Tada! Its the first actual Lego Tech post for the purpose this blog was created for. I really don’t know what I really should call these posts, though. Should I just call them posts, volumes, episodes, editions, articles, or what? Along with trying to decide that I also need to decide on a format I will use to title the posts. The date format I used in this seems alright, but I don’t know if thats what I’ll go with in the end.
Hopefully though you will enjoy the following post (or whatever):
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Lego Tech
June 6th, 2008
This issue of Lego Tech will begin a series of articles dealing with speeding up your computer, along with the Firefox extension of the week.
Speeding Up Your Computer
Part 1:
From the time that you bought your computer to now, you have probably noticed a gradual decrease in speed of your computer. This is usually caused from a buildup of various things onto your computer. Even if you haven’t changed any of your habits during the time you’ve had your computer, or installed any new software, there is still buildup behind the scenes that is most likely slowing it down.
Note: This article series is for Window’s users, and the software that is used will be for Windows. If you have a different operating system than there is probably ways to do the things described in this series, but they wont be discussed here.
Possible reasons for slow down:
- Fragmented Hard drive
- New software being installed (which can mean multiple things).
- Startup Entries Buildup
- Errors in the Registry
- Unnecessary Addons
- Viruses, Trojans, Spyware, etc
Those aren’t the only reasons, the list is huge. Like one reason could be that your hard drive is actually failing and needs replaced. And, so you’re not worried, hard drive failures are very rarely the case. Especially if the computer was just bought, hard drives normally last about 5 years before begin to degrade.
Besides the gradual slow down, you may just want to make your computer faster in general. Even new computers are not at their top speed. The question is, what can you do to make your computer faster? That is why this is being written, to show you how to do just that.
In this part of the series we will only be covering the small area of “Startup”. This may or may not speed up your computer to much depending on various circumstances, but you should still be able to see at least a small change.
When you login to your computer various programs will start up. Yes, you’re probably thinking about the “Startup” folder in the Start Menu. Part of the startup programs do come from their, but usually thats not all, a lot of times the Startup folder will be completely empty. Why is the Startup programs so important dealing with speed? Well, it takes time to actually load those programs when you login (time depends on various things), taking away time you could be doing something productive. Plus, some of those programs you don’t even use, which is especially bad if they use a lot of resources. There are also programs that you don’t even know are starting up, they just run in the background on your computer. Depending on your computers hardware and settings the affects of different startup programs will have different effects. Such a computer with a large amount of RAM, or a high processor speed.
I myself have a total of 2 programs that startup. These are MSN Messenger and a small program that changes the appearance of my system tray clock.
On a side note I would like to point out that Apple programs, such as iTunes, seem to (From past experiences) take up a good share of resources. I’m not saying that it will on your computer, it just all depends on various things, such as how many resources the other programs your run normally take. I am not saying that you should remove the Apple programs from startup, but I do recommend it, especially if your computer is quite slow. I myself actually would recommend switching software (I use Winamp [which does support Ipods]). You can always click on iTunes like any normal program to open it up, but you may want to leave the startup entry regarding Apple Devices.
Along with Apple there is also Security Software such as Norton’s that you have to think about. I do not have any realtime security software on my computer (meaning it monitors it all the time). Eventually I will discuss if security software is actually needed on your computer in a later issue. For now I would actually disable the security software from starting up. In the next article in this series I will actually have you scan your computer for viruses, and the chances of you getting any form of virus are actually incredibly small. Unless you already have one on your computer, but hopefully your security software would take care of it.
Now that you have a reasonable idea of what startup programs are, I think its time we go and look at whats actually starting up on your computer. To do so we will use Mike Lin’s Startup Manger of which I’m going to ask you to download (preferably the control panel version, which will implement itself into the control panel). There are many other startup programs available, but this one is easy to use and gets the job done. Window’s Vista itself has a startup manager built in, but you may still want to install this tool.
After installing it and successfully opening it up (from the control panel if you installed that version), you will see something like this:
After you have that up, I would uncheck all the checkboxes in each of the tabs. Don’t worry about the names of the tabs. They represent the different areas that startup entries are started. Such as the “Startup (user)” is the startup program folder, and then the “Startup (common)” is also that folder but for All Users on that computer.
Following that go into each tab and check all the things you want to start up. You should be able to tell what each entry is. Like MsnMsg is obviously MSN Messenger. A lot of things are probably printer things that are unneeded, these usually have hp or lx or something in their startup entry name (depending on the brand of the printer).
Once thats done then you can just exit the window. Now the next time you log in to your computer again those changes will take affect. And, hopefully they improved your computer speed somewhat.
There is still a lot that can be done though, next week we will do some virus scanning and cleaning out the registry.
Firefox Extension: Adblock Plus
Adblock Plus – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865
If you asked me to choose the most important Firefox extension, this is definitely the one I would choose. Adblock Plus is an add-on for Firefox that blocks all kinds of advertisements from being displayed.
I really don’t have to go into any more detail then that, its just an awesome extension. After installing this you really wonder what you did without it, and how many ads are actually on pages.
Adblock Plus Rating – 10/10
