Tag: Hard drive

How to Improve Printing Quality

March 03, 2008 by Jason

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. Read More»

Save space when using two drives or dual-booting

February 28, 2008 by Jason

You may be able to free up some valuable space if you’re using two disk partitions, using two physical drives, or dual-booting between XP and Vista on the same machine.

I’ll show you several steps you can take to eliminate duplicate files and get more out of your disks.

Decide on your multiple-partition strategy

Years ago, it was common for users seeking more reliability to divide a hard drive into two or more partitions: portions of a disk, each with a different drive letter. Back then, recovering data from drive d: was easier than from drive c: if the primary partition (containing Windows) became corrupted.

That configuration is rare today, because backup programs and disaster-recovery services have improved. But there are still three situations in which you might find yourself handling two or more partitions or physical disks: Read More»

Dual-booting XP deletes Vista restore points

February 21, 2008 by Jason

My tips explained how to set up a Vista machine to dual-boot between that OS and Windows XP.

But booting to XP on a dual-boot system has the negative side-effect of deleting any Vista restore points, in addition to all but its latest backup file, and a Registry workaround is required to prevent this.

XP dual-boot is not system-restore friendly

Ian Brown was the first to describe an unfortunate fact of dual-booting XP and Vista: Read More»

Dealing With Doubles

January 30, 2008 by Jason

Sooner or later most of us have to confront the problem of running out of hard disc space. Usually there’s no alternative but to bite the bullet and delete some files and applications, upgrade to a larger hard drive, install a second hard drive, or if the PC is coming to the end of the road, buy a new one. However, it may be possible to delay the inevitable by scanning your drive with this freeware utility. It’s called DoubleKiller and its job is to track down and eradicate duplicate files. You would probably be surprised how many duplicate files you accumulate over time, I found several hundred megabytes worth on a quite modestly well-used office PC. Read More»

Save Embedded Web Videos To Your Hard Drive

January 13, 2008 by Jason

Have you ever come across a really cool video on the web and want to download it to your hard drive, but the site doesn’t have the functionality? This is no longer a problem with the UnPlug Firefox Extension.

Simply put, this add-on allows you to download embedded media on a web page to your computer. From the description: Read More»

Clearing out space on your parent’s system hard drive

December 26, 2007 by Jason

I was at my parent’s place and discovered that their home PC’s system partition was nearly full. Naturally the easiest way to free up some storage is to simply delete files that aren’t necessary on the hard drive – particularly in the c:\windows directory.

Here’s some quick ways to clear out some unneeded files and free up some space on your system partition. Read More»

Speed up Firefox without reinstalling

November 03, 2007 by Jason

You cannot imagine life without Firefox but over time, your favorite browser keeps getting slower and slower.

Not only is it slow, Firefox sometimes hangs for no reason, consumes a large amount of memory and CPU usage can climb to 90% or more when you have multiple tabs open simultaneously.

You have uninstalled most of the extensions and toolbars, deleted all the cookies and internet temporary files, cleared up the file download queue and disabled the background check for software updates but none of this has helped you speed-up Firefox. Read More»

How to use ReadyBoost to uh Boost your Performance

October 19, 2007 by Jason

One of the better Windows Vista features I’ve seen is ReadyBoost. Despite contrary misinformation you will read on other sites, this does not add more memory to your system. The flash memory used is nowhere as fast as RAM, but it is sometimes faster than hard drives. Readyboost works by caching your pagefile on the drive. It does not replace the pagefile, it is just a cache. A faster than hard drive but slower than RAM cache. But this speed can make a difference, especially consider the slowness of many peoples hard drives.

How do I use it?: Read More»

Speed up Firefox without Re-Installation

October 09, 2007 by Jason

Problem: You cannot imagine life without Firefox but over time, your favorite browser keeps getting slower and slower.

Not only is it slow, Firefox sometimes hangs for no reason, consumes a large amount of memory and CPU usage can climb to 90% or more when you have multiple tabs open simultaneously.

You have uninstalled most of the extensions and toolbars, deleted all the cookies and internet temporary files, cleared up the file download queue and disabled the background check for software updates – but none of this has helped you speed-up Firefox. Read More»

12 Tweaks – Performance of the Windows Vista

September 16, 2007 by Jason

Windows Vista is a resource hog. Microsoft’s latest operating system will swallow every last bit of hardware resources you throw at it in the race for a top user experience, a concept synonymous with high performance. And yet, there are scenarios in which Vista will eat away CPU cycles, huge amounts of random access memory, completely hug a ReadyBoost USB device and still underperform. The operating system will choke even on the most common of tasks, abandoning the user to slowdowns in system performance and to unresponsive processes catalyzed by nothing more than routine and mundane actions. No doubt, Vista has a few rough corners in terms of reliability and performance, but there are a few solutions available, until Microsoft delivers the first Service Pack in 2008. Read More»