Optimize your computer for peak performance
Rearrange your data
Don’t be shocked, but your computer can get sloppy. Your computer often breaks files side by side to increase the speed of access and retrieval. However, as files are updated, your computer saves these updates on the largest space available on the hard drive, often found far away from the other adjacent sectors of the file.
The result: a fragmented file. Fragmented files cause slower performance. This is because your computer must now search for all of the file’s parts. In other words, your computer knows where all the pieces are, but putting them back together, and in the correct order when you need them, can slow your computer down.
Windows includes a Disk Defragmenter program to piece all your files back together again (if only Humpty-Dumpty had been so lucky) and make them quicker to open.
To run the Disk Defragmenter:
1. In your Start menu, click My Computer.
2. In the My Computer dialog box, right-click on the drive you wish to check for errors (for most of us this will be the C: drive, unless you have multiple drives on your computer), and click Properties.
3. In the Properties dialog box, click the Tools tab, and then in the Defragmentation section, click Defragment Now….
4. In the Disk Defragmenter dialog box, select the Volume (most likely your Local Disk C:) at the top of the screen, and then click Analyze.
5. After analyzing your computer, the Disk Defragmenter displays a message stating whether you should defragment your computer. Press Defragment to clean up your computer if necessary. The Disk Defragmenter will reorganize files by placing together and organizing them by program and size, as shown in Figure 5.
Make Internet Explorer run faster
The Web is a sparkling achievement of modern society. It’s everywhere from the home to the classroom. We use it to communicate, to work, to play even to waste time when there’s nothing else to do.
Yet there’s nothing more frustrating than having this technical marvel at our fingertips 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, only to watch our computers access the Internet at a crawling pace. Thankfully, Microsoft Internet Explorer provides some useful options for quicker Web surfing. Let’s look at these options now.
Reduce the size of your Web page history
Internet Explorer stores visited Web pages to your computer, organizing them within a page history by day. While it’s useful to keep a couple days of Web history within your computer, there’s no need to store more than a week’s worth. Any more than that and you’re collecting Web pages that will slow down your computer’s performance.
To reduce your Web page history:
1. In Internet Explorer, on the Tools menu, click Internet Options.
2. In the Internet Options dialog box, in the History section, find the Days to keep pages in history: box. Type “1″ in this box, as pictured in the image below. Click OK.
Don’t save encrypted Web pages
Encrypted Web pages ask for usernames and passwords. These pages scramble information to prevent the reading of this sensitive information. You can define Internet Explorer to not save these types of pages. You’ll free up space by saving fewer files to your computer, as well as keeping secure information off your computer.
Tags: antispyware, antivirus, Clean up disk, Disk Defragmenter, internet explorer, Microsoft, Microsoft Update, Performance, Remove temporary files, Web page history, Windows
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