PC Upgrades

Now I am not a huge Vista fan. I will be honest here. It has it's perks. That's why just like anything vista can use a little Tweaking and Upgrading as well. Recently i was able to sit down with a buddy and we played around with his Vista powered PC. He happens to be in love with Vista,and I..well...U know. So Here I am going to make sure and not become hated by the Vista lovers, and give some treats to them too. So here we go:

Here are some more tweaks that can be done with Vista to either increase speed, or to fit your need for speed. Remember to create a restore point if your lazy to do this and revert back.

Customize the size of desktop and file icons(Vista)

For some time, it has been possible to adjust font size in office documents and Web browsers simply by holding down the CTRL key while rolling your mouse wheel up and down. In Vista, the same action lets you tweak the size of your desktop icons. Just click on an empty area of the desktop, hold down CTRL, and spin your mouse wheel until the icons are the size you want. You can also adjust the size of your file or folder icons in Windows Explorer by doing the same thing. This is extremely handy for viewing thumbnails of images.

Increase SATA drive performance(Vista)

This tip “enhances” drive performance by allowing the drive in question to perform more write caching to system memory. The danger is if your system loses power and you do not have a backup power source (UPS), whatever data is cached to system memory will be lost. If you’re the adventurous type and want a bit more responsiveness out of your system, click Start, type Device Manager in the Search box, click the Device Manager, open up the Disk drives tree, right-click a drive, and select Properties. Go to the Policies tab and check “Enable Advanced Performance.” Click OK.

Speed up Flip3D(Vista)

This tip will be useful for notebook owners or anyone whose PC is packing less than stellar graphics processing power. The Flip3D animation can bog down weaker graphics cards if it has to flip a lot of windows, so this is a tweak that lets you set the number of windows that will be rendered in 3D at one time.

• Click on the Start Button, type regedit in the Search bar, and press Enter.
• Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER, Software, Microsoft, Windows, and DWM.
• Create a new DWORD and call it Max3DWindows.
• Set the value of this to something between four and nine (“4” and “9”) depending on the performance of your card (a higher number requires more video card power). You should then feel free to experiment to find the best value for your computer. Restart your PC to finalize the change.

Discover what applications are linked to certain processes

The Processes tab of the Windows XP Task Manager was a confusing, barren wasteland of cryptically-named processes. If you wanted to find out which application was responsible for a certain process, all you could do was to copy down the name of the executable, and then search for it in Windows to locate it or Google it. This was an annoying process. Thankfully, Microsoft has fixed this in Vista by adding an “open file location” option when you right-click any process. Doing so opens the folder the process is running from, which can help you figure out if a certain process can be turned off or not. You can also click “View” at the top of the Task Manager and click Select Columns to select which columns to display.

Turn off unneeded Windows features(Vista)

This one is self-explanatory. Do you need Tablet PC components installed? Probably not, unless you are using a Tablet PC. So turn off whatever you don’t need in the name of keeping your Windows install as lean as possible. I will go into more detail about this later.

Click Start, Control Panel, then under Programs at the bottom click “Uninstall a Program.” In the left-hand pane you’ll see “Turn Windows Features on or off.” Ba-da-boom, ba-da-bing. Uncheck whatever you don’t need


Hope you enjoyed tweaking in Vista. As Vista progresses more tweaks and tricks will be available. But for now Happy Upgrading!

I am a firm believer in that YOU can always tweak a computer to make it run just a little bit better. That is what i like to do on a daily basis. Tweaking, to try and get a little more performance out of that old machine.

Kinda like saying "Getting more bang for the buck".

If you didn’t know, XP wasn’t tweaked when you first bought your PC.
But after time your computer starts to run a little slow,starts dragging.
Now it's time to tweak it a little bit.

Today I will share some of my personal Tweaking tips, you can take advantage of your PC, such as speeding up page loading times, and optimizing your processor efficiency.

Subtopics

* Tweaking XP - The Simple Way
* Advanced Tweaking (ADVANCED USERS ONLY)
* Increasing Boot Times*

Tweaking XP - The Simple Way

Easy: just download a few programs and whatnot. A free choice is Tweak UI, the free PowerToy from Microsoft. Google it up, download, and install. It allows settings not seen in Control Panel to be changed.

My personal choice is TuneUp Utilities, which is not free, but is a handy tool. With that program, you can do a lot, from changing your boot and login screens and formats, optimizing Internet connections, and cleaning out and fixing up the registry, to optimizing system performance values. Its a handy tool, and the trial is available at cnets Download.com.

Another great tool, even though not free, is Diskeeper. It claims to defrag more files in a faster time than Microsofts included Disk Defragmenter in a shorter time, which is actually true from a test I conducted. I got 2 computers, fresh from a reformat, and all of its drivers and the same programs installed. One ran Diskeeper, the other ran the default defragmenter. Diskeeper finished the job in around an hour, while the other defragmenter finished when I finally woke up after a good nights sleep, so… 9 hours? Big difference, huh? And the computers were the same - 10 GB formatted Macbooks on a Windows XP partition, with the same stats. So Id recommend Diskeeper to those whod like to invest a little money into faster document loading times, leading to faster virus scans and a faster computer in general. The trial is avaliable - check the Downloads section.

TweakNow RegCleaner Standard is one of the free tools I use to maintain my PC. Its quite useful, scanning for obsolete entries that can conflict with your PC, and thus speeding up the computer. However, many Unknowns can pop up, and it'd be annoying to click every single one of them, since the last version I reviewed had no select all feature for the Unknowns.

Here's a cool little trick that i recently added myself. Make a Shutdown shortcut on your desktop,So instead of having to go into start panel and choosing shutdown. Now you can just double click a program on your desktop and it will automatically shut the computer down.

Right click on your desktop, then click create New Shortcut.
In the Location text box, type “shutdown -s -t 0″ (without the quotation marks).
Name it anything you want (Shutdown is the most common) and click OK.
Now whenever you wanna shut down, just click this shortcut and...Voila.

Type “shutdown -r -t 0″ to make it a restart button.
Type “shutdown -l” to make it a logoff button.
Type “shutdown -s” to make it a standby button.
Type “shutdown -h” to make it a hibernate button.


Advanced Tweaking

These tweaks can easily be triggered through Tune-Up Utilities, but if you can’t afford it (or crack it lol) then check out this section.

ADVANCED USERS ONLY - Registry tweaks

To access the Registry, you must be an administrator.
Go to Run, type in “regedit” and hit OK.
Registry Editor pops out and you’re ready to risk screwing up your PC big time. :P
And any tweak requires a system restart, so after you’re done tweaking what you need, restart to see its effect.

Force Windows to Unload DLLs from Memory

Why tweak: Windows automatically keeps DLLs loaded in memory in case applications using it are launched later on. This can be a problem on systems with 512 MB or less, because of memory shortage. This tweak will disable DLL caching.

To tweak: Find the key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorer]. Create a new sub-key named “AlwaysUnloadDLL” and set the default value to 1. Delete the sub-key to re-enable DLL caching.

Disable Core System Paging

Why tweak: On default, Windows pages the system core to the disk to save memory space. This immensely slows down your PC as memory access is much faster than disk access. By disabling this feature, the core system will be kept in memory, speeding up system performance.

DO NOT USE THIS TWEAK IF YOU HAVE LESS THAN 512 MB OF RAM.

To tweak: Find the value “DisablePagingExecutive” in the key [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession Manager]. Change the value to 1. Change the value to 0 to re-enable core system caching.

Other tweaks

Here is a tweak that doesn’t require traveling through the Registry:

Disabling the Wireless Configuration Zero service

IF YOU ARE CONNECTED ON A WIRELESS CONNECTION, DO NOT DISABLE THIS SERVICE.
To those who are connected through Ethernet, disabling this service will speed up boot and login times. To do this, go to Control Panel, select Classic View, then go to Administrative Tools, then open Services.
Look for the “Wireless Configuration Zero” service, then double-click it.
Stop the service then select “Disabled” in the Startup Type drop box.
The computer should load a bit faster now.

To speed up your startup
Go to start>run>type msconfig>then on startup tab untick everything besides your antivirus. This applies to vista as well but run is in accessories.


Hope you enjoyed this little special on tweaking. Happy Upgrading!

Like anything in life making the right decision is important and is easier said than done. So when is comes to buying the computer that is going to be right for you, It's no different. The good news is this time YOU can have some guidance. Today I am going to give you a basic walk through of different scenarios you may encounter while choosing the right computer.

This section should basically give you a good walk through on what you should get.

The first and most relevant question should be of the following:
A. You want something that is portable and can tag along side you
B. You want something for the home that will be stationary

Now if you chose A, you need the laptop. If you chose B, you need the desktop.

The next set of questions involves both the laptop and the desktop. So consider:
A. You only need a PC for work, a bit of e-mail, and some easy Web browsing.
B. You are gonna listen to music, watch a few movies and videos, a bit of DVDs, play a few causal games, and burn some CDs.
C. You are gonna play a bunch of games, edit music and movies, and burn a bunch of CDs and DVDs.
D. You need all the power you can get - you’ll be playing the most hardware-intense games on the market, scan both viruses and spyware while playing a game and defragmenting a hard drive all at the same time, and edit movies, vids, pics and more while burning discs and doing a Photoshop job.

If you choose A
I'd say a low-end Intel Core 2 Duo or equivalent AMD Athlon 64 X2
Linux: 1GB XP: 1GB, Vista Home Basic: 1GB, Vista Home Premium and above: 2GB (RAM for all classes are DDR2)
Integrated audio and graphics or low-end dedicated graphic (ex. 8400GS)
120GB+ HDD
DVD Reader/CD Burner
Linux, Windows XP x86 (recommended), Windows Vista x86

If you chose B
I’d say under $600 for desktops, and under $800 for laptops
Low/mid-end Intel Core 2 Duo or equivalent AMD Athlon 64 X2
XP: 1GB, Vista Home Basic: 1GB, Vista Home Premium and above: 2GB
Integrated audio, low/mid-end dedicated graphics card (ex. 8400GS-8500GT)
160GB+ HDD (depending on uses)
Power supply depends on the system build (even though it is “low/mid-end”, the wattage requirements vary)
DVD Burner
Windows XP x86, Windows Vista x86 (either one works good in this price range)

If you chose C
I would say under $800-ish for desktops, and $1100-ish for laptops
Intel E8200 to E8400 or E8500 or Phenom 9850/9950, they’re actually not bad. About as powerful as a Q6600, but cheaper
2GB RAM for all OS or higher
Integrated audio, 9800GT/GTX260, or even a HD4850/70
200GB+ HDD space (depending on uses)
Power supply determined by builder i recommend 400+
Windows XP x86 (lenient on this one, but I won’t recommend one over another), Windows Vista x86
DVD Burner

If you chose D
High-end Intel Core 2 Duo (E8200+), mid/low-end Intel Core 2 Quad (Q6600/Q9300), would not recommend AMD here (unless you have an AM2+ motherboard already) *intel scores the higher benchmarks in gaming*
2-4gigs of RAM
8800GT 512MB+ or higher video cards in SLI or ATI crossfire , integrated audio, or not if you want good surround sound
Power supply depends on exact system configuration 500+ is recommended
Windows XP, Windows Vista
DVD Burner (dual layer and lightscribe if you’re going to use them)

Selection D: For laptops, just choose the most powerful part, so it’ll add something above $6000 if you buy at Dell and similar vendors, and something around $4000 if you buy from CyberPowerPC and similar vendors), desktop price is really anything at this price point
High-end Intel Core 2 Extreme quad core processor (ex. QX9770)/Upgrade to Nehalem
4GB+ High Performance Mushkin/Kingston HyperX/Patriot Extreme/etc.
Dual/Triple/Quadruple GPU setup (obivously, you would get the best stuff, not necessarily the GTX280 though, CrossFireX or SLi)
4x Velociraptor drives in RAID 0, 2x 1TB drives in RAID 1 (not completely sure if it can be done though).

If you are an average computer user(by average i mean just uses computer for basic tasks,internet browsing) then choosing between selection A and B is ideal. For the avid gamers,or video editors or someone that just wants a real powerful computer then sticking with selection C or D is what you are looking for.

I hope this helps with a basic idea. Be sure to check back soon for more. Happy Upgrading!