News

Hard Drive Prices

Due to recent flooding in Thailand, hard drive production facilities have been forced to shut down, causing hard drives prices to skyrocket. This not only affects the price of the drives themselves, but also the price of desktops and servers. It might be many months before production and prices go back to normal.

Tips & Tricks

How To Make A Computer More Efficient

For a PC to run efficiently it must be properly maintained. Here are some suggestions and routines that can improve performance and keep your computer running smoothly.

General

Keep the computer clean – only install program that you actually NEED. The more programs you install the slower your computer will get.
As a general rule do not install freeware/shareware programs (like Toolbars, backgrounds, screensavers, etc…). These programs tend to slow down your computer and are often bundled with malware or ads. Staying free of malware is one of the most important things that you can do to keep your computer running fast.
If the “Java” update icon appears in your taskbar, click it to start the update.
If prompted to update “Adobe” or “Flash”, select yes.
Leave your computer on at night or at least most nights. During nighttime hours your computer runs maintenance tasks that keep it running efficiently.
Do you tend to have a lot of programs open all at once and switch back and forth between them? This is a very common but inefficient situation. The solution? Get split screens. A dual-video card is less than $100, and LCD monitors are very cheap. The efficiencies gained by implementing this will pay for itself in a month or two. Some users can benefit from having 3-4 monitors. Again, this will pay for itself in a very short period of time.
How much memory is in your computer? By today’s standards you should have at least 1-2GB if you have Windows XP, and 2-4GB of you have Windows Vista or Windows 7. Some users require even more depending on what programs are used. How do you check this? Go to Start > Control Panel > System. The amount of memory should be displayed in “MB” or “GB”.
How old is your computer? If it is 4 or more years old there is probably little that you can do to make it faster other than to replace it.

Monthly Routine

Run “Disk Cleanup”. This will clean up temporary files and other junk from your hard drive. Go to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup. It should only take a minute or two to complete.
If Windows XP, run a Disk Defrag. This will reorganize files on your hard drive so that programs load and run faster. Go to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter. Select “Defragment”. Do this over lunch or at the end of a day as it will take 30-60 minutes to complete. Note: there is no need to do this with Windows Vista or 7 because this is already done automatically at night. But if you turn off your computer/laptop at night, then you should manually run this each month.
If you use Outlook you may consider cleaning up your Inbox, Sent Items and Deleted Items folders. Outlook will perform better the smaller these folders get. This is not necessarily an easy thing to do since you may not want to delete these items. It would be better to archive them in a place that gets backed up. Please discuss this with your DuraLogic technician.