Keeping your Hard Drive Organized. Defragging. You probably have heard that a lot. It takes your files scattered all over your hard drives platter (imagine a CD) and places them as close as they can get together so your hard drive has a faster time accessing the data. Download and Run Defraggler from the downloads page. We run it about twice a month because we are nerds, you can run it once every 3 months.
Stop all those start up items from running. They all take up a certain amount of memory, and a bit of CPU usage too. If you don’t use them till you need them, you could save your poor machine from a 5 minute start up time. CCleaner has a place where you can disable certain start up items under the Tools section (Left Hand Side). I haven’t seen a machine that wouldn’t boot if I disabled all the start up items. I typically keep my anti-virus tray icon, and that’s about it. Play around with it, if it stopped certain features like hotkeys, turn the item back on.
Don’t Use a Overkill Anti-Virus (like Norton 360). If your going to buy Norton, buy just the anti-virus. A CPU & Memory hogging anti-virus is typically something that comes with a bunch of overkill features that you can either do for free or can cause issues. Ask us what we recommend, I can’t tell you here because we only sell what does good in the independent labs.
Clean the inside of your machine. Buy a can of Compressed Air, we use Dust-Off (By Falcon) or a Air Compressor (Be Careful, some have high pressure). Go outside. Blow the can into the vents, bursts are best. Desktops, blow everywhere. We have seen machines come in with a good 2 to 3 inches of dust-bunnies on the bottom. If your a smoker, its going to be worse. Save your computer from heat issues and dead fans by blowing the suckers out.
Everybody wants there machine to run at top notch, “like the day we bought it,” its easier than you think. Here are just a few things we like to tell our customers to help their PC’s run quicker. You don’t have to do all of these, but us nerds over here do (and for a reason).
Cleaning Utilities. We use one, called CCleaner. You can find it on our downloads page. This will get rid of most, if not all, of your temporary files that your machine gathers from doing all sorts of tasks. Taking up space and in some cases, slowing you down. Cleans all sorts of other information that I could go into for hours but I’m just going to keep it simple. Download it, Run the Cleaner. We ourselves run it about once a day, after we are done surfing for the day.Keeping your Hard Drive Organized. Defragging. You probably have heard that a lot. It takes your files scattered all over your hard drives platter (imagine a CD) and places them as close as they can get together so your hard drive has a faster time accessing the data. Download and Run Defraggler from the downloads page. We run it about twice a month because we are nerds, you can run it once every 3 months.
Stop all those start up items from running. They all take up a certain amount of memory, and a bit of CPU usage too. If you don’t use them till you need them, you could save your poor machine from a 5 minute start up time. CCleaner has a place where you can disable certain start up items under the Tools section (Left Hand Side). I haven’t seen a machine that wouldn’t boot if I disabled all the start up items. I typically keep my anti-virus tray icon, and that’s about it. Play around with it, if it stopped certain features like hotkeys, turn the item back on.
Don’t Use a Overkill Anti-Virus (like Norton 360). If your going to buy Norton, buy just the anti-virus. A CPU & Memory hogging anti-virus is typically something that comes with a bunch of overkill features that you can either do for free or can cause issues. Ask us what we recommend, I can’t tell you here because we only sell what does good in the independent labs.
Clean the inside of your machine. Buy a can of Compressed Air, we use Dust-Off (By Falcon) or a Air Compressor (Be Careful, some have high pressure). Go outside. Blow the can into the vents, bursts are best. Desktops, blow everywhere. We have seen machines come in with a good 2 to 3 inches of dust-bunnies on the bottom. If your a smoker, its going to be worse. Save your computer from heat issues and dead fans by blowing the suckers out.
