PCTips Box

If you have only one hard drive, just leave well enough alone. But if you have two or more internal or external hard drives (not just disk partitions), your PC will be peppier if you keep the default paging file (what Microsoft calls the virtual memory disk space) on your boot drive (the one that holds Windows) and add a paging file to the second drive.

To do so, log in to Windows as an administrator and verify that you have more than one hard drive in your computer: Click Start, Run (just Start in Vista), type diskmgmt.msc, and press to open the Disk Management utility (click Continue in the User Account Control, if necessary). (more…)

By default Windows Vista will automatically defrag your hard drive (defrag: reorder files on the physical hard disk and not to make them easily accessible / re-organising your file cabinets).

The default is that Vista itself schedules the best time for this to do, while this could decrease real-time performance it might be better if you choose when to defrag yourself. An easy way to disable this scheduled defragmentation is as follows. (more…)

When a users enters text in the search box on the start panel Windows automatically searches the file index as well. The file index includes all of the searchable files on your hard drive and can be quite large. One way to speed up searching through your start menu applications is to narrow the scope of the search so that it does not include hard drive files.

Prevent Start Menu Searches from searching the File index: (more…)

There are many free software diagnostic tools available to test and help you determine what, if anything, is wrong when you suspect there may be a problem with a hard drive.

Some of these tools are built in to your operating system already and are ready to use right now while others are available from your hard drive manufacturer.

Interested in some slightly more costly but arguably better third-party hard drive tools? (more…)

Scanning your hard drive using Error Checking can help diagnose and even correct a wide range of hard drive errors. Error Checking replaces older Windows hard drive diagnostics such as “scandisk” and “chkdsk”.
Difficulty: Easy
Time Required: Anywhere from 10 minutes to 2 hours or more, depending on the size and speed of the hard drive
Here’s How: (more…)

As some of you will already know, Windows XP keeps a record of all files on the hard disk to try and improve searching speed. The only downside to all of this is that your PC will have to be indexing all of the files, so if you don’t use search very much you can disable this feature: (more…)

I have found my first bug in the final code of Windows Vista. A few weeks ago after my hard drive was getting low on space I ran disk cleanup to try to delete some unneeded files. Since I needed a lot of space fast I also checked the option to clear my hibernation file. It turns out that was a big mistake.

After clearing my hibernation file my laptops ability to hibernate was destroyed. It was so badly damaged that I could not get to the control panel hibernation settings to turn it back on. Thanks Disk Cleanup! (more…)

Here are two easy registry hacks for minor performance gains. First, turn off the low disk space checks:

1. Using the left side of the Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies
2. Right-click in the right pane and select New Key.
3. Name the new key Explorer.
4. In the Explorer key, right-click in the right pane and click New DWORD (32-bit) Vaue.
5. Name the DWORD NoLowDiskSpaceChecks. (more…)

XP automatically updates the date and time stamp with information about the last time you accessed a file. Not only does it mark the file, but it also updates the directory the file is located in as well as any directories above it. If you have a large hard drive with many subdirectories on it, this updating can slow down your system.

To disable the updating, start the Registry Editor by selecting Run from the Start menu, typing regedit in the Open text box, and clicking OK. When the Registry Editor window opens, navigate through the left pane until you get to (more…)

Windows Vista has many new features that are designed to help older computers run Windows Vista better. One of those features and the topic of this tweak is called ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost helps your computer by giving it more high-speed memory. If your computer is running low on RAM then it has to kick a lot of applications out of high-speed physical memory to the paging file on your hard drive. This usually results in a big hit in performance and increased activity on your hard drive. ReadyBoost helps this situation by giving Windows an alternative to having to stick data into the slow paging file on your hard drive. Instead, ReadyBoost uses a USB storage device that is faster than a hard disk. This results in a performance boost because Windows will have a high speed alternative than using the slow paging file on your hard drive. (more…)