Technical Tidbits™

In her day she was top of the line – a beauty. Her ebony case glistened in sunlight and flirted mysteriously with you as you burned the midnight oil enjoying her high speed surfing capabilities and hyper-thread technology.

Or maybe yours was a muscleman with 6-packabs that put every gamer on the block to shame.

Okay, so maybe 6-pack abs are a stretch, but the blue florescent hue from his case lights and the deep hum of his fans was the envy of friend and foe alike.

But alas, beauty fades and so does PC performance and speed over time.

And just as mankind searches for the illusive fountain of youth, computer users search for the Viagra of PC performance. That magic pill – er, solution – to gain back that which was lost.

Okay, enough romanticizing!

Why is it the “new car smell” inside your new car lasts longer than the speed on your new PC or laptop?

Why is it we can put rovers on Mars but we can’t make a computer that doesn’t slow down a half hour off the shelf?

So, why does your PC, laptop, or notebook run slow? This is the question we will be discussing over the next several articles and video additions.

We may even start a reality show called, “How slow can you get?” But you’d have to beat one of our clients that clocked his boot at 6 minutes! And that’s only the boot!

His was a tale of hardware and software woes – totally unrelated to each other, but created a very difficult situation for troubleshooting. But you’ll hear about that in a later article.

So let’s start with the most obvious culprits of slow PC’s and begin with the boot process. This is the first step in creating a noticeable increase in boot performance time.

Look down.

No! Not at the floor or your shoes silly! Look down at the taskbar on your desktop!

Maybe you should really look up and down! I’ve fixed computers where they had two rows of taskbar icons and a toolbar flashing across the top and that’s without even opening a browser!

And while you’re looking at the desktop anyway, take a good look at your whole desktop! How much junk is on there? Icons, shortcuts, pictures, files, folders, and the like? Does your desktop look like a mine field?

If so, clean it off! Crowded desktops are the #1 cause of slow boot time!

Here’s a trick I use that helps keep my desktop tidy but keeps the stuff I just cannot live without accessible from my desktop.

I created a new folder called, “Debs” in my ‘My Documents‘ folder, and in it I put everything I want available at one click from my desktop. I even have sub-folders named: 2do, 2read, blog fodder, and so on.

Now, once you have your desktop cleared of the mess, go to the bottom, right side of your taskbar and right click.

Select Toolbars.

Select New Toolbar.

A pop-up window appears that allows you to select a folder or file! Select the folder you just created that holds your desktop items.

Once you select the folder, click OK, and you should see your new toolbar item like this:

Click to enlarge image

Now, when you click on that new item, you should see any folders and files you put in there, as in this example:

Click to enlarge image

Because the actual files are no longer sitting on the desktop and required to load at boot time, you should see a marked increase in your boot performance time.

Now, tomorrow, we are going to cover some of the junk that loads at boot time! That will include how it gets there, how to stop it, and how to know what the heck it is!

Until tomorrow……

And remember,

“The early bird catches the worm, the second mouse gets the cheese, but the wise mouse knows how to get into the fridge!”

Debbie

As some of our loyal readers know, MICE delivers a newsletter that updates our readers to critical technology (PC or computer related) information from recalls to security flaws as we become notified about them.

We receive over 20 early warning newsletters and feeds that allows us to keep up-to-date (early warning notification) with the latest happenings in our industry. Whether its software or hardware, our newsletter covers:

• recall
• security flaws
• vulnerabilities
• exploits
• new virus discoveries
• worm attacks
• breaches
• possible outbreaks
• critical patches & service pack releases

So, if you are on the go like many of us are these days, you can now subscribe to these alerts in plain SMS text format to be delivered to your mobile device! Sort of a mobile alert system! Just use the sign-up box on the right sidebar beneath the RSS subscribe box.

We have to keep updated ourselves, so why not let others benefit from our necessary but tedious task of reading, reading, reading, and reading! We do it, so you don’t have to!

Why clog up your inbox with security newsletter after security newsletter? Why overload your RSS feed reader with feeds that may or may not apply to you? With all the information being thrown at us, you need to be discriminating in your time and where you put your energy! We’ll help you manage that by doing the reading and leg work for you, just because we have to do it for ourselves!

If you want to also subscribe to the e-mail newsletter service (FREE ALSO) you can do so on our subscribe page.