Portal PC & Gaming

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

PC and Laptop Optimization tips

Working with Computers through out most of my career as well as performing a lot of IT functions I started to realize that a lot of people have issues either optimizing their computer or maintaining the current level that their computer is at. So what I am going to do is list some tips to get better performance out of your computer. These are suggestions and depending on your case these may or may not work.

- First off if you purchased your computer through a retailer or a online store then there is going to be a lot of useless programs and services on your computer. So what the first thing your going to do is clear all of those programs off of there unless it is used to control something like a DVD player or a webcam. These useless programs duplicate most existent ways to do things in Windows such as updates and change functions/options. This will then clean up a lot of what is running in the background and free up some RAM/Hard drive space

- The second thing you are going to probably want to do is get yourself a simple and easy to use Anti-Virus software for your computer. Personally I use the free version of Avast! It is a quick download, with a simple setup and is easy to maintain. I set my basic scans for daily and the advanced/longer scans for once a month. As well if it finds a infected file then it will quarantine it to the sandbox so you can still access it without risk.

- The next thing i would do for optimization should only be done if you know what you are doing. This and everything else is DO AT YOUR OWN RISK. So what I do to all my computer after I complete these first two steps is go to Run > type MSCONFIG and this will allow you to select what programs and services will boot up with your computer. This will allow your computer to start up more quickly and efficently thus helping free more of your RAM up.

- This next step will depend on the last time you have done this if you have done it at all that is. So what you are going to want to do next is do a disk defrag. This is something you may want to do often such as once a month or leave more time and do it once a year. This really depends how often information is be written and removed from your hard disk. What this should do is re arrange all the file fragments in such a way where it is easier and faster for the hard drive to access.

- As a helpful hint many people may want to look into is investing in an external hard drive. This allows you to save the file from your computer to this device putting all your information into a portable content. This also allows you to not use hard drive space maintaining speed and efficency.

- The last thing I normally do is go through my computer immediately after doing the previous steps and doing all necessary updates. The major programs you will normally will want to update is Adobe Flash, Shockwave, Reader and AIR. As well as your Java client. All of these programs play into a large portion of your web browsing abilities. It allows for more access to media and webpages. The other program you will want to update is the Operating System. There could be many updates but after taking these steps it should take less than an hour for these updates on most computers.

Basically this is more or less a guide on optimization and increasing the performance of the computer you are using to get better results. As with everything else on this site these are things that you do at your own risk. You should know what you are doing or have the proper people around during this to ensure no important settings or files are tampered with. If you have any suggestions or any thing you would like added to this blog please feel free to leave a comment.