Learn how to fix your computer and make it run as fast as possible
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Posted:Nov 12, 2015 6:25 pm
Last Updated:May 3, 2016 9:10 pm
6546 Views
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So it is time for part two of my post on how to fix your computer and make it run as fast as possible. Here are some basic tune up tips I can give you that will help ANY computer run faster. Most are quite easy to do and I will add more when I can.
First and most important is to keep your hard drive less than half full. Preferably 25% full or less. After 25% everything you add will start to slow it down. After 50% it gets ALOT slower. There are a couple easy ways to keep the amount of free space on your drive down. First go into control panel and "add and remove" or "programs and features and remove any old programs or things you never use. First on your list should be ANY toolbars. Toolbars are those extra bars at the top of your browser that usually add stuff or links to search engines or other websites. They get installed automatically by a lot of programs and are a complete waste of space and take up valuable room in your browser window unless you are using them all the time. Bing Bar,Google Toolbar, Yahoo toolbar;Ask toolbar are the most common. Basically anything that says Toolbar unless it is for your antivirus or hardware like your printer or camera or something like that should be removed. Next look for old printers you may have once had and are long gone. HP and Epson software can be huge. Also look for duplicate versions of programs that may still be installed. I see machines all the time with 3 or 4 versions of Java. This is not only a waste of space but a security risk as well. Also make sure you only have one version of Antivirus installed. I see machines all the time with Norton , AVG , Avast and Mcafee all installed. Usually most are expired but they can make your machine run really bad if you have multiple ones loaded at the same time. It also makes it a lot more likely some bad things will get through as sometimes they cancel out each other.
After you do that and get rid of a lot of the junk reboot your machine. Always reboot after doing any kind of serious cleaning as it usually changes things in windows and if you do too much and don't reboot sometimes it locks things up.
Next you need to think about how much real data you have on your machine. If you
have a desktop it is an easy thing to just add another hard drive. They are getting really cheap. A 1 terabyte drive 1000 megs can be bought for as little as $40. A 2TB is only about $75. That is a lot of space. You can then move all your videos , pictures and music to the other drive and make a lot of room on your c drive. If you have a laptop get an external drive. They are not much more and connect to the USB connector on the side. They are not as fast as an internal drive and you have 1 more thing to plug in but they work well. Videos are the biggest space hogs. A full DVD movie uncompressed can be 4-6 GB. Music and pictures unless you have 10, 0000 songs or pictures do not take up that much room. Documents take almost nothing.
After you get the hard drive down the next thing I would do to speed things up is remove the drive indexing on your hard drive. Drive indexing was created by Microsoft way back in XP days and is still on by default on every machine. It basically keeps track of any changes to every file on your computer so that when you search for something it comes up a little quicker. Sounds like a good idea but in reality the few seconds it saves is nothing compared to the overhead of your computer constantly checking itself every time something changes which is basically constantly.
To disable drive indexing just go to My Computer or File Explorer in newer versions. (The little yellow file folder on the taskbar) Left click on C or Local c so it is highlighted. Then right click and go to properties It will show the pie graph at the top with how much space you are using. At the bottom of that window are two lines with check boxes in front of them. The first is compress drive to save space NEVER use this. It makes your computer Much Much slower. The second is Allow files on this drive to have their contents indexed Remove the check mark in front of both boxes then click apply. It will start and then come up with a box which with 4 choices. Choose ignore All Then let it run. It can take quite a while. Sometimes an hour. When it is done it will be back at the screen with just the pie graph.
The next thing I would do is close that and go back to control panel and open system go to Advanced system settings go to performance settings uncheck all the animate and fade and slide buttons. These are the video features that make windows pop up or spin or fade out when you click on them. Nice at first but they serve no real purpose and slow down your video response quite a bit. Then click apply.
Then reboot your machine and you should notice a difference in how fast it opens windows and programs. That is about all the time I have tonight but I will post more soon.
Happy computing till next time.
Surf Safe.
Neal
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Learn how to fix your computer and make it run as fast as possible
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Posted:Oct 30, 2015 12:37 am
Last Updated:Aug 31, 2016 9:38 pm
6634 Views
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Hello all. Neal Donovan here. I have been building and fixing windows and DOS based computers for close to 30 years. I started off going to tech school after high schools and got an associate degree in Electronics and computer repair. Back then in the early 80's there was hardly any internet and the few that were on 300 baud. (300bits/sec) dial up connections. We basically only used text back then. My first PC was a 386/25 25 MHZ computer. It had 1 meg of ram a vga video card an 80 meg Hard drive and a 14" color vga 640x480 monitor. It cost $2000. It ran DOS 4.1. I remember basically locking myself in my room and messing with it non stop for close to 3 days. I spent weeks learning all the commands and how to make it do things.
It is amazing to me how far computers have come since then. There are so many great things people can do with PC's now. The problem is they have become almost indispensable to our everyday lives. All our pictures and music and documents are stored in that box. And when it doesn't work people really freak out. A hard drive crash can be a real tragedy. Years of peoples work and or life memories are at the mercy of electronic devices that can short out, get zapped by power surges or infected with awful viruses and malware.
I have started this blog. (My first in the hopes of helping people solve some of those problems and explain in as simple terms as I can what you should do to keep your data safe and enjoy using your computer instead of cursing it and getting ripped off by so called "experts" who usually just want to scam you for money or steal your information.
I have no interest in either. I am just a simple and smart techie who likes to help people. I will give you the best advice that I know and help everyone as best as I can. I do this full time for a living and spend all my free time on my computers at home and my days off fixing my friends and relatives machines. I have working machines with every version of windows and DOS that I can hook up if you need step by step instructions. You can ask me ANYTHING about computers and I will answer as best I can.
Seeing as this is my first blog ever and I have to work in the morning I will stop here for tonight with just an introduction and a brief overview of what I am thinking about posting. I can of course expand into any topic you might suggest as time allows.
I am betting that if you have read this much and on this site you have a pretty good idea how computers work so I won't get into the basics too much.
The first thing people ask me everyday is Should I upgrade my PC to windows 10?
After all it is technically "free from Microsoft till June of next year if you have a windows 7,8 or 8.1 license.
But everyone knows there is really no such thing as free from a company like Microsoft. There definitely is a price you have to pay for upgrading to Windows 10. That price is basically your privacy. To Microsoft the customer is now their product. If you use the new windows in the way it is intended Microsoft will know everything about you. They can read your emails. Get all of your lists of friends. Where you live. Where you go.(If you have a laptop). What software you have loaded on your computer and if they think it is pirated or illegal they have the right to disable it or delete it. All this is in the TOS -Terms of service- that no one bothers to read. Sure you can turn off a lot of the things that spy on you through changing a lot of the settings and not using a lot of the features. But if you are going to go through all that trouble why would you upgrade your machine anyway. You lose all the features and usefulness of the new OS.
Now you would think by all that I just said that I do not like Windows 10. That is not true at all. I have it loaded on 3 of my 6 main computers I use everyday. Cortana the new voice assistant is fantastic. Ask it anything and it will either directly answer or direct you to the page with the answer. Tell it to remind you to tell Tom he left his notebook at your house the next time he emails you and it will remind you. There are so many cool things you can do with it I have barely even scratched the surface of what is possible.
You can run multiple desktops. Say one for work and one for home. You can snap up to 4 apps back and forth. You can reset it to tablet mode if you have a touch screen. And soon the new laptops will come with cameras that will let you log in to your computer by facial recognition. This I think may be the greatest feature of all. I can definitely see the end of passwords being typed in over and over on the horizon.
Now a lot of people say. "I have nothing to hide and don't do anything illegal online so why should I worry? This may be true or so you might think. But there is a lot of "grey" areas online that are not exactly illegal but frowned upon by governments and may get you on their radar. Do you have strong political opinions? Do you question what the governments and multinational corporations are keeping secret from us. If you start investigating these things Microsoft will know. And they say they will not give that information to the NSA or CIA or any other LEA but can we really trust them. I am not that big of a conspiracy supporter but just the thought that I am being watched that closely makes me a little uncomfortable.
Beyond the privacy thing there is one other thing that should be considered before you update your machine. The upgrade is free and can be rolled back in the first 30 days if you do not like it. After that it basically "eats" your previous windows registration key. There is no going back unless you do a full system image of your old hard drive before you update. (I did this). The other thing I recently discovered is that if you say change out your motherboard or update your BIOS . Windows may get deactivated. This is because it thinks you have a different machine. If this happens I have heard that it cannot be reactivated by Microsoft. You pretty much have to pony up the money to get a new windows key at that point. $100 for home of $200 for Win 10 pro. This is something to consider if you are a techie like me and constantly updating your desktop pc.
It is getting late and I will continue this blog as soon as I can. Thank you all please comment and have a great day/night.
Neal
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