Tag: defragmenting

Firefox databases for better performance

July 29, 2009 by Jason

Since Firefox 3.0, bookmarks, history and most storage is kept in SQLite databases. Also, the default history time span was raised from 9 to 90 days as it became more discoverable and useful thanks to the awesome bar, so depending on your browsing habits it could represent some pretty large databases.

Aas any other database, SQLite databases become fragmented over time and empty spaces appear all around. But, since there are no managing processes checking and optimizing the database, these factors eventually result in a performance hit. So, a good way to improve startup and some other bookmarks and history related tasks is to defragment and trim unused space from these databases.

To do this:

Step 1: get sqlite3, a single file command line SQLite database manager, for your platform (available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X).

Step 2: Copy the downloaded binary to your profile folder where all your .sqlite files reside.

Step 3: Close Firefox. Read More»

Schedule a weekly defragmentation

October 22, 2008 by Jason

If it seems like your computer has gotten slower since you bought it, it probably has. One of the biggest factors that slows down your computer’s performance is fragmentation, a situation that occurs over time, in which files on your hard drive become divided into small pieces. Your computer must read a file to open, save, or close it. So when it reads each piece of a fragmented file separately, the effect is that the file can seem “slow” when you’re working with it.

Defragmenting your hard drive is the process of putting all the scattered pieces of files back together. Microsoft Windows XP includes a tool that will defragment your hard drive for you. To keep your system performing well, it’s a good idea to have Windows XP automatically defragment your hard drive every week. Read More»

8 ways to save time with Windows Vista

August 21, 2008 by Jason

Windows Vista comes with loads of features that can help save you time, especially with tasks that you perform regularly. Try out these tips and see how much time you can save.

1. Send an email straight from your desktop

If there’s someone you often send mail to, you can add a shortcut to your desktop to create a new email. Make a new shortcut and type in mailto: followed by your recipient’s email address, for example mailto:example@pctipsbox.com. Click Next, give the shortcut a meaningful name and then click Finish. The new shortcut will appear on your desktop, and double-clicking it will open up a blank email in your default email editor with the recipient’s address already filled in.

2. Quickly check your network connection status from your desktop

You can create a shortcut to quickly check the status of your internet connection, saving you the effort of clicking through a number of windows and folders. Go to Start > Control Panel > Network and Internet > Network and Sharing Center > Manage network connections. Right-click on the connection you want to check the status of and select Create Shortcut. This will place a shortcut on your desktop, and when you double-click it you will be taken directly to the status page of your connection. Read More»

Speed Up Windows By Optimizing Your Page File

August 19, 2008 by Jason

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»

Turn XP into a Blazing Speed Demon

July 06, 2008 by Jason

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»

4 Ways to Speed Up Your Computers Performance

September 19, 2007 by Jason

Free Up Disk Space
By freeing disk space, you can improve the performance of your computer. The Disk Cleanup tool helps you free up space on your hard disk. The utility identifies files that you can safely delete, and then enables you to choose whether you want to delete some or all of the identified files.

Use Disk Cleanup to:

• Remove temporary Internet files.
• Remove downloaded program files (such as Microsoft ActiveX controls and Java applets).
• Empty the Recycle Bin.
• Remove Windows temporary files.
• Remove optional Windows components that you don’t use.
• Remove installed programs that you no longer use. Read More»

Defragment 10X faster

May 06, 2007 by Jason

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: Read More»