PCTips Box

1. Forgot Windows password ? Reset Windows password
2. Uninstalling Internet Explorer 8
3. Windows XP and Vista: The Benchmark Rundown
4. 2 Quick Windows Tricks
5. Windows XP Shutdown too slow, fix it to shutdown instantly
6. How to Remove or Delete AutoPlay Handler from the Options List in Vista and XP
7. Windows Vista SP1 Improves Speed Up to 86% Faster
8. How to eject cd drives automatically with a keyboard shortcut in windows xp
9. Sizing up your boot drive’s pagefile
10. How to dual boot Vista with Ubuntu
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I have already published one post on How to fix slow opening of my computer and delayed contents display here.

There are still some issues like connected network drives when you use office at your work place.

Like in my office when I login at my system at my work place, according to the user policy every user is connected to the network drives at the server location.

These connection to the network drives make my computer more slow at the time of opening.

Let see how can you disconnect network drives. (more…)

Firefox may be my browser of choice but there are times when it is REALLY slow, so slow in fact that I am sorely tempted to defect to Opera or even gasp Safari!

It’s sometimes even worse when you’re opening up Firefox. You click on that little Fox icon and it sits there thinking “hmmm….he wants me to start up…will I or won’t I? Let’s think about it for a few minutes”. Meanwhile you’re sitting there gnashing your teeth and flirting with the idea of walking on the wild side with Flock.

But you don’t have to wail and despair any more! During a little stroll through SourceForge, I found an interesting program called Firefox Preloader which was short on technical details but long on prospects. It claims to be able to “improve Firefox’s start-up time”. (more…)

In this tip you will learn that how to improve the printing quality. Today most of the printers provide you the method to improve the quality of the printing. In the following section you will find step by step instructions on how to improve the printing quality.

* Go to Start > Control Panel
* In the control panel click on the “Printers and Other Hardware” or “Printers and Faxes”.
* Double Click the Printer’s Icon.
* Click the printer preferences in the printer menu.
* Select high quality or best print option in the printer preferences.

In the Windows based operating systems you can improve the quality of your printings through the above mentioned steps. (more…)

I tend to be wary of programs that purport to make computers go faster, fix problems and so on. The vast majority of them are worthless snake oil. I’m also a bit suspicious of Russian software – they’ve still got a reputation for dodgy programs and scams and anything that comes from a company called Loonies is bound to set the alarm bells ringing so Actual Booster doesn’t get off to a very promising start.

Nevertheless, after giving it a fairly thorough road test I can tell you that Actual Booster really does liven things up a bit. It’s also free, and as far as I can see there’s no iffy content and it doesn’t try to phone home. (more…)

Sometimes making your PC ‘run’ faster is just about changing the way programs run e.g disabling splash screens. This tip will make your machine feel faster, by increasing the speed with which menus load, by removing the delay between clicking on a menu and that menu being displayed, which is enforced by XP.

To enable this tweak do the following:

1. Go to the Start Menu and then click on ‘Run’

2. Type in ‘Regedit’ then click on ‘Ok’ (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…)

Step 1:
The biggest problem is that almost every time you install new software, it loads when you boot. I have applications that I rarely use like optical character recognition, and those I turn to several times a day like MS Outlook. By simply loading software only when you need it, you can cut your boot time significantly. To see what is loading now and to pick and choose in Windows XP click on your Start Menu. Go to Run. Type: msconfig. You’ll be presented with tabs. You’re probably operating under Normal Start Up which loads all device drivers and services. Choose Selective Startup instead. Under Selective Startup I’ve checked Process System.INI file, Process Win.INI.file, Load System Services, Load Startup Intems and Use Original Boot.INI. If you are an advanced user and you know what you are doing you can select or deselect these boxes as you choose. If you click everything except Services and then click disable all, followed by OK, you’ll end up booting in Safe Mode. Our goal here is to cut back on the Start Up programs. Click that tab. There you’ll find a long list of applications like ALCMTR and hpsysdrv. I took the time to enter each of them in Google to search for what they did. Sites like processlibrary.com proved useful in determining whether or not I should enable or disable the applications on booting. Right now I’ve only selected about a third of those listed. My machine boots faster and I’ve notice no lack of performance. (more…)

Let’s say your computer started acting funny and you have no idea what’s going wrong. Maybe it slowed down, or a program or device isn’t working like it should.

Windows Vista can run a diagnostic report to find any obvious problems and save you the time and aggravation of hunting the problem down yourself, especially if you’re not an IT pro. (more…)

For me firefox is the best web browser. Firefox is faster, more secure, and fully customizable way to surf the web. Here’s some tips how to speed up your firefox 10 times faster.

Type about:config into the firefox browser and hit enter. After that, scroll down and found this entries and setup like this: (more…)