Tag: memory

Windows 7 Performance and Productivity Tips

February 25, 2009 by Jason

1. Find bottlenecks

From what we’ve seen so far Windows 7 is already performing better than Vista, but if your PC seems sluggish then it’s now much easier to uncover the bottleneck. Click Start, type RESMON and press [Enter] to launch the Resource Monitor, then click the CPU, Memory, Disk or Network tabs. Windows 7 will immediately show which processes are hogging the most system resources.

The CPU view is particularly useful, and provides something like a more powerful version of Task Manager. If a program has locked up, for example, then right-click its name in the list and select Analyze Process. Windows will then try to tell you why it’s hanging – the program might be waiting for another process, perhaps – which could give you the information you need to fix the problem.

2. Keyboard shortcuts

Windows 7 supports several useful new keyboard shortcuts.
Read More»

Free Rapidshare Downloader

February 14, 2009 by Jason

Recently we had written about a free download  for rapidshare free users, which lets you download more than one file simultaneously with out any time lag in between. Today we will tell you about another free rapidshare downloader which lets you download any fie from rapid share with ease.

Rapid Download is fast, portable and lightweight download accelerator for rapidshare, the use of this rapidshare downloader is quite simple as you just need to copy all the links of the rapidshare files to be downloaded in a file called download.txt and double click the executable of the application rapiddownload.exe

Rapidshare downloader is very small in size with only 14 KB in size, moreover it also checks whether the file as per the download link is still there on the rapidshare servers before downloading.

Features of Rapidshare Downloader (Rapid Download): Read More»

Problems of Internet Explorer 7

February 08, 2009 by Jason

So you think that everything was going to be great and all will work fine when you upgraded to Internet Explorer 7and all your web browsing problem will be gone? but despite having the latest and stable version of Internet Explorer 7 problems still occurs, such as:

  • Internet Explorer temporarily hangs up while loading certain webpages such as those that use the contain Adobe Acrobat Reader plugin or any pages that contain client-side Java applets.
  • Web Pages takes more time to load than normally expected even if you have high speed internet connection and your computer just comes from a fresh restart.
  • Internet Explorer just stops responding and even refuses to be terminated even if you attempt to end it’s process.
  • Internet Explorer spontaneously crashes and stops running

Knowing the exact causes Internet Explorer 7 problems is just as much a mystery now as it has always been with previous versions of this web browser. Read More»

How to Boost performance by a good partitioning scheme

February 05, 2009 by Jason

Although a PC used for writing doesn’t need to be a high-performance computer, its performance can be improved by a good partitioning scheme. The biggest boost comes from my Paging partition on drive H, which is found on my second physical disk. I use this partition to boost performance in the following ways:

Move the paging file there. A well-known method for improving performance on a Windows-based computer is to move the paging file (pagefile.sys) from its usual location on drive C to its own separate partition on a separate physical drive.

Keep the Paging partition small (4 GB). By default the initial size of your paging file is 1.5 × RAM and its maximum size is 3 × RAM. So if your computer has 1 GB of RAM, which is pretty good for a desktop productivity computer, then setting your Paging partition to 4 GB gives you more than enough room for your paging file without wasting disk space that could be used for other purposes like storing data. Read More»

5 Tips For Computer Troubleshooting

February 02, 2009 by Jason

1. Your computer isn’t turning on? “Oh, no!” You think, “I’d better get a new one!” STOP right there. Before you get too frustrated, be sure you have checked that the power cord is actually plugged into your wall socket properly. You may think it sounds silly, but believe me, it’s more common than you think even for the computer savvy. If your computer is connected through a power board, you should try plugging it directly into the wall (note for the safety conscious: by plugging the power cable directly into the wall, you lessen the chance of power failure and damage to your machine). Another reason that your PC may not start is if you have made any repairs or modification to your machine. You may have unwittingly pulled out a connect plug; check all connections.

2. If your computer is starting but is spitting error messages at you, then you might need to take out any memory modules such as RAM and then reset them by plugging them back into different RAM slots.If you get an error such as ‘Unexpected Interrupt in Protected Mode,’ then there is a problem with the settings you have entered in BIOS. To fix it go into BIOS and set it to default settings. If the problem still won’t go away, then you must remove the CMOS chip on your motherboard then put it back in to clean BIOS completely. Read More»

Ten ways to Tweak your Linux Boot Process

January 16, 2009 by Jason

Linux rarely needs to be rebooted. But when it does, it’s often slow to boot. Fortunately, there are ways to speed things up. Some of these methods are not terribly difficult. (although some, unfortunately, are). Let’s take a look.

1. Disable unnecessary services

Depending upon the use of the machine, plenty of services won’t be needed. Using Linux just for a desktop? Then you won’t need sendmail, httpd, and many other services. If your server is only a Web server, you can shut off many services as well. To do this, you can go to the Administration menu and take a look at the Services entry. Just deselect all of the services you don’t want to start.

2. Disable unnecessary kernel modules

If your desktop is wired to the Ethernet, you don’t need to have a wireless kernel module loaded. This task is a bit more difficult and will require a kernel recompilation, which is not the easiest task to undertake. To do this, you will need the kernel sources. Then, follow the standard steps for compiling a kernel. The difference is that you’re going to go through your system and disable all of the modules you don’t need. Read More»

Windows 7 Increased Performance

January 06, 2009 by Jason

Microsoft is optimizing Windows 7 in order to increase performance, and, in this context, the dispatcher lock is one of the components that has got cut off . According to the Redmond company, fewer hardware locks are synonymous with boosted parallelism, namely a new level of efficiency when it comes down to taking advantage of modern processing architectures. This is valid for Windows Server 2008 R2, namely Windows 7 Server, and, naturally, also for the Windows 7 client, since the two operating systems share the same code base.

“With Windows 7, the dispatcher lock is replaced with several finer-grained synchronization techniques, thus effectively distributing resource contention. The main benefits for applications include increased system performance and more optimal use of available hardware resources,” Phil Pennington, Windows Server Technical Evangelism, revealed.

Evolving from Windows Vista, Windows 7 is embracing the many core CPU world, delivering the promise of enhanced performance through the advantage represented by parallel computing. However, in order for Win7 to be tailored to many core processors, the platform’s kernel had to be freed from past relics such as the dispatcher lock. Read More»

Booting Windows XP with USB Flash Drive

January 02, 2009 by Jason

Almost everyone who has worked with computers for any length of time at all has run into at least one situation in which a problem left a PC unbootable. What if you could return the machine to a bootable state just by inserting a USB flash drive though? Believe it or not, it is actually possible to install a bootable copy of Windows XP onto a flash drive and then boot a PC off of the flash drive. From there, you can use applications that you have installed on the flash drive (anti virus, anti spyware, disk repair, etc.) to fix the PC’s problem. In this article, I will show you how.

What’s the catch?

As with most cool new techniques, there are a few catches. For starters, not every PC is capable of booting from a USB flash drive. For the most part, computers manufactured within the last two years are generally able to boot from a flash drive. Older systems may require a BIOS update, or might not be able to boot from a flash drive at all.

Another catch is that not every flash drive will get the job done. The primary factors that limit your use of a particular flash drive are capacity and speed. Technically, speed isn’t really a limiting factor, but booting Windows will be painfully slow unless you use a flash drive that supports USB 2.0. Read More»

Top 10 – November 2008 Popular Tips

December 01, 2008 by Jason

November 2008 Popular Tips for Pctipsbox.com – TOP 10

  1. Installing Windows XP Using A USB Flash Drive
  2. XP SP3 and Vista SP1 DirectX Update
  3. DirectX 11 for Windows 7 and Vista SP1
  4. How To Reduce Firefox Memory Usage
  5. Make Your Windows Vista Super Fast
  6. How To Change Text On XP Start Button
  7. Vista SP1 and XP SP3 Vulnerability Hit by Malware
  8. Maximize Security in Outlook Express
  9. PcTipsBox October 2008 Popular Tips – TOP10
  10. 9 Tips Make Your Computer Run Faster

Read More»

Double your Firefox speed in just five minutes

November 26, 2008 by Jason

Firefox has been outperforming IE in every department for years, and version 3 is speedier than ever.

But tweak the right settings and you could make it faster still, more than doubling your speed in some situations, all for about five minutes work and for the cost of precisely nothing at all. Here’s what you need to do.

1. Enable pipelining

Browsers are normally very polite, sending a request to a server then waiting for a response before continuing. Pipelining is a more aggressive technique that lets them send multiple requests before any responses are received, often reducing page download times. To enable it, type about:config in the address bar, double-click network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining so their values are set to true, then double-click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set this to 8.

Keep in mind that some servers don’t support pipelining, though, and if you regularly visit a lot of these then the tweak can actually reduce performance. Set network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining to false again if you have any problems. Read More»