Few things are as frustrating as dealing with a slow, sluggish computer. When a computer is brand new, it works wonderfully well. Over time, though, its performance can slowly begin to worsen. This happens for a number of reasons, but the biggest culprits are things like spyware, adware and other computer threats that are unwittingly downloaded along with other content while online. You don’t have to download thousands of MP3s, movies or other items to experience these problems, either – nobody is immune to them. Instead of accepting the situation, there are plenty of techniques and strategies that you can use to make it better – a few of the best ones are outlined below.
Strategy #1: Clean Your Computer’s Windows Registry
The biggest cause of slow, sluggish PC performance is errors and problems within its Windows registry. Adware, spyware and other threats usually target the registry, damaging or misplacing important files within it. When it comes to PC cleaning, a daily Windows registry cleaning should be at the top of your list of priorities. However, this should never be done manually – there are too many opportunities for major errors that could seriously damage your PC’s operating system. Instead, invest in a high-quality Windows registry cleanup program and configure it to run once per day – you won’t believe the difference that it makes.
Strategy #2: Remove Unneeded Files
Every time you log on to the Internet or otherwise use your computer, temporary files are generated. They are usually only needed once; however, they don’t disappear on their own. Instead, they accumulate over time until they are cluttering up your computer’s file system and affecting its performance. While it’s possible to remove these files one-by-one, it’s much easier and quicker to use a PC cleaning tool that’s designed for the purpose. Try to do so about one time per week to keep your computer humming along with ease.
Strategy #3: Remove Unneeded Programs
Like many people, you probably download and try out many different programs each month. How many of them do you actually end up using on a regular basis? Chances are, not very many of them. By getting into the habit of uninstalling unused and unneeded programs, you can keep your computer’s file system a lot less cluttered. In turn, your PC’s performance will improve dramatically. You can optimize your computer in this way by using its Add/Remove Programs feature. Its location varies by operating system, but you should be able to find it somewhere in the Control Panel.
Strategy #4: Empty the Recycle Bin
When you click “delete” on a file or a program, it doesn’t go away for good – not immediately, anyway. Instead, it sits in a kind of purgatory in your computer’s Recycle Bin. As things pile up in the Recycle Bin, your computer can start exhibiting some very annoying problems. If sluggish startups and frequent crashes are occurring with increasing frequency – and your computer’s recycle bin is very full – go ahead and empty it. From then on, get into the habit of doing so about one time per week. This small but important strategy can make a huge difference.
Strategy #5: Perform a Disk Defragmentation
Windows isn’t very efficient when it comes to storing files. It actually splits them up, depositing them into whatever spaces are available. The more spaced apart the pieces of a file are, the harder your computer has to work to make them run. The Windows disk defragmentation system tune-up utility works to piece all of those files back together again. The process is a long one, though, and only needs to be done about four times per year. Set it up to run automatically once every three months. By doing so, you’ll be able to keep your computer running in tiptop shape.
When it comes to keeping your computer running optimally, small but regular maintenance is the best way to go. Protecting your PC only does so much; even the most careful Internet users in the world unintentionally download malicious software from time to time. By using basic system tune-up tools, cleaning your computer’s Windows registry regularly, performing regular file-cleaning maintenance and otherwise optimizing your PC, you should be able to keep it in like-new condition for a lot longer. Even if your computer has been performing slowly for some time, beginning this regimen is sure to produce results. In the end, you’ll be able to enjoy a computer that flies along – instead of one that spins its wheels.
Wireless routers operate on a fixed channel. Since most routers ship with a pre-selected channel, the wireless signal may interfere with other routers in the vicinity that are operating on the same channel.
Changing the wireless channel from the factory default is a good starting point if your wireless signal strength is poor.
2. Give the router space to breathe
The biggest advantage of a wireless router is that it can penetrate doors and walls – but that doesn't mean you can just stuff it next to a wall or cordless telephone, or use it as a stand for your stack of DVDs. Treat it with respect.
Try to keep it in a central location, away from other wireless devices; make sure it's not in direct sunlight; lift it off the carpet; and ensure its vents and air holes aren't covered.
3. Improve reception
Try as you might, you'll find it's sometimes not possible to put the router in a good spot. One way around the problem is to buy a router with multiple antennas and point them in a variety of directions covering your home.
Alternatively, if you've already got a router, check whether it's possible to upgrade its antennas to something stronger. However, don't get disheartened if your router doesn't have any antennas. A wireless repeater compatible with your router is a perfect solution.
4. Use WEP
Running an unsecured network will earn you brownie points from neighbours and hackers with cars, but that's about it. Wireless routers support a variety of encryption methods, such as WPA and WEP, but these aren't enabled by default.
WPA2 is the most secure method at the moment, but before deciding on an encryption method, make sure your network cards and adapters support it as well. Bear in mind that older machines – and games consoles such as the Nintendo DS – don't support WPA.
5. Restrict access to specific PCs
If you really don't want to use encryption, you can force your router to only connect to specific PCs. Your router identifies each computer by the unique MAC address of its network gear. Feed it a list of MAC addresses to connect to and you save yourself the trouble of entering a password each time you log in.
The disadvantage is that you'll have to add the MAC address of any new computer before it can get on your network – which is probably a more annoying way of getting things done.
6. Disable SSID broadcast
All wireless routers have a Service Set Identifier (SSID) that identifies them to network computers. Routers from the same manufacturer generally ship with the same SSID; 'Netgear' or 'Cisco', for example.
You should first change the SSID to something unique to set your router apart from those of your neighbours. Then, once all your hardware has been set up, it's better to turn off broadcasting the SSID altogether. This ensures your router isn't displayed in the list of available networks, and won't be a target for potential hackers.
7. Keep the firmware updated
Router manufacturers keep working on firmware, even after hardware has been shipped. In addition to tweaks in the user interface, new versions might make better use of the various components in the router, or add extra features.
Just like with an operating system, it's a good idea to upgrade the firmware of the router regularly – check the manufacturer's website for a new version. In the good old days, there was the risk of a botched firmware upgrade bricking your router, but it's a lot safer today.
8. Familiarise yourself with the router manager
All routers ship with a browser based manager. To use many of the tips in this article, you'll have to log in to this interface – try typing 192.168.1.1 into your web browser for the most common location.
It's a good idea to familiarise yourself with the various options and settings you can tweak from within this software. Many routers also have detailed documentation that's updated regularly, so hunt out the latest manual online.
9. Check your connections
There's nothing more irritating than receiving a 'cannot connect to remote machine' error. To ensure a solid connection, use Ethernet cables where possible. It's also a good idea to check the connection between the two PCs with the ping command.
To do this, simply open a command line and type, for instance, ping 192.168.1.2. You'll need to replace the address given here with that of your target machine. Ping works identically on Windows, Mac and Linux.
10. Forward ports
Many servers and applications – for example, file-sharing software, FTP servers and music-streaming servers – need to serve people outside the network. These applications accept connections on specific ports.
With port forwarding – check your router's interface – you can poke holes in your router and ask it to direct incoming traffic on a particular port (or, if you wish, a range of ports) to a specific computer that's on the network.
11. Change DNS providers
DNS is what fetches you a website by translating the human-friendly address, such aswww.pcplus.co.uk, into a bunch of machine-friendly numbers. It also displays the '404 page not found' error, corrects misspelt URLs and finds the fastest route to a web server that hosts the site you want to visit, along with lots of other cool things.
Generally, it's up to the ISP to put up a DNS server. However, there are other free services as well, including the likes of OpenDNS and Google Public DNS.
12. Use USB adapters
These days, it's difficult to find a laptop or netbook without a built-in wireless module, but if you've used one, you'll know that they can't always be relied upon. Network cards with antennas are the best option, but they're really only suitable for desktops.
If you really need both mobility and assurance, make sure you get a USB adapter. Most of them ship with a Windows driver, but many work out-of-the-box on Linux as well.
13. Enable Dynamic DNS
The Dynamic DNS feature enables you to connect to your computer remotely. Back in the day, when real-estate on the web was expensive, it was a wonderful option to show off your HTML skills and host your own website.
Now, by associating your dynamic IP address with a domain name, DDNS enables you to connect to the internet-exposed home computer from anywhere in the world. In addition to enabling the feature on your router, you'll also have to register with a dynamic DNS provider, such asDynDNS.org.
14. Save power with Wake-on-LAN
What's the point of keeping a print server on when there's nothing to print? The smart way to save energy is to use the Wake-on- LAN feature of the network card. Thanks to this, you can put the machine to sleep after it's been configured to wake upon detecting network activity.
15. Encrypt your online activity
With the range of snooping tools now available, it isn't safe to do anything online without covering your footprints. There are lots of tools that promise to encrypt your online activity, making it completely unintelligible to anyone who might be listening in.
You can configure a firewall on a Windows or Linux machine, and there are also a bunch of third-party software firewalls available. However, building a firewall isn't easy. If you're serious about putting one up, download a dedicated firewall distro, such as Ebox.
17. Install the software
Ebox is distributed as a Live CD ISO and there are VirtualBox/VMWare images as well. It's based on Ubuntu Server 8.04. You can also pull in Ebox packages to a standard Ubuntu Server 10.04 installation. You can find it atwww.ebox-platform.com.
18. Configure settings
Ebox can be adapted flexibly to your network. You can use it to restrict services that can be accessed and slice the network to keep some areas more secure than others. The distro runs a browser-based interface for adding, removing and configuring the components.
19. Filter content
Besides the firewall, intrusion detection (via Snort) and filtering content (via DansGuardian) are two other highlights of the distro. DansGuardian can also plug into the ClamAV antivirus scanner and filter content based on known virus signatures.
20. Exploit other features
In case you're still not satisfied, Ebox can also act as a gateway and provide a host of other services. It bundles various applications that enable you to turn your network into a VPN, host XMPP chat sessions or run a Postfix mail server, a Squid web proxy and more.
21. Turn on UPnP
Universal Plug and Play helps smart devices that support UPnP to discover each other without any user intervention. Once turned on from within your router, UPnP enables a compatible infrared device, a Bluetooth phone or a FireWire camera to see and talk to each other.
22. Write files remotely
The most logical use of a network is to share files. This is the job of the SMB protocol. Thanks to it, you'll be able to write files to a remote network share via Network Neighbourhood. On Linux, the SMB protocol is implemented by Samba.
23. Share printers remotely
In addition to sharing files, SMB can be used to share printers attached to a Windows machine. Once configured via the Windows Control Panel, a printer can be used to accept print orders or even be managed from a remote machine, irrespective of its operating system.
24. Format shareable partitions as FAT
PCs running Windows can easily see each other and share files. For Linux or Mac machines, ensure the partitions are formatted with the FAT filesystem. Create them as Samba shares and they'll show up under Network Neighbourhood.
25. Plug in USB drives
Once, if you wanted to share files on the network, a network-attached-storage, or NAS, device was the best bet. Not any more. New routers enable you to plug in one or more USB devices that are automatically accessible by all the users connected to the router.
It is often seen that many people want to secure their data from other users or their friends. For this purpose they use different methods to hide their data but all these tricks are not reliable. BUT now I am telling you a secure method to hide full drive. You can put all your data in a drive and after applying this trick you will be able to hide full drive. To learn this trick, follow these steps.
First of all logged into administrative account.
Click on start, open run and type “CMD” and press enter.
Type “diskpart” and press enter.
After few seconds diskpart utility will appear.
Now type “list volume” to show list of volume and press enter.
Select the Drive or volume that you want to hide. If you have four drives C,D,E,F, and you want to hid “D” drive, then type “select volume 1” and press enter.
Now in the next step type "remove letter D" to hide this drive.
Close CMD and open My computer to check…drive D is not there…
Now if you want to show the hidden drive then in step 7 type “assign drive d” and check “My computer”. Drive is back now.
Some time an error occurs while you are using XP. A little dialogue box appears asking if you want to send report to Microsoft for this accident or not? Mostly when we press the button “Don’t send” The software we are using, turns off and we do not get any chance to save our working data. You can solve this problem simply and after this process you will not see this error box again. Just follow these steps.
Right click on “My computer” and click on ‘Properties”
On system properties dialogue box click on ‘advance tab”
Click on the error reporting button.
Click on “Disable error reporting”
It’s better for you to Place checkmark on “But notify me when critical errors occurs”
It is common observation that some times our computer slows down due to low performance of hard drive. This problem happens due to the slow performance or poor speed of hard drive. When we say about poor performance, actually we mean, poor speed of reading/writing of hard drive. This problem can be solved by increasing the hard drive speed. Follow these steps to solve your problem.
Click Start menu and select run.
Now type (sysedit.exe) in run and press enter.
System configuration editor will appear.
Here you can see some multiple windows but you will select (system.ini).
This window contains a line (386enh)
Now after this line type (irq14=4096)
Now close this window and save it.
Reboot your computer now.
You will surely feel better performance of your computer.
Recommended minimum hardware requirements for Windows Vista
The following list describes the recommended minimum
hardware requirements for basic functionality of the different editions of
Windows Vista. Actual hardware requirements will vary, depending on system
configuration and on the programs and the features that you install. If you
install Windows Vista over a network, additional hard disk space may be
required.
Windows Vista Home Basic
800-megahertz (MHz)
32-bit (x86) processor or 800-MHz 64-bit (x64) processor
512 megabytes (MB) of
system memory Note On system configurations that use system memory as graphics
memory, at least 448 MB of system memory must be available to the
operating system after some memory is allocated for graphics.
DirectX 9-class
graphics card
32 MB of graphics
memory
20-gigabyte (GB) hard
disk that has 15 GB of free hard disk space
Internal or external
DVD drive
Internet access
capability
Audio output
capability
1) Shall we begin? (Image 1.1)
After configuring the system for booting from a CD/DVD, the Windows Setup
screen appears.
At this point, Setup is loading the driver files it needs to continue with
installation.
2) Progress Bar: (Image 1.2)
The next screen is a more graphical progress bar indicating Windows Vista is
still working in the background.
3) Option Selections: (Image 1.3)
The first options you will come across are selections for Language, Time and
currency format, and Keyboard layout.
Make your selections by using the pull down menus and press the Next
button.
4) Install Now: (Image 1.4)
Here we have the option of repairing a previous installation or
"Install Now."
Highlight the "Install Now" button to continue to the next screen.
5) Please Wait: (Image 1.5)
Windows Vista is working in the background. This may take several minutes
depending on the system.
6) Product Key: (Image 2.1)
This screen is where you enter your product key or "CD Key" as it
is sometimes called.
An option also exists to automatically activate Vista upon first coming
online. I uncheck this box to ensure everything is running smoothly before
activating and having issues later on. 30 days is the standard amount of time
before activation is required, though some products (such as MSDN
subscriptions) have 60 days or more.
After entering your product key, press the Next button.
7) License Agreement: (Image 2.2)
Here we see the License Agreement you must accept before continuing.
After reading the agreement, check the box next to "I accept the
license terms".
8) Option Selections: (Image 2.3)
Here we would be able to choose an "Upgrade" install (if running
setup from a previous version of Windows, such as XP) or a "Custom"
(clean) install.
Select the whole box containing "Custom (advanced)" to continue to
the next screen.
9) Hard Drives: (Image 2.4)
This is where you can select which hard drive/partition to install Vista on.
Since this system only has one hard drive, only one place Vista can go.
Advanced options are shown in the next screen shot.
This is also where you would install drivers for your RAID/ACPI controller
by using the "Load Driver" option. After the installation of the
RAID/ACPI drivers, your hard drives should appear as shown tot he right.
If no additional drivers are needed, select the Next
button.
10) Advanced Options: (Image 2.5)
The advanced options allow creation of multiple partitions and the option of
formatting existing partitions.
After finishing your particular partition configuration that you desire,
select the Next button.
11) Installing...: (Image 3.1)
Here is where Vista installs major components of the OS. This process can
take 10 to 60 minutes depending on the system.
12) Reboot: (Image 3.2)
Here we see the system needing to reboot to continue installation tasks.
You can hit the Restart Now button or just allow the reboot
to happen automatically after several seconds.
13) First Time: (Image 3.3)
Here we see a "..." progress as Vista tries to start for the first
time. This process may take several minutes before going to the next screen.
14) Completing Installation: (Image 3.4)
Vista continues to install at this screen. Depending on system, another
reboot or two may happen before the next screen is displayed.
15) Account Creation: (Image 3.5)
Here is where we create the first user account for the system and select an
icon to be displayed on the login screen. Ensure you password your account.
After finishing entering your information and icon selection, select the Next
button.
16) PC Name: (Image 4.1)
Here is where we can name the system for networking purposes. By default, it
uses the account name entered in the previous step and adds "-PC" to
it. We can also select a background for the desktop.
After making your selection, select the Next button.
17) Updates: (Image 4.2)
Here we can configure Windows Update with several options. I suggest
"Use recommended options" or the top option for most PC users.
18) Time Settings: (Image 4.3)
Here is where you can set the time and daylight savings time options.
After configuring your time zone, clock settings and date, select the Next
button.
19) Network Configuration: (Image 4.4)
Vista now asks our network configuration by asking "Home, Work or
Public Place."
Descriptions are expanded on screen so I will no go into them here.
Make your selection to continue to the next screen.
20) Thanks!: (Image 4.5)
On this screen, we are thanked by Bill G. for installing Windows Vista.
After you are done being thanked, select the Next button.
21) PC Performance: (Image 5.1)
Vista now checks the system performance to automatically configure a few
options. This may take several minutes while the system does this and it will
only do it this one time.
22) Login: (Image 5.2)
We are finally greeted with the login screen, however, there is still more
configuration to come.
Enter in your password that you used previously during the install process
and hit ENTER or the little blue arrow to login.
23) Desktop Setup: (Image 5.3)
Your account profile starts being created here starting with your personal
desktop configuration. More happens on the next screen. This process will also
take several minutes, but only happen once.
24) Account Profile: (Image 5.4)
Vista now sets up profile configurations for Internet Explorer, Windows
Media Player as well as a few more Windows applications. This could take
several more minutes but we are almost there!
25) Welcome Screen: (Image 5.5)
Vista is installed!
On this screen, we are presented with our system configuration as well as
several different options.
I hope you enjoyed this install guide and I thank you for reading!
