PCTips Box

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. (more…)

The Windows Vista Disk Defragmenter has been improved over the Windows XP version, but you can’t see or use all the best features unless you run it from the command line. By default the defrag tool only defragments files smaller than 64 MB, because according to Microsoft’s benchmarks, fragments of this size, which already consist of at least 16000 contiguous clusters, have a negligible impact on performance. If you still want to defrag files larger than 64 MB too, you need to use the -w switch mentioned below to defragment files of all size.

Disk Defragmenter does not defragment files in the Recycle Bin, or files which are in use. Disk Defragmenter will not degragment Bootsect dos, Safeboot fs, Safeboot csv, Safeboot rsv, Hiberfil sys, Memory dmp, or the Windows page file. Using the -b parameter will optimize these boot files. (more…)

The never-ending two-step defragmenting process of Vista can soon become a thing of the past. With certain tools, we were able to cut defragmentation time of 25 GBs of files with Vista Ultimate from 82 minutes to 6 minutes!!! That is defragmenting 10X faster than the built-in Vista defragmenter! The tutorial also works with Windows 2000 and XP.

Right now, many things are probably whirling around in your head:

- Is this true? Yes, it is.
- Does it work? Yes. We will show you charts on hard drive fragments before and after defragmentation.
- This has got to cost money. Absolutely free.

These “certain tools” we will be using are called contig.exe and PowerDefragmenter.
When we used these two programs, the results were as follows: (more…)