a more detailed view, select a region and choose Zoom or Details from the menu.

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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.

Even though you might not realise it, your Windows Vista PC isn’t all that far removed from the world’s most powerful computers. A modern CPU is only capable of 30 million FLOPS (giga-FLOPS) but supercomputers comprise large numbers of desktop components running in parallel for the greatest computational throughput. Here’s how to get closer to the supercomputer potential of your PC…

1. Go Quad-Core

A supercomputer is simply lots of standard CPUs running in unison, so add more CPUs by swapping a single or dual-core processor for a quad-core one. Underneath the big fan in the centre of your motherboard, a single clip holds the processor in place. It can easily be undone and a new chip slotted in.

The tricky part is making sure a new processor fits your motherboard. You can find this out by visiting the manufacturer’s website you may need to upgrade the BIOS for the latest chips.

You won’t notice a huge difference in games, but switching between desktop applications or watching movies will be speedier.

2. Speed up your graphics card

If you want faster frame rates in games, you could try overclocking your graphics card – making it run faster than the manufacturer originally specified. The first thing to do is find out what sort of graphics card you’re running. You can do this by right-clicking on the desktop and selecting Personalize > Display Settings. You should see a pull-down menu that says something like ‘Generic PnP Monitor on…’ – the text that follows tells you what your graphics hardware is.

If you have an Intel graphics accelerator, then your best option is to upgrade the card completely (see number 8). If your graphics hardware says ‘GeForce’ or ‘Radeon’, then the chances are you can overclock your card using utilities built into the drivers.

If it’s a GeForce card (made by NVIDIA), go to www.nvidia.com/object/ntune and download the nTune software. AMD cards(marked Radeon) have a utility called Overdrive in the Control Panel – both of these allow you to overclock your hardware.

Now right-click on the desktop and select the NVIDIA or AMD Control Panel option, then go to the nTune or Overdrive tabs on the left. You can change the clock speeds of your graphics processor and memory core, but beware the faster you go, the more chance there is that they’ll overheat and crash your system.

3. Fit more memory

Generally speaking, if you’ve got 1GB or less of system memory then the best way to speed up Windows Vista is to add more.

You can find out how much memory your PC has by going to Control Panel > System and Maintenance > Welcome Center. An overview of your hardware at the top of the window will include an amount of RAM (Random Access Memory). For the best performance in Windows Vista, you’ll need at least 2GB of RAM.

Adding RAM is easy it comes in long sticks, which simply plug into the sockets beside your CPU on the motherboard. You must get the right kind of RAM for your motherboard though most PCs use DDR2 – as the wrong kind won’t fit. Computer Memory is rated by size (in GB) and speed (in MHz), and for the most benefit must be fitted in matched pairs (two sticks that are the same) in dual channel slots on the motherboard.

The slot pairings are usually colour coded, so you should make sure you put identical memory in the two blue slots or the two black slots, for example.

4. Switch to hi-def

Whether it’s a web download or Blu-ray movie, decoding high-definition video requires a lot of processing power, and if you’re getting choppy playback then your CPU is struggling.

Rather than replace your main processor, new AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards have built-in tools for taking the load off of the CPU during video playback. Look for either the GeForce 8xxx or Radeon HD ranges the lower end cards sell for less than £50 and have the same hardware tweaks for decoding HD video as the most expensive. They won’t be great for playing games, but should turn your PC into a super media centre.

5. Improve your cooling

When computer parts get hot, they run more slowly. And conversely, the faster they run, the hotter they get. If you’re going to be tweaking the clock speeds of your PC to speed it up, chances are you’ll need to improve the cooling inside your case. Even on a standard machine, you’d be surprised by how many crashes or lock-ups are due to undetected overheating.

The simplest way to improve cooling is to fit extra case fans. Quiet PC (www.quietpc.co.uk) has a selection of dampened fans that won’t cost much more than a tenner. These either clip on to or screw into spare spaces inside your case, or replace the fans you have. Normal case fans are 8cm in diameter, but larger fans move more air around and can spin more slowly – if your case will take them, consider upgrading to 12cm fans all round.

“The worst thing,” says Quiet PC’s Paul Lee, “is buying a shiny new CPU cooler only to find out that it doesn’t fit your motherboard. Here at Quiet PC we try to provide as much compatibility information as possible, and we’re only a phone call away.”

6. Speed up your processor

Perhaps the most extreme way to turn your PC into a supercomputer is to overclock it. Simply put, this means increasing the clock speeds of various components beyond the manufacturers’ original settings. It’s not as dangerous as you might think, though: many motherboards are guaranteed to run at enhanced speeds, and today’s processors are very robust when it comes to accelerating them.

The speed of a CPU is derived from a multiple of either the Front Side Bus on an Intel system, or of the Hypertransport clock in an AMD one. The easiest way to overclock your processor is to increase these base speeds. Many motherboards come with a Windows Vista utility for this Asus AI is a good example. If you don’t have a piece of software, though, you’ll need to make some BIOS changes. See tinyurl.com/2tyljj for how to do this.

7. Free up system resources

The more programs you try to run at any one time, the slower your computer will be. There are many programs that run in the background all the time and these aren’t immediately apparent on your desktop. Some of them are essential to the operation of Windows Vista, but many especially third-party ones – are not. “No matter how fast or shiny computers are when they’re new,” says Microsoft’s official advice page at tinyurl.com/29t5am, “they all seem to get slower over time.” To free the supercomputer within, you’ll need to pare these background programs back to a minimum. Start Windows Defender (Control Panel > Programs > Windows Defender) and select Tools > Software Explorer. This application will let you prevent services loading when the PC boots – simply disable those you don’t need. If you turn one off and your PC starts having problems, simply turn it back on again in the same screen.

8. Upgrade your graphics card

“If you require more frames per second from a game,” says Paul Lee from Quiet PC, “then upgrading the graphics card is your best option.” If your processor is less than a year old, it’s probably OK with modern game engines. Many new PCs, though, are sold with low-end graphics cards.

Have a look at the Windows Experience Index for your PC. Are the graphics scoring low? For less than £150 you can buy a top-notch GeForce 8800GT or Radeon HD3870 3D card with 512MB of memory. This fits into the long PCI Express x16 slot on your motherboard. It’s usually the top expansion port below the CPU fan. Fitting a new graphics card is easy: check out our guide at tinyurl.com/27ek5r.

9. Enable advanced hard drive performance

Increase the speed at which your hard drive loads program data to the system memory with one simple tweak but be warned, it does mean disabling certain settings that store information. If your PC crashes, you’re at more risk of losing data than if it crashes normally.

Open the Control Panel and navigate to System and Maintenance > System and choose Device Manager. Click on the plus sign next to Disk Drives, and select your hard drive. Right-click on it and choose Properties.

Under the Policies tab, you’ll find a check box for Enable Advanced Performance. Turn this on and click OK.

10. Join the grid

If you decide you can’t turn your own PC into a supercomputer, why not turn it into a small part of a much, much bigger one? There are several ‘grid’ computing initiatives which take the time your PC sits idle and puts it to good use, working on calculations for cancer research or analysing radio waves from outer space.

The most popular way to do this is to sign up for BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). At any one time, BOINC routines can have enough computers contributing to break the 1,000TFLOPS, or penta-FLOPS, barrier. To offer your computer’s services, download the software from boinc.berkeley.edu and choose which projects you’d like your PC to contribute to. While the screen saver runs you could be fighting climate change or simulating the effectiveness of anti-malaria drugs.

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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.

The return of the Quick Launch toolbar

Annoyance: The latest Windows versions let you place the Quick Launch toolbar on the taskbar. From there, you can launch your favorite applications, documents, or folder windows with a single click. In Windows 7, unfortunately, Quick Launch is MIA.

In Win7, a new Taskbar combines elements of the classic Taskbar and Quick Launch toolbars into one. To be sure, many people like the new Taskbar. Al Arnston is one of several readers who suggests that Win7’s “Pin to Taskbar” feature trumps Quick Launch. But you may disagree.

“There’s no need to use the ‘hidden’ Quick Launch toolbar in Windows 7. Just right-click any program and select Pin to Taskbar. This will create an icon for that program and place it on the left side of the taskbar. A single click launches it just like the old Quick Launch did in previous Windows versions.”

Solution:

“Regarding Dennis O’Reilly’s piece on Windows 7 early adopters: Quick Launch is still available, but it’s hidden by default. You have to know where to look:

C:\ Users \ username \ AppData \ Roaming \ Microsoft \ Internet Explorer \ Quick Launch

“Simply create a new toolbar and point to this location. You’ll have to enable ’show hidden files’ to find it.”

An alternate solution that I prefer is to devise a custom toolbar that serves as a Quick Launch replacement. To do so, create shortcuts to your most-used items and place them into a folder stored anywhere on your computer.

(Not sure how to create a shortcut? Right-click the desktop or any other folder and choose New, Shortcut. Enter the path to the file or folder you’re linking to, or click Browse to locate the file. Give the shortcut a name and click Finish.)

Next, right-click the taskbar and choose New, Toolbar. Locate and select the folder you just created and click Select Folder. Voilà!

You can customize the taskbar’s settings by right-clicking it and choosing one of the options. For example, choose Show Text to uncheck and remove labels; or click View, Small Icons to pack more shortcuts into a smaller space. Drag the toolbar to your preferred position in the taskbar. If it doesn’t move, right-click the taskbar and make sure Lock the taskbar is unchecked.

Restore ‘Show Desktop,’ ‘Switch Between Windows’

Annoyance: Other useful items you may be missing from Windows 7’s taskbar are the two buttons named Show Desktop and Switch Between Windows. What to do?

Solution 1: In Windows 7, the Show Desktop button is actually still there, but it’s been moved to the end of the taskbar farthest from the Start button. Similarly, the function served by the Switch Between Windows button is now available by holding down the Windows key and pressing Tab repeatedly to scroll through your open windows.

Solution 2: If you prefer to have these features appear as buttons in your Quick Launch toolbar, you can recreate them. To make a new Show Desktop button, open Notepad or your preferred text editor and type the following lines just as they appear here:

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop

Save the file with the name Show Desktop.scf. Hold down the right mouse button as you drag the file to your Quick Launch bar, and then choose Move Here.

Creating a Switch Between Windows button is even simpler: right-click the Desktop and choose New, Shortcut. When prompted for the location, type the following line:

C:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe DwmApi #105

Click Next, name the shortcut Switch Between Windows, and click Finish.

To give the button an appropriate look, right-click your new shortcut and then click Properties, Change Icon, Browse. Select imageres.dll and click Open. The default selection in the upper-left corner of the window should do the trick. Click OK twice.

Finally, use the right mouse button to drag the shortcut to your Quick Launch bar, just as you did with the Show Desktop button.

Return of the mysterious disappearing taskbar

Annoyance: You install your favorite screen saver on your Windows 7 machine. When you leave your computer, the screen saver kicks in and, eventually, the power-saving settings shut down the monitor. When you return to the machine, the taskbar has disappeared!

Solution: Some third-party screen savers that aren’t designed for Windows 7 can cause this problem. Your first step should be to see whether the screen saver’s developer has an updated version designed specifically for Win7.

If an update isn’t available, locate your screen saver’s .scr file and create a shortcut to it. Store the shortcut on the desktop or somewhere on the Start menu. To make this solution keyboard-friendly, right-click the shortcut and choose Properties. Click in the Shortcut key box and press the key combination you want to use to activate your screen saver. Finally, click OK.

The next time your taskbar disappears, use your keyboard shortcut — or launch the screen saver from the menu or desktop shortcut. The next mouse move or keystroke will dismiss the screen saver — if it has had time to start — and restore your taskbar.

Prevent Win7 from saving duplicate themes

Annoyance: You use the Control Panel’s Personalization applet to modify an existing theme. When you’re done, you click Save to preserve your work. Instead of just saving your existing theme, you have to enter a new name.

You type the same name as that of the theme you changed, but rather than ask whether you want to overwrite the old theme, Windows simply creates another theme with the same name and adds it to the list.

For some bizarre reason, Microsoft thinks this dialog box’s Save function should behave differently than every other Save function in Windows. The result: every little change you make to your theme results in a new copy, even if you want only one.

Solution: You can’t change the weird Save behavior, but at least you can clean up all your duplicate themes. Press Win+E to open an Explorer window and navigate to this location:

C: \ Users \ username \ AppData \ Local \ Microsoft \ Windows \ Themes

Replace username with the name of the current account. Once the folder’s open, delete the extra themes you don’t need.

If you’re not sure which to delete, press Alt, V, D to switch to Explorer’s Details view, then sort the files by date to find the newest ones you created. If you saved over an existing name, the older theme will be named “My Theme” while the new one will be named “My Theme (2).”

Bonus tip: If you decide to change a theme name by renaming the file in this folder — other than just deleting the number Windows adds automatically — you won’t see the new name in the Personalize window unless you open the theme file in Notepad and change the text to the right of the DisplayName= attribute.

Tile some open windows, but not all of them

Annoyance: In XP and Vista, you could selectively tile just the open windows you wanted by Ctrl-clicking their taskbar buttons, right-clicking one of the selected buttons, and choosing an arrangement option on the right-click menu. For some reason, Windows 7 has removed this capability.

You can still arrange all open windows by right-clicking the taskbar and choosing an option, but you can’t limit the rearrangement to just a subset of those windows; you’re forced to minimize the windows you don’t want to tile first.

Solution: The ability to tile windows selectively has been replaced in Windows 7 by Aero Snap. This is a new feature that lets you tile windows side by side by dragging the title bar of one window to the far left side of the screen and another to the far right. The two should snap into position.

Unfortunately, Aero Snap doesn’t work if you have two monitors or if you want to stack one window above another.

If Aero Snap isn’t the window arrangement you’re looking for, press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to launch the Task Manager (or right-click the taskbar and choose Task Manager). In the Applications tab, Ctrl-click only the windows you want to work with. Then choose a tile or cascade option from Task Manager’s Windows menu.

Note that this technique may not work on the first try if one or more of the selected windows are currently minimized or open on different monitors.

Microsoft keeps coming up with new features, but in the process, the company sometimes also discovers entirely new ways to irritate us Windows users. As long as there’s a Windows, we’ll keep showing you how to work around the inevitable annoyances.

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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.

Menu method: For me, the “classic” Start menu provides a better solution. If you organize shortcuts into a hierarchy of menus, each starting with a unique character, you can navigate the menus quickly and launch most programs with only 3 or 4 keystrokes.

For example, to launch Photoshop (which is on my Start menu’s Images menu), I press the keyboard Windows key and then type I, P (see Figure 1). For Microsoft Excel, I type Win, N, X (Start, Numbers, eXcel). Before long, you’ll know your shortcuts by heart.

To get the classic Start menu in XP or Vista, right-click the Start button and choose Properties. On the Start Menu tab, select Classic Start menu and click OK.

Bonus tip. To avoid having menu items start with the same letter, either rename them or place an ampersand in front of any letter in the name. The character following the ampersand will then act as the shortcut for that item.

Mouse methods: For fast launching using the mouse, put the shortcuts you use most often into the Quick Launch toolbar (or another custom toolbar) on the taskbar. Right-click the taskbar to open its properties; add the Quick Launch toolbar if yours is missing. (Personally, I prefer not to pin shortcuts to the taskbar because it quickly fills with open-program icons.)

If you have Windows 7, you can also “pin” shortcuts to the taskbar. Right-click a running program on the taskbar and choose Pin this program to the task bar to make a launch button stay there.

Open another window (Win 7): To quickly launch another instance of a running program, Shift-click its taskbar button. Not all applications support multiple instances.

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PC Tips for Vista to XP Copying Performance being Slower

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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.

Fix notifications

Windows Vista is great at letting you know if there’s a problem with your computer. Your antivirus program should also alert you to potential problems, such as when a virus has been found or if you haven’t downloaded and installed the latest update for the software.

These notifications usually pop up from the notification area when you boot into Windows Vista, and on a computer that’s already struggling, the appearance of such messages could slow down the start-up time even further. You can save a few seconds by making sure that you always read all the notifications and subsequently follow their recommendations to fix the problems.

Not only will this stop the notification from popping up on your screen again, but it will probably also help your computer in other ways.

Change the boot order

When your PC is turned on it searches all its drives, such as hard drives and DVD drives, for boot files to load Windows Vista. These files are always on your primary hard drive, but your PC may search your DVD drives, floppy drives and other places before searching the correct hard drive, and this can add seconds to your startup.

To save time you can change the order that your computer searches your drives, making sure that the drive that Windows Vista is installed on is searched first. To do this you need to enter your computer’s BIOS, which is accessed when your computer is first turned on, before Windows Vista starts.

The method of accessing the BIOS varies from computer to computer – you need to either hold down Delete or sometimes F12. Once inside the BIOS you should see a menu option called something like Advanced BIOS Features. If you have more than one hard drive in your computer, select Hard Disk Boot Priority and select the hard drive that holds Windows Vista.

There should also be a menu option called something like Boot Priority. Select this, and then make sure that Hard Disk is first, followed by CDROM. There may also be an option called Quick Power On Self Test. Select this and make sure it’s enabled. When your PC is first turned on, it runs a number of tests to make sure everything is running properly. Some of these tests are more important than others, and by enabling Quick Power On Self Test your PC skips some of the less important tests, which speeds up your boot times.

Finally, there may be an option called Boot Up Floppy Seek. If you have that option in the BIOS, select it and then disable it. This is a test your computer runs on your floppy disk drive. These are an old form of media, and your PC either won’t have one, or you’ll hardly ever use it, so testing it is unnecessary.

Once you’ve finished in the BIOS choose Save and then Exit. Your computer’s BIOS might be slightly different, so don’t panic if the menus are laid out or named differently to how we’ve said. If in doubt, check the BIOS manual that came with your computer, or on the internet.

Tweak the BIOS to cut start-up time

1 MAIN MENU The main menu of your BIOS should look something like this. Although there are lots of intimidating-sounding options to choose from in this menu, you need only concern yourself with Advanced BIOS Features.

2. SELECTING THE BOOT DEVICE To speed up your computer’s startup, make sure that your first boot device is Hard Disk. Make sure you set your Second Boot Device to CDROM, in case you need to boot from the Windows Vista DVD.

3. SAVE AND EXIT Once you’ve made the changes you want, press Esc to exit the BIOS. You’ll be asked if you want to save your changes. Press Y to save, or N to exit without saving.

Result: Changing settings in the BIOS made the computer load up Windows Vista quicker than before.

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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?

We have a PC at home packed with so much stuff that it takes an age to load Windows Vista, so we decided to test the tweaks to find out how much time we could save.

First things first – Start-up slow-down

We knew that our PC was slow to start, but when we timed it and saw that it took nearly six and a half minutes from the moment we pressed the on button to when the computer had loaded all the start-up programs and was actually usable, we knew that something needed to be done.

Our first port of call was to check out the Startup folder by going to Start > All Programs > Startup. The Startup folder can be a really useful feature of Windows Vista because you can place shortcuts to your favourite programs in there and they will load up when Windows Vista starts.

The problem is, if there are too many programs in there, it will slow down your computer’s startup as your computer loads them all. Deleting the shortcuts from this folder (don’t worry, it won’t delete the actual programs) will certainly help speed things up. Not all programs that load themselves when your computer starts appear in the Startup folder, however.

Take a look at the Notification area of your Taskbar, which is on the bottom right-hand corner of your desktop next to the clock, to see if there are a lot of icons there. Most of these icons are for programs that run in background, and with all of them starting up when you turn on your computer, it will definitely slow it down.

Many of these programs can be safely prevented from starting up automatically, so you only load them as and when you need to. Most of the time you can right-click the icon and either open the program or go straight to the program’s options or preferences, and from there clear a box that says something like ‘Run this program when Windows starts’.

If there are any programs that you don’t need any more at all, go ahead and uninstall them to get an extra speed boost.

Result: After deleting four shortcuts from the Startup folder and cutting down the Notification icons from a massive 19 down to seven, we saw a huge improvement in the computer’s start-up speed.

Going in deeper

Not all programs give the option to prevent them from automatically starting up. To disable more stubborn programs, we went in to the powerful Msconfig utility. Before using this you should create a Restore point so you can revert your PC back to its former settings should anything go wrong.

Click Start and type msconfig. Click the Startup tab and you’ll see a list of programs, the name of the manufacturer of each program, and the program’s path (where it’s kept on your hard drive). Using all this information you can tell whether these programs are essential to making your PC run properly.

As a general rule, don’t disable any programs from Microsoft because these are usually vital for Windows Vista. Any drivers or programs related to your graphics card and other hardware should be left alone as well. Once you’ve disabled the programs you want, exit Msconfig and restart your PC.

If there are any problems or error messages, make a note and go back into Msconfig and check the boxes of the problem programs. You can also stop some services running on startup. Only stop them if you’re sure that you don’t need them. Again, no Microsoft services should be turned off.

If there are any services you want to stop, it’s a good idea to search for the service on the internet to make sure it’s okay to do so. Once again, if there are any problems, open Msconfig again and restart the services.

Use Msconfig to disable more programs at startup

1. LAUNCH MSCONFIG Msconfig is a powerful application that’s usually only used by advanced computer users. This is why it doesn’t have a snazzy name, and why you won’t find it in the Start Menu. To launch it click Start and type msconfig into the search box.

2. TICK THE BOXES Click the Startup tab and then in the Startup Item column clear the boxes of the programs you wish to prevent from loading on startup. Be careful which programs you deselect, however…

3. RESTART YOUR PC For these changes to take effect you’ll need to restart your PC. Make sure you have saved all your work, and then click Restart. This is a good opportunity to examine the improvements that your changes have made so far.

Result: We found a number of programs that didn’t need to load on startup, so we unchecked them. We also found a couple of services that ran on startup that were used by old programs we had long ago uninstalled, so we safely stopped them.

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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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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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