Tag: defragment
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. Read More»
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The page file is a dedicated spot reserved on your hard drive that the computer refers back to when it needs extra memory for programs and applications. Page file, or virtual memory is the slowest component of the memory process, because your computer has to call to the hard drive to access the page file. By optimizing your page file you can speed up Windows’ responsiveness and performance.
Defragmenting The Page File
Defragmenting your hard drive is recommended by everyone, but what about your page file? Your page file too, like the hard drive, can get cluttered and fragmented so it’s important to make sure your page file is defragmented for optimum for performance.
There are two main methods for defragmenting your page file: Installing a page file defragmenting software, or disabling the page file then running the Windows Disk Defragmenter. Read More»
Posted in Windows XP | 2 Comments »
A fast PC has little to do with the Internet speed up situation. Oftentimes, making simple adjustments to a computer will enable it to load web pages faster.
Clearing the clutter that gets downloaded into the PC or switching to a better Internet service provider that does not clog up PCs will often do the trick. But achieving an Internet speed up necessitates a number of things.
Internet Speed Up Pointers
The download speed often boils down to how well and how efficiently a site was created by its website designer. Many websites aren’t organized enough to allow for quick downloads. Some of them feature content that take ages to load, hence the sluggish Internet speed. Here are Internet speed up tips you should know that can help speed up download activities. Read More»
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Is your windows Vista getting slower and slower now that you have been using it for almost a year and have installed many programs and used up more space since you first installed the OS? If so here are a few tips to tweak your PC to get that boot up performance back making it quicker.
First thing you should do is always get rid of your temporary files and any unused programs. Once you have done that then run the defrag tool to reorganize your hard drive. Defragmenting your files puts them back into one contiguous space on your drive optimizing your boot time.
To get Vista’s defrag tool to give you some information about your hard disk, and to controlWindows Vista Memory which hard disk or partition it defragments, you will need to use the command line defragmentation utility. It will still not give you any feedback while defragmenting, just as the GUI version of the defragmenter will not, but at least you can get information on the fragmentation level of your hard disk, control whether to defragment even if the file fragments are larger than 64 MB, and control which partition or hard disk to defragment. Read More»
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1. System Start-up packed with too many applications (Start-up overload)
Over time, as you add more and more programs to your computer, many of these applications automatically add themselves to your Windows Start-up folder. Additionally, these applications can add themselves quietly to a hidden area of your Windows Start-up system (accessed via the MSCONFIG run command). In extreme cases your PC will appear completely frozen.
Limiting the number of applications loading themselves at start-up can speed boot times considerably and increase overall system performance. Read More»
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I used to rely on Norton’s Speed Disk, then, eventually Perfect Disc and Diskeeper to optimize my HDD. Defragmenting is the idea- an antiquated process of reorganizing bytes on spinning platter so that each file is grouped into contiguous locations on the disk. Many still believe that defragmenting hard disk drives on a regular basis keeps PCs operating at peak performance. But that idea is behind the times.
Defragmenting served its purpose back when folks chugged along on 486DX4 PCs powered by 5400rpm drives. Now those where slooooow drives and extra spindle movements arising from defragmentation truly hobbled the system. But that’s no longer the case. Today, 7200-RPM hard-disk drives with monster seek and latency times are the bare minimum; most brag a 16-MB cache buffer. Couple that with Windows XP’s high speed NTFS and you’ll quickly discover that defragmenting no longer makes much improvement, if any, to system performance. I say this after thorough experimentation on my QuadCore running on a 10,000RPM Western Digital Raptor. Read More»
Posted in Computer, Windows XP | 2 Comments »
No matter how fast or shiny computers might be when they are new, they all seem to get slower over time. That state-of-the-art PC you bought last year might not feel like such a screamer after you install a dozen programs, load it with antispyware and antivirus tools, and download untold amounts of junk from the Internet. The slowdown might happen so gradually you hardly notice it, until one day you’re trying to open a program or file and wonder, “What happened to my poor PC?”
Whatever the cause, there are a lot of ways to help speed up Windows and make your PC work better even without upgrading your hardware. Here are some tips to help you optimize Windows Vista for faster performance. Read More»
Posted in Windows Vista | 1 Comment »
1. Open the command prompt with administrative privileges by clicking the Start orb, All Programs, Accessories, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as Administrator.
2. Type defrag c: -b (assuming you want to defragment files on your C: drive) and then press Enter on your keyboard. You could also type defrag –b to defrag boot and application files on all hard drives.
3. You won’t see any output in the command prompt during the defrag process.
4. When it’s finished defragmenting a new line will appear in the command prompt. Read More»
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Slow computer getting you down? Wish you could speed up your system so that games won’t crawl by like a slide show permanently set to slow? Well look no further! I shall share five easy steps that you can take to improve your system’s speed! Most of them are free of charge, and all of them should have some effect on your system. So without further ado, we begin with:
1. Remove spyware and adware from your system. Have you noticed recently that ads seem to pop up whenever you go to a Web page? Or that Internet speeds are about that of diseased livestock? Your system’s probably chock full of spyware. What to do? Well, thankfully there are several things you can do. First, download either Spybot-S&D or Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware, and run it. This should remove most if not all of the spyware and adware on your system. Neither of these are particularly robust, however, so we move on to: Read More»
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Is Vista SP1 really the shot in the arm your Vista system needs? We’ve spent many hours strapped to our benchmarking system in a caffeine and pizza fuelled haze to uncover these very interesting results.
We tested Vista:
* as it comes out of the box (RTM — or “release to manufacturing”)
* as it comes out of the box, with all Windows Update patches applied (”RTM patched)
* with the final SP1 service pack applied
Testing Setup
Although Vista SP1 has many documented improvements, we aimed to test a particular scenario which has proved to be a major problem for pre-SP1 users: file copy speed, particularly over a network. Read More»
Posted in Hardware, Windows Vista | 4 Comments »
