N Eye On Silicon

There’s nothing more frustrating than a slow PC grinding its cogs while you wait to check your bank balance before you leave for work in the morning. Clicking Internet Explorer and waiting 30 seconds for the application to load begs for justification as to why you spent $400 on that computer in the first place - wouldn’t it be quicker to just drive to the bank? It could certainly be less stressful.

There is an epidemic of slow computer syndrome, it’s caused primarily by the constant bulky packages we install as consumers. Buy a printer, install the drivers - and the boat load of sofware that comes with it. Even Windows is bloated full of useful tools that you’ll probably never use.

So I want to focus on how to speed up your machine, or rather stop it from running so slowly. We’ll be looking at how you can reduce your computer’s work load, and give your computer more resources to help it better manage the work load it has.

1. Defragment Hard Disks

This should be part of some kind of monthly maintenance. Running deframentation on your hard disks can be done every night, every week or every month - the more frequently you run it, the less time the process will take to complete. Disks ‘naturally’ fragment, and fragmentation causes slower disk access. You can defragment your disks easily.

1. Click Start.
2. Click All Programs.
3. Click Accessories.
4. Click System Tools.
5. Click Disk Defragmenter.
6. In Windows XP, click the C: drive and click ‘Defragment’.
   In Windows Vista, you can check ‘Run on a schedule’ to schedule the defragmentation process. Alternatively you can just click ‘Defragment now’ if you’d like to run the process manually.

2. Tidy Startup Menu

Your startup menu is a folder with shortcuts to applications that Windows loads when it starts up. Often, none of these applications are actually required and can be started manually by loading them from the Start menu. You can delete applications from the Startup folder easily:

1. Click Start.
2. Click All Programs.
3. Click Startup.
4. Right click the application you want to prevent from loading at startup, and click delete. Confirm deletion if prompted.
5. Sometimes the start menu will close after this operation, you can repeat from step 1 to delete other applications from the Startup folder.

3. Use MSCONFIG to disable hidden startup applications.

Windows has a list of applications that load at startup that isn’t readily available, you can use the MSCONFIG tool to disable these applications.

1. Hold down the Windows key and hit R. This should bring up the ‘Run’ prompt, if this doesn’t work then click Start and press Run.
2. Type MSCONFIG, and click OK.
3. Along the tabs at the top of the window, select Startup.
4. In this list, applications that are ticked will load at startup. To prevent an application from loading, simply untick it.
5. If you’re not sure what an application is, Google the name of the application. Google will usually come up with information on the application in its results where other people have disabled it.
6. If you have any problems, you can repeat the process and tick the applications to re-enable them.