Intro
If you have a personal rocket, or your dad's dusty computer, a free boost, in terms of speed and productivity is more than welcomed any time. I would like to clarify that none of the brands/programs/companies that may appear in this article have anything to do with me. The fact that i mention them is just so i can express my opinion about their product/service and I do not work, or receive anything from them.
NOTE: these tweaks/tips are not Godsend. Doing this will not transform your old computer into a new one. That's just false advertising that is present everywhere. You will notice some decent improvement(depending of your configuration), but still, keep your pants on please.
NOTE: these tweaks/tips are not Godsend. Doing this will not transform your old computer into a new one. That's just false advertising that is present everywhere. You will notice some decent improvement(depending of your configuration), but still, keep your pants on please.
Must have tools The operating system needs maintenance now and then, so it can work top notch, all the time. Known fact, nothing to debate here. I use some free open source programs, just because they do the job that i require. I am not the one to say that paid software alternatives are better/worse, I just do not use any.
So we begin, for maintaining a healthy operating system you need a set of tools to do some basic jobs, I use the following:
As far as defragmenting goes, I use the tool of choice once a week(usually at night). I queue the full hard disk with all his partitions, for a complete defragmentation. How often should you do it, it's just a matter of how much you use your pc. Large files, frequent file moves, installing big software suites/games tend to fragment your drive allot. Security...always protected.Enough said. I only turn any protection feature off when I am not online. Advanced tweaks/tips
Again, press the WindowsKey+R, type "regedit",click ok and now navigate to: "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics". Now in the right window of the registry editor we must find "BorderWidth" and "PaddedBorderWidth". Double click them, and change their values to 0, to obtain the smallest border possible. Experiment with these values if you don't like how they look when they are set to zero. The default values for these two keys are: BorderWidth = -15 and PaddedBorderWidth = -60.(in case you change your mind). Now restart your computer for the changes to take place.
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Easy tweaks 101
What I usually disable: -google updater service; - I check manually for updates -adobe updater service; - read above -bing update; - ditto -print spooler; - I do not own a Printer -windows defender; - I have another security suite -windows search;-I rarely use Search(I cannot recall my last time) -touch keyboard; - I do not have touch devices attached to my computer -security center; - It seems quite useless to me. -windows update; - I manually turn this on every Sunday and let it update, the rest of the time I really want this off.
o On your system partition(usually “C:\”), some drivers create installation files that are no longer needed after the specific device’s driver has been installed. Some good examples would be nVidia and ATI graphic cards. Each of these graphic card’s drivers creates a folder named(ATI or nVidia, depending on your gpu) that you can safely delete. o Delete your temporary files and internet browser’s cache. While you’re at it, delete system restore points too(these can get quite big – saved over 4Gb on some machines). How do you do this? Either using a special tool(CCleaner is a free one) or by going to “Disk Cleanup”, the build in windows tool(but not so smart). o Delete your windows update downloaded files. Most people don’t know about this method. Windows update keeps some of the files downloaded when running a system update, and after the update is complete, they become useless, taking some of your precious space. You can do this by navigating to: “C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download” and just delete everything. As you can see in the picture below, just some recent Microsoft Office updates take >200Mb of my space. BE GONE PEST! |
To be continued
That's it for now. I hope you will find all these tips and tweaks helpful!