Your PC is
running slowly and you have to reboot.
- Running out of resources
-
- You may have too many
programs running or too many
windows open. Try closing some.
Windows is not an operating
system that you can leave on for
days at a time (unlike some
versions of Unix or os/2 which
perform the same for months ).
Windows will occasionally become
cluttered with unused junk - you
can either have a good clear out
and keep only what you use or
reinstall windows.
- Other people might use
Norton Ghost or TrueImage to
make a clone of their perfect PC
configuration and use that to
restore it to peak performance.
You can either make a recovery
image to CD/DVD or to a
partition on your disk which is
dead fast and without impact -
of course not the disk you are
going to be backing up. Most DVD
writers are initially only seen
as CD drives and so the drivers
are required to use it - not
good in they are on your
recovery disk which cant be
read.
- You are using ADSL for the
home. This has a 50:1 contention
ratio which means your network
connection is shared with 50
other people. Which means at
peak times such as lunch time
and in the evenings it will slow
right down and at at others it
will feel very quick. A business
connection would have a
contention ratio of 25:1 so only
25 people are trying to use the
connection all at the same time
but this costs more. Having a
contention ratio is because are
are not all downloading at the
same time, sometimes we are
reading the page or sipping
coffee - that wasted time is
used by someone else. Streaming
media is is constant use, so if
49 oof the other people sharing
your connection are downloading
music then it will feel dead
slow.
- It is possible that your
disk drive is fragmented so will
need a quick 'spring clean' from
your computer using button2 and
select Manage then choose Defragment
and defrag your disk. It will complain
if you do not have 30% free space
on the disk otherwise the performance
of your disk will be impaired.
- Most PCs now are used to having
256mb of ram in them "double ram"
is meaningless like what is double
zero? RAM is cheap so buy
it now. No PC in the office has
less than 512mb and if you are a
gamer then you will want fast DDR2
ram.
- SpyWare on your PC will
show it down - because the PC is
working on that as well as what
you have asked it to do.
- Virus Activity - you
should have adequate protection
against virus attack. This will
show down your PC.
- Incompatible drivers and
Hardware - typical problem areas
have always been the humble
mouse driver and the Screen
drivers - devices are competing
for resources or conflicting
with each other at the lowest
level in your system. So ensure
that you run your updates once a
month or just set it to
automatic.
- MSIE is a rich feature program
- the cost of that is that if you
leave it running for alone time
it will eat up resources. The mean
time between failure for MSIE is
about 10hours. During that time
it can grab memory and not let go
of it - many other programs do this
as well. At some point in time you
run out.
Instead of getting the blue
screen of death you get a popup
box to send the error to Microsoft
so they can constantly improve
their products.
- Other browsers such as
FireFox do not do this they are
also not feature rich or as
integrated into windows -
Firefox is multiplatform and
conforms to W3C standards where
as MSIE is more flexible and
forgiving of sites. This means
that it conforms to the lowest
common denominator (a Windows
OS, a Unix OS, Palm OS or a Mac
OS are not all the same so
how does a browser be the same
for every platform if the
underlying architecture does not
support something?).
FireFox is a great browser
especially if you have poor
eyesight but some features will
be missing.
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