Time & Money Saved. Shawn’s Easy Computer Tips, Part II

In the last part of this guide, I spent some time laying the hardware foundations of your computer system. In this portion of the guide we’ll spend some time discussion tips tricks and tweaks for making your operating system to get the most out of your hardware. There are many good options for your OS, but since most of you are going to be using Windows XP or Vista, these tips will be targeted to those OSes.

Part II – Software

Most systems start with waaaay, waaaaaay, waaaaaaaaaaay more extra crap, doo-dads, bells, whistles and useless nonsense on them than is really necessary.  Start the system off properly by removing as much of this excess fat as you can, getting to the delicious meaty center that we all want and need. Remove programs you have no intention of using, don’t know how to use, or are out of date and you’ll have yourself one kick ass geek steak of a machine.

Updating – The OS and it’s drivers is the foundation upon which you’ll be running. When building a home, you don’t use rotten wood from the old barn to build it, so it makes sense that you don’t use shoddy out of date programs and drivers on your brand new hardware. As soon as Windows is installed (and you have an internet connection), run Windows Update until nothing else is left to install. When all of this is done (and it might take a while) then go to the appropriate websites and download new drivers for every piece of hardware in your system and install them one at a time, with a reboot in between each install.
Install your drivers in this order:

1. Chipset – These are basically the drivers for your motherboard. Making sure these are properly installed can have a massive effect on your computer’s performance. Most commonly they are Intel and VIA and more recently nVidia.
2. Video Card/GPU – these are usually self explanatory. Generally, every manufacturer has its own customized driver package, but you’ll usually find the newest drivers at either nVidia or ATI , since 90% of the video cards you’ll be buying will have chips made by those manufacturers. Keeping these up to date can not only improve speed, but can also improve stability and the performance of certain games can be significantly improved. Updating your monitor drivers at this time will often make things a bit clearer, too.
3. Sound Card/Chipset – whether your Sound card is built into your motherboard or a secondary card like a Soundblaster X-Fi, making sure you have the latest and greatest is always a plus. While it’s not always a speed booster, it almost always increases stability.
4. Everything else – Cameras, Scanners, Tablets, card readers, video and audio codecs. The only things you really don’t usually need to install are things like keyboard and mouse drivers. 99 times out of 100 these drivers are usually a waste of valuable RAM. And speaking of RAM…

It’s time to introduce the mantra that we shall all be chanting the remainder of this section of the guide: RAM is everything. Every program runs on RAM. The more of it you have, and the fewer programs you have accessing it the more stable your computer will be and the more you can do with it. The following two areas will focus on reducing the amount of RAM you and your computer use. This is the part where you really start to tweak your computer and get the most out of it.

Protip: Do a complete system back up using Windows’ system restore function before doing any of this. You can seriously hose up your system if you aren’t paying attention. This is what back-ups are for. Do not skip this step or you will be loading everything from scratch again.

Turn Off stupid features - I’m looking at you, Vista side-bar, and shaking my meaty fist! There’s disk Indexing, Search/Speech Bars, along with a slew of other pretty-pretties that are all about as useful as an anchor on your car. Most of this stuff is useless, you’ll probably never use it and all it will do is slow you down. I know, I know, Windows Side-bar is really cool! Sure, but it’s also a system hog.  Shut it down and make sure it’s no longer loading at start-up. Everything you stop from loading is time saved later.

Take a look at the clock in the bottom right corner of your screen. Next to it are a few icons. Each of these icons represents memory you can no longer access. Some things, like your antivirus and speaker icon and the like, are useful and worth keeping. Other things, like mouse controls and camera icons and Image/Picture managers, are pretty much useless and a waste of memory. Often times, these programs don’t make these little “features” easy to remove. You, however, have the ability to take this monster by the horns.

Click on Start, then Run and type in msconfig and press enter. Through this service you can control what programs load at start up. The bit that we’re going to focus on is under the Startup Tab. Clearing the check box next to any line will ensure that the associate program will not load after the next boot. You can usually safely remove anything relating to Adobe Acrobat as well as Windows Defender if you have a anti-spyware software of your own, which you most likely will. As a side note, this would be the only Microsoft software I’d touch in this area. The important thing to note about these programs is that all of them usually provide some level of function. If you’re not using the function, you can unload the program without much issue. If you’re not sure, leave it alone and look it up on the internet.

Tuning System Services – Services are the functions and features that your computer is capable of. This is where most of the sorcery that keeps your computer running is located. Some of these services are really important and do critical things like allow connection to the internet. Some do less useful things like allow a secondary user or terminal services, neither of which most people use. For every one of these services that is started more RAM is used. Since RAM is everything, the more we can save the better off we are. Most services are provided by Microsoft, though some more important drivers and more software may have services of its own; things like Antiviruses and the like.

Rather than make you guess, here are a couple great guides for system tweaking the services. One for Vista, here: Windows Vista Service Tweak Guide v1.0 and here: Windows XP Services Tweak Guide. There are others and feel free to look around at any of the others but these are the ones I use. My suggestion during this phase is to disable only a couple services at a time. After the change, reboot to make sure everything is working. If something you need doesn’t work, restart the last things you stopped. The trick here is this: if you don’t need it, Stop the service, then Disable it. For most of us, it’s unlikely that anything useless now will be useful later.

For a more in depth guide to the services, there is no place better than BlackViper. This is a comprehensive list of all the services running on your computer along with discussions of how important they are. If you’re feeling really brave (and bored) take the time and do this.

Control Your Installs – Whenever you install something, especially something from the internet, the install almost always includes extra software that you either A) don’t/won’t need or b) don’t/won’t want. During your installs you can save yourself trouble later by doing two things: pay attention and just click NO. No, you don’t want the Yahoo/Google Toolbar (Mozilla has the Google search bar built in anyway). No you don’t need the Microsoft office speech bar because no one freakin’ uses it. No, you don’t want free updates. You can do them yourself. No, you don’t need anything extra in your task bar, dastardly Quicktime! No, you don’t want Bonzai Buddy (but more on that later). All you want installed is your program.

Get a good, fast Anti-virus: Most people have heard enough to know they need an anti-virus, but some have a difficult time knowing which ones to chose and which are right for them.  There are quite a few excellent, and free, anti-viruses out there. I have used Avast! for several years now and the home version is free and well supported. Avast! (and other free anti-viruses like AVG) also has the benefit of not being as much as a system gobbling hooker when they’re installed. The two more popular paid anti-viruses, Norton and McAfee are certainly effective and have their staunch supporters, but they throw so much extra crap at you that it bogs the system down. As paid anti-viruses that I’d actually recommend, I think I’d go with Kaspersky. No matter what, you HAVE to have antivirus protection on your machine. There is no excuse. …Unless you like your computer not working.

Keeping that Anti-virus up to date: This is enough of a problem it needs it’s own bullet point. Anti-viruses need their definitions updated since this is what they use to determine if a file is infected or not. I can’t keep track of all the viruses I’ve removed to the astonished and surprised computer owner. When asked how I did it when they couldn’t appear to get rid of the infection, I tell them: Your anti-virus definitions were from 2005…I just downloaded the newest ones. Keep’em up to date or they don’t work!

Get a good, fast Anti-Spy/Adware program: Back in the day when I used to paint mammoths on walls and hunt with the other spearmen of my cave-tribe, it used to be that every piece of problem software was either AOL or a virus. Over the last few years though, I’ve seen Spyware responsible for a huge amount of questions and problems brought to me by the unwary.  I used to be a huge fan of Lavasoft’s AdAware (I even paid for it! The horror!), but the recent release was really disappointing. Lately I’ve taken to Spybot Search and Destroy. It is certainly far from perfect but it’s free and it’s decently thorough enough for me.  Keep whatever you chose to use up to date just like you would an anti-virus and run it once a month or if you start seeing pop-ups more frequently.

Defragment regularly: Windows defrag is acceptable if that’s what you’re alright with using, but I tend to think it’s not as useful as it could be. Here are some ways to make the defrag process more effective: Before defragging, delete your temporary files from your web browser (easier if you use Firefox and set your browser to auto-delete when you close). Clean out temp files from c:\Windows\Temp and C:\Windows\TMP. While you’re deleting them, if anything says you can’t because it’s already in use, don’t sweat it. Once the temp files are cleaned defrag away. I suggest one of two options. For what I think is the best defrag ever, use Perfect Disk by Raxco Software. This is awesome if you’re willing to shell out a few bucks to make sure your defrag is thorough.  I sprung for it, and I think it’s worth every penny. If you aren’t willing to splurge, then try Auslogics Defrag, which is completely free. It’s also an excellent defragger  and fast as hell. I used it until I found Perfect Disk. At any rate, remember to run whichever defrag you choose at least once a month.

And so ends our no-so-short journey through basic software set-up. In our next and final thrilling installment we’ll be focusing on you, dear reader and how you can avoid being your computer’s worst enemy.

Just tuning in? You’re reading part II! Don’t miss Part I: Time & Money Saved. Shawn’s Easy Computer Tips, Part I

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