The Bulletin – April/May Edition
Technical Tips
By Tom Snyder Ph.D.

If you're like most, and can't buy fast new computers now, these tips are for you. They provide 10 ways to get the most out of the computers you already own, for FREE!

Speed becomes important as your skills and expectations of what you can do with your PCs rise. You tackle more complex tasks that take more processing power—and more time.

One of the easiest ways you can restore much of a system's zip is to free up space on the hard drive. When your hard drive is more than 90 percent full, everything slows down, and we mean slooooowww.

If cleaning up your hard drive is the easiest way to get some added zip, then defragging your hard drive is the second easiest.

If you can't remember where you put things, we recommend using the Windows search function. You can cut your search time from hours to seconds by simply indexing your disk (that's how Web search engines are so fast).

If you think one of the most annoying delays happens during system boot-up, you're not alone. You can trim several seconds off your boot-up time by using your BIOS's advancedsetup option to change your boot order to start up first from your hard drive. Systems that are no more than two years old and have Windows NT, 2000, or XP also have a "Quick Boot" BIOS option that skips the lengthy power-on tests.

The blazing speeds quoted for today's hard drives rely on a technology called direct memory access (DMA). This feature is great when activated, but some versions of Windows and some disk installation programs opt to be conservative about speed. We recommend activating it if the option is available.

If you're an LCD monitor owner, you can get more speed if you're willing to settle for a little less resolution and color in your on-screen graphics. Downshift to 16-bit color and your video system can open its throttle, saving a few microseconds.

One of the biggest challenges left for computers with today's multi-gigahertz processors is synthesizing video images for games and interactive displays. Much of this software relies on Microsoft DirectX for fast screen updates. You can add a bit more zip to your video and multimedia displays by using the latest, fastest version of DirectX, currently in release 9. You can download this version for free.

Did you know that when you install new software and hardware, programmers have added their own often-invisible utilities, which load automatically when you start your PC? Each one of those little programs steals a share of your system's performance. To get rid of those unwanted automatic start-ups use a utility called MSconfig.exe, which comes with your operating system and lets you manage all start-ups through a simple menu system.

The single best idea for speeding up systems more than a year old is re-installing your operating system. Windows inevitably slows down as you continually surf the Web or install new software. It collects utilities and drivers that load to your system but do nothing—or actually work against you (think of the spyware graciously loaded on your system by unscrupulous Web sites). Files get scattered. Your Registry grows uncontrollably. Uninstalling programs may help a little but often doesn't eradicate everything, leaving drivers and even program routines that hog memory and disk space. And now add a year's worth of your own data. You could spend hours hunting down the problems one by one, or you could spring-clean your system by re-installing it in an hour or two.

File compressing or archiving programs will save both hard drive space and file-transfer times. A lawyer, for example, can squeeze all the files associated with a client into a single, easy-to-manage file.

Some of the best speed-up advice if you have a few dollars to spare is:

• Buy more memory
• Replace your motherboard
• Move to a broadband Internet connection. This is the most expensive but most satisfying speedup.