Slappa's Blog

School is starting to mount on the pressure for first year university students like me. With this pressure comes a lot of studying and late nights spend working. Midterms are in full swing.

Work is starting to clutter up your desktop, physically and virtually. In this environment, you can’t be bound by a slow machine. Your productivity should not be limited by a PC’s ill-maintained state.

For this reason, I decided to write a quick tuneup guide for anyone that is interested. Let’s get started.

Part 1

Eliminate all unwanted startup programs and services from your computer. It is best to stick with the basics. Don’t let all your torrent programs, game managers, IM chat programs, and more slow you down on a fresh startup. Any programs needed later can be opened at any time.

This can be done by accessing msconfig from the search/run bar in windows as so:

Upon accessing this program, you will find many tabs. First start by clicking the “services” tab.

At the bottom, there will be a box that says “Hide all microsoft services”. Check this box. You will then be brought up with a list of services that have been installed by you in the past. Uncheck anything you don’t need to be running in the background all the time. If you aren’t sure what something does, google it, or just leave it enabled.

Next move on to the “Startup” tab. This tab displays all programs that are launched upon starting/logging in to your machine. Eliminate unwanted start programs. Once you are done with this step, press apply to save the settings.

Upon pressing ok, the computer will prompt you to restart the computer, or exit without restart. Hit restart and reboot your machine.

Part 2

Now that all the unwanted services and startup programs are eliminated, it is time to optimize windows. There are a few excellent programs that do a lot of this for you automatically, but I have a few personal favourites.

First download a program called smart defrag. This little disk defragmenting program is miles ahead of the built in windows disk defragmenter.

Once you run the program, On the “Defrag” dropdown menu at the bottom, select the dropdown, and choose “Defrag and Fully Optimize”. This process may take awhile depending on how fragmented your hard disk is, but it is extremely worth it.

Another program I strongly recommend is Advanced System Care. This program deletes junk, invalid registry files and much more. Download and install this program, and on the main menu, choose the “Deep Care” setting. This one may also take awhile. So sit back and relax.

Be fully aware that these programs will set themselves as startup programs/services and also set up scheduled scans automatically. If you do not want this, disable this in the options of each program, or repeat part 1 of this guide.

Part 3

Not only is keeping your operating system in check important, but is important to check hardware components every so often. It is important to ensure the cpu is getting proper cooling that it needs to maintain its life and performance.

This can be checked with yet another program that I recommend. This program is called coretemp. This application allows you to monitor the workload and temperature of your cpu. It also displays the current voltage of the cpu.

If you are on a laptop, it is normal to see temperatures up into the 80-90C range while under full load. However this is not normal if you are not under load. You may have to use compressed air to blow out excess dust from the heatsink and vents on the side of your computer.

On desktops, processor have a lower temperature tolerance, but usually have way better cooling. The general limit for desktop processors is 60-70C under full load.

In this screenshot, I had my A6-3400 Quad Core Processor in my new laptop running under full load during stress testing:

Hard drives can also be monitored for health. Search for programs on the internet that user S.M.A.R.T. hard drive monitoring.

Part 4

If you are seeking a larger performance boost, and are looking into more advanced options, consider overclocking your components. I do not recommend this for laptops, only desktops.

I will not write a guide for this, as this is a very vast topic and has many variables to take into account. I will however direct you to one of the largest overclocking information pools. A website where I gained most of my knowledge: www.overclock.net