Archive for the ‘General IT’ Category

Reinstall Windows Is everything still running slow? It might be time to back up all your files, format your hard drive and then reinstall Windows from scratch. While modern operating systems reduce the frequency in which this is needed, sometimes it’s just the only sane way to

If you can determine what part is the bottleneck in your system, a simple upgrade will be much cheaper than getting a whole new system. With laptops, your options here are pretty much limited to RAM, hard drive and wireless card, but desktop users will have a little more

Ensure that both Windows and your hardware drivers are up to date — apart from bug fixes, which should make your system work better, you may be getting new features as well. Graphics card drivers in particular should be kept up to date, as performance improvements are

Do you run antivirus? Is it old? Some companies of late have really focused on getting system impact as small as it can get, notably Symantec, whose Norton software is now incredibly trim, but is still fighting its old reputation for bloatware. Performance impact is a tricky metric

This is mainly a Windows thing. While it won’t have that much impact on a modern system, and should absolutely not be performed on an SSD, defragging a hard drive could potentially give you that little extra speed boost you’re after. Under Windows XP you can find the defrag

Hard drives cope better with a bit of free space (as a general rule, 10 per cent free should keep things happy). There are two easy ways you can help get rid of things if you’ve been a bit of a digital pack-rat. CCleaner will help clear away

No, really, everything; browser toolbars, programs you forgot about, games you didn’t finish. See that system tray in the bottom right stuffed to the gills? Thin it down. Be sensible – leave things like Windows updates and hardware drivers. If you’re not sure what something is, grab

There’s every chance that your hardware may not be performing to spec, whether through some kind of fault or mere age. To make sure everything’s running as it should, there are quite a few software tools you can use first before you go on an upgrading rampage,

This is more applicable for the desktop, but the same basic principles apply for a laptop. There’s a small possibility that the thermal conduction between your CPU or GPU and its heatsink isn’t optimal, causing things to overheat. If you want to make sure that things are

Is your computer moving at a crawl? Don’t give up. There are some things you can do about it. Craig Simms of ZDNet Australia takes a look at some of the possible ways to motivate a PC that runs like a turtle and  bring it back up to speed.