Computer Articles

As the end of the year approaches and thoughts inevitably turn to 2004, you may be finding it hard to reconcile your sci-fi fantasies of a chrome plated turbo charged rocket powered future with the slightly apologetic excuse of a PC sitting dusty in the corner. One way to give your PC a kick in the pants is to indulge in a complete hardware overhaul for some pointers to the good stuff to get. However, this costs money and in the future, we're not supposed to need money

FREE SPEED@
   So it's good to hear that we've put together this massive collection of speed solutions to help you make and use your PC faster. So, lie back in your acceleration chair and prepare to blast off into a future where any PC - no matter how slow or fast already---can be made even quicker.

1.FASTER  BOOTING:
    Benefit: Save seconds off your boot time.

    What you have to do: Ensure that the Show all files option is selected in Explorer and then find the file Msdos.sys in your root directory. Remove the read only status of the file. Now, load it into notepad. Go to the ( options ) sections and try these two:
    Add logo=0 to stop the Win95 logo screen appearing. Add Boot Delay = 0. Also, if you're sure you don't want to use the boot menu then use Boot Keys = 0 to disable it, just look at the number of programs cluttering up this startup menu.

2. CULL THE START UP:
    Benefit: Slim the startup time.

    What you have to do: Some applications just love to grab attention and put themselves in your StartUp menu so they load every time Win95 does, slowing the already over long startup process. If you don't use them then delete or move these shortcuts, unless they are vital.

3. SENT TO TIME-SAVING:
    Benefit: Save time opening applications.

    What you have to do: Save time opening applications and rummaging through directories by using the Send To menu you get when you right click on the file or folder. The options listed are actually shortcuts stored in a directory called SendTo in your windows directory. You can put any shortcut you like in here---whether it's to an application, drive or directory.

4. FAST  RESET:
    Benefit: Quicker restarts.

    What you have to do: Force your system to just restart Win98 rather then your whole PC by holding down [Shift] when you click on Restart the computer from Shut Down.

5. SHORTCUT  KEYS:
    Benefit: Quicker Win98 access.

    What you have to do: Any shortcut on your Desktop or in your Start menu can be assigned a shortcut key. Right click on the icon or go to the Task bar settings and click on the Advanced button. Now click on the shortcut tab and then on the Shortcut key field and press any key.

6. MAX.  CACHE:
    Benefit: Quicker hardware access.

    What you have to do: Win95 does most of its optimization automatically, but check these settings. Open up the System Properties box from the Control Panel, click on the performance tab and then the File system button. On the hard disk section move the slider to maximum and set the system to be Network server if you've 32 MB of memory. On the CD-ROM section move the slider to maximum and set the access pattern to represent the type of CD-ROM drive you have.

7. FONT REDUCTION:
    Benefit: Quicker startup.

    What you have to do: Many applications install lots of fonts. They all have to be read when your PC startup so having couple of hundred slows things right down.Go to the Fonts folder and move any you are unlikely to use to another directory. If you ever need them you can always move them back again. Leave the raster fonts alone the ones with a red A on them your system needs them.

8. MACRO MANIA:
    Benefit: Automate repetitive tasks.

    What you have to do: An operation you repeat many times is worth automating. Applications such as Word and Excel have macros: small program like sets of instructions that repeat a task. Get to know how to use these and you can save yourself hours.

9. DISPLAY RESOURCES:
    Benefit: Quick display settings.

    What you have to do: Don't have your display set to 1024x768 and True color unless you have a decent video card and monitor, keep the settings down in terms of resolution and color depth for faster performance.

10. CD-ROM:
       Benefit: Faster CD drive.

       What you have to do: On the CD-ROM tab ( see tip 6 ) you should change the Read Ahead caching to.

11. CUT THE CRAP:
      Benefit: Only use necessary resources.

      What you have to do: When you press Ctrl+Alt+Del in Win95, a box containing details of all your running applications appear. Do this just after you've booted up and see what appears. The entry called Explorer is the Win95 Desktop and is naturally vital. Everything else may or may not be important, but all of it is taking up resources.Try to keep your startup menu to the minimum.

12. PERFORMANCE  ISSUES:
      Benefit: Make sure Win95 is set up for optimum performance. Win95 is pretty good at  queering your hardware, but it doesn't always set itself up for maximum performance. This means opening the System Control Panel and going to the Performance tab. If it shows that your system is configured for optimum performance, you think that there's nothing more to do. Wrong!

     What you have to do:This message means only that the machine is using 32 bit drivers to access your drives. If there is a problem then the machine will show that real mode drivers are being use. The solution to this is to check your autoexec.bat file to see if any 16 bit drivers are being loaded and used. If so, it will reduce the efficiency of the system. The solution is to get new drivers of your hardware. This area actually exemplies many reasons for lack of performance. You should make sure that you have all the latest drivers and patches for your system. If you don't have Win95 OSR2, make sure you have the Service Pack installed. If your hardware isn't new, check for more recent drivers for everything from your 3D card to your modem.

13. FASTER FILE SPEED:
      Benefit: Enhance graphics and file speed.

      What you have to do:Click on the Graphics tab on the Performance window and check that it is set to maximum acceleration. Now, go to the File System button. On the Hard drive tab you should also have the Read Ahead set to maximum.

14. TWEAKUI
       Benefit: Save time on window anims.

       What you have to do:Once installed, under the General tab you can deselect Windows Animation. This is the pointless animation when programs are minimized or maximized to the Task bar, which simply eats up processor time.

15. QUICKER  BOOTING:
      Benefit: Quicker booting.

      What you have to do:On the Boot tab you can change the several things to speed up booting. Change the function keys available for setting to 0- this will stop the system from waiting to see if you want to boot to anything other than Win95 ( this change or inserts a line called Boot Delay = 0 in your Msdos.sys file in the [ options ] setting to 0 and Auto scan = 0).Now, we need to get our hands dirty. Find Msdos.sys file from (Find, Files or Folder ).Make sure that show all files is selected. Find the Msdos.sys file and change its properties so that it is not set to read only. Now, open it into Notepad. In the [ options ] section. Add a  line DBLSPACE = 0 and another DRVSPACE = 0. Now remove drvspace.bin and dbispace.bin files from the c:\ drive. This will increase DOS memory and speed up booting. BUT DON'T DO IT IF YOU HAVE COMPRESSED DRIVES!!

16.  CACHE FOR QUESTIONS:
       Benefit: Less disk access.

       What you have to do: Run Sysedit into the Run box from the Start menu and go to the system.ini window. Scroll down to the [ vcache ] section. This section defines how much memory is used as a cache for the 32 bit file access drivers, VFAT.386. If there are no values present it will be set to the default 64k. If you increase the value, your applications won't need to page to disk as often, but you can only do this if you have sufficient memory. If you have 32 MB enter two lines under [ vcache ]: MinFile Cache=0 and MaxFile Cache=4096. If you have more memory you could increase bits, but it's probably not worth it.

17. FRAG IT:
      Benefit: Further reduce disk fragmentation.

      What you have to do: In the registry go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHNICES\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\File System section. Right click in the right pane and select New\DWORD. This will enter a new value change the name to Config File AllocSize. Double click on it and enter the decimal value of 2048. this sets the amount of minimum free space in Kbs that Win95 will looked for to write a file. The default is 512 Kb which means that when it finds 512 Kb free on the drive it'll start writing the file there even if the file is bigger than that. Upping this value stops this happening but the downside is that it relies on you having enough free space for it not to matter that smaller spaces are ignored.

18. FASTER START MENU ACCESS:
      Benefit: When you use the Start Menu you will notice about a half second delay before sub menus are opened. Let's remove this 400 ms delay.

      What you have to do: Open the registry editor from the Run box on the start menu by typing regedit and press [ Enter ].Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop key. On the right pane if there is a Menu ShowDelay value present skip to the next step.If not, right click on a blank space in the right pane and select New\String. Change the name of the New value to
" Menu ShowDelay ". Double click on it and change the string fields to 0. Close regedit and reboot your system. Your Start Menu should be noticeably faster then earlier.

19. THE UTILITY OPTION:
      The last area that can improve win95  is a set of software utilities designed to accelerate access to your hardware. Some of them are:
Norton 3+, various uninstallers, MagnaRam97,winboost98 etc.

20. SPRING CLEAN:
      Windows can be customized in many ways the whole look can be altered to suit your taste. The pay-off is often in faster responsiveness. The fastest Desktop is by far the cleanest.

21.WALLPAPER:
       Looks good but slows your system down considerably every time it has to be redrawn.

22. DESKTOP ICONS:
      These also have to be redrawn, so remove any you don't regularly use.

23. FASTER COLOR:
      The speed of graphics cards can usually be improved by switching to higher color depths, often 24 bit or even--if the driver will allow you , that is 32 bit.

24. SOUNDS:
      Apart from getting after a while each sound also creates a little pause in your system, and that includes the Windows start-up sound. Go to the Sounds section in the Control Panel and go for the scheme appropriately called No Sounds.

25.FASTER FILE ACCESS:
     Vroom! and there goes this file--it's as if they've been given new lease of life.
     1. Keep unwanted files to the minimum. If there's a big application taking retirement on your system then you might as well get rid of it.
     2. Whenever you install a new software always use the Add/Remove Tab in the Control Panel.
     3. Make sure the windows directory isn't overflowing with redundant files---these are liable to slow your system.
     4. Whenever you remove hardware always try and remove all its associated files.
     5. Clear out the Config.sys and Autoexec.bat files of any unwanted lines.

26. DEFRAG CITY:
      As you run applications and save data to disk, the hard drive inevitably ends up putting files all over the place. The more disperse they are the more you system will be. Equally, any disk errors are likely to pull your PC up in its tracks, as it struggles to read data from the damaged disk sectors. This is all basic maintenance, but it makes a big difference.....

27. FINDING SCAN DISK:
      You'll find both scandisk and disk defragmenter under the System Tolls menu in Win95&Win98. You need to disable any active screens before running scan disk or Disk Defragmenter.

28. PARTITION:
      The size of your hard drive determines how well it handles files. When you format your hard drive it's initially split into small storage areas called sectors. These sectors are organized into clusters, where the size of each cluster is dependent on the size of your hard drive. A small 120 Mb hard drive has a cluster size of 4,096 bytes, a large 2 GB drive has a cluster size of 65,536 bytes; Win95 accesses data on your hard drive by cluster rather than bytes for speed reasons. The downside is that one byte file takes a cluster to itself. That's a lot of space that's going to waste.

29. FAT-FUELLED:
      The other option, although it depends on you having copy of Win95 OSR2, is to partition your disk using FAT32. This is s 32 bit FAT that allows smaller clusters on bigger drives. It is worth nothing, though, that this does have compatibility problems with some other programs.OSR2 also offers support for Direct Memory Access ( DMA ) for your hard drives and CD drives. If you look at the properties of your hard drive in System Manager, you will find the new options. Turn these ON for a small speed increase.

30. FREE CHACHE:
      Win95 handles caching dynamically, you don't specify how big the cache is as it's adjusted to the current system load. This means you are limited in what you can tweak in this area, but it's worth checking you have got read ahead optimization set to full.

31.GO FASTER:
      Benefit: Iron out the system bottlenecks.

      What you have to do:If you still feel your system could be going faster, the best advice is to use Win95's System Monitor to track potential bottlenecks on your PC.

32. TESTING THE SYSTEM:
      Benefit: Know how to read the system Monitor.

      What you have to do: To test your system, you need to keep the monitor active while browsing the Net as normal. Your system will gather the statistics as you go.

33. TWEAKING BIOS:
      Your BIOS rests at the very heart of your machine, without it, you would have a circuit board holding a lot of chips that couldn't talk to one another. The good news about tweaking your BIOS is that you don't have to open your system. The bad news is that you must know what are you doing. Each system has different ways to get into BIOS setup, although pressing DEL., F1, or F2 on boot up should generally get you there. Once inside, you can change the settings that affect the speed at which different elements of your system talk to each other.

34. ENABLE YOUR CACHES:
      First, you should check that the system outlined in your BIOS corresponds to your actual system: date, time, drivers, memory etc. Next, check that you have your internal and External caches enabled as they have the greatest effect on your system's performance.

35. CHECK YOUR WAIT STATES:
      Make sure your wait states are set to the minimum allowable by your system. Next, confirm that you have selected Shadow Video and System ROM---the effect this has is dependent on the how old your system is.

36. CHECK YOUR LATENCY:
       If your BIOS gives you the option, increase the value of the Latency Timer ( hunt around, this could be in one of a few sections). This sets the amount of time a device on your PCI bus can keep hold of the bus after another device has requested it. If you have to ISA devices you can pump this up to the maximum amount. As long as you 're sensible with your BIOS changes---one at a time is ideal----you should get your system working at optimum speed in no time.

37.SPEED THE MEMORY:
     Memory is one of the key components affecting the speed of your PC. You generally can't have enough of the stuff, and after your hard drive, it is one of the greatest bottlenecks in an over clocked machine. Even so, you can probably get more out of the memory you already have. The memory in your system is physically held in the form SIMMs or DIMMs. Depending on how much you paid for it. You will have the 70ns or 60ns variety. Don't mix memory of different types, as your memory runs as slow as your slowest chip.
 

SPEED, EFFICIENCY AND WINDOWS 98
When Microsoft released Windows 98, it claimed it was faster than Windows 95. We've since largely debunked this claim, but you can't really blame Win98 for not managing to improve its speed statistics---it is, after all, doing a lot more work than its predecessor, what with increased Web integration and various other funky new features lurking under its bonnet.
    There is a good news, however, depending on badly Win98 is performing on your machine, there are a number of things you can do to it in order to give your system that badly needed kick in the pants and getting it flying along again.

38. MAKING COMPROMISES:
      Sadly, most of these enhancements come at a price--you might have to wave good bye to the Active Desktop for example, or make do without that, color full background image that takes an age to redraw. Whenever you move windows around the screen. Happily though there are plenty of other system tweaks you can perform just by finding with the Win98 settings that will also give your PC a new lease of life.

39. CUSTOMIZE PERFORMANCE:
      As with Win95, you can tweak your system's performance parameters. Right click My computer, select properties and switch to the Performance tab. If you have 64 Mb or more memory, click the File System button and set the role of your PC to Network server, regardless of what you use your PC for---this means Win98 will cache up to 64 paths and over 2600 filenames, boosting your disk access speed. While you're there, also ensure that the Advanced Graphics are set to the highest level.

40. DISABLE EFFECT:
      Open your Display settings from Control Panel, and switch to the Effects tab. Win98 includes some extra cosmetic niceties which again can slowly degrade your PC's speed. Turn off show window contents while dragging for an extra speed boost. If you spend a lot of time scrolling through large documents, it's also worthwhile switching off the smooth edge of screen font option for faster scrolling.

41.TURN OFF WEB VIEW:
      Funky though the new Win98 cosmetic fetters may be, they can slow your system right down. For those extra squirts of speed, make sure you disable the new Web View mode and run with classic Win95 interface. The new active Desktop in particular can bring your PC to a standstill.
For similar reasons, don't install a huge full color image as your desktop background unless you have a lot of memory.

42. OPTIMIZE YOUR STARTUP:
       Lots of applications will install extra functions and utilities which start automatically when you switch your PC ON, you may not need them, and may not even know they're there. From the Start Menu's Run dialog box type 'msconfig' to start Microsoft's System Configuration Utility. If you then switch to the startup tab, you can see exactly what's being loaded when your PC boots, even if there's nothing in the start Menu's Startup section. If you need to disable a program's extra function--such as Coral Media Folders add-on which comes with Corel Draw 8 for example--this is where you do it.

43. DEFRAGMENT YOUR DRIVES:
      Defragmenting your hard drives has always improved  system speed. As windows doesn't have to spend as much time shunting the disk heads about your hard drive looking for date. Under Win98, there are extra improvements. Once you have your favorite applications installed and you've used your PC for a while, defragment your main drive. While defragmenting, make sure you haven't left any application running while you can continue to works as defragging proceeds, anything written to the drive being worked on will restart the whole process.

44.CHECK YOUR DRIVERS:
     For optimal performance, any hardware you have fitted in your PC should ideally be using the 32 bit drivers provided as part of Win98. Some bits of hardware---soundcards and SCSI connector cards are prime examples--may also install older 16 bit DOS drivers when you first install the hardware. You don't need these under Win98, and they will actually slow your system.

45. SPEED YOUR BOOT:
      You don't need to have the text boot menu displayed every time you switch your PC on--if you always boot straight to Win98, turn it off install Microsoft's nifty Tweakui Control Panel ( on your Win98 CD )and switch to the Boot tab, then deactivate the Always show boot menu option. It you need it as your PC boots. You can still hit the F8 key to call it up. To save a fraction more off your boot time, disable the Display splash screen while booting option--this turns off the graphic startup screen when Win98 loads, saving you yet more time.

46. FASTER RESTARTS:
      Rather than waiting for your PC to completely re-boot, hold down the [ shift ] key as you click Restart in the Shutdown dialog, Windows itself will be restarted without going through the whole hardware re-boot process.

47. OPTIMIZING VIRTUAL MEMORY:
      By default, Windows will automatically manage virtual memory for you in the background, swapping out portions of memory to the hard drive as and when more memory is needed. Because none of us use our machines in the same way. Microsoft's routines provide a safe way of dealing with the virtual memory needs of every one of us. First, you need to keep an eye on your PC for a while, so you know what your virtual memory requirements. Thankfully there is a tool provided with Win98 name as System monitor. When you first run system monitor, it used a default configuration, running in a normal program window. The only aspect of your system being monitored is the kernel's processor usage.

48. CUSTOM MOUSE SOFTWARE:
       If you have an enhance mouse with a wheel or rocker switch like Microsoft's IntelliMouse , don't install the software which comes with it having extra software loaded which tracks ever mouse action, slows the system down.

49. TWEAKUI TWEAKS:
       Once you have TweakUI installed, you can toggle one or two other things to increase your general system speed under Win98. From the General tab, you can turn off windows animation, smooth scrolling and the cosmetic animation for menus, combo box and list boxes.

50. ACCELERATE INTERNET EXPLORER:
      Internet Explorer 4 is provided as part of Win98, and some of the new cosmetic enhancements can slow down your Internet browsing. Open the Internet Explorer properties and switch to Advance tab. Here you can toggle various settings to speed up IE4 slightly. In particular, pay attention to settings such as use smooth scrolling and Enable page transitions with the latter switched on, any custom built IE4 sites can call up effects like wipes and dissolves as you move from one page to another and they're painfully slow on most computers. While you're there, make sure Use Auto Complete is switched on, so that IE4 can make a guesstimate and complete any familiar URLs you type into the address bar.
 

                                        Main | Personal Info | Friends | The Way of Life

                                          Best Links | Computer Sec | Free SMS | Poetry

                                                      Fun Section | Guest Book

Site Design by Ch Yasir
Please Contact: webmaster . For Feedback.