Hard drive space is cheaper than ever, but as Parkinson’s Law dictates, your data (and, let’s face it, BitTorrent addiction) somehow expands to fill your space available for storage. Here’s a few simple but effective ways to clean out your hard drive. More »
One of the most persistent myths about Windows is that you need to reinstall the operating system regularly to keep it running at top performance. Let’s take a look at the real problem and how to fix it.
Today we’re talking about the myth that Windows slows down over time, and how to solve the problem. The reality is that Windows doesn’t slow down if you just take care of your PC a little more. Follow these procedures, and you won’t have to wonder if spending hours backing up data, installing from disc, and re-installing your essential applications is really necessary.
I'm not going to sit here and tell you that your Windows PC will never slow down—because for many people, they almost always do. What actually slows your PC down are too many poorly written applications that stay resident in memory and waste CPU cycles, having too many badly written low-level applications that hook into Windows, or running more than one antivirus application at a time. And of course, if you’ve run your PC’s hard drive out of space, you can hardly blame Windows for that.
If you aren’t getting the picture, the problem is usually the person behind the keyboard that installed too many junk applications in the first place. More gently put, it’s often that (very well-meaning) person’s gradual easing of their safeguards and cleaning regimens as time goes by.
Installing software should be thought of like feeding your PC. If you constantly feed your PC garbage apps, it’s going to get sick and won’t be able to run fast anymore. These poorly written applications clutter your drive with unnecessary DLL files, add always-resident Windows services when they don’t need to, bloat up your registry, and add useless icons to your system tray that waste even more memory and CPU cycles. Usually you can get away with using a few terrible applications, but as you continue to install more and more of them, your PC will slow down to a crawl.
We feature and recommend a lot of software applications around here, but you should keep in mind that we aren’t trying to tell you to install every single one of them at the same time-just install the applications that you actually need and you’ll generally prevent the dreaded format and reinstall.
Here’s a few tips to help you know what applications you should be careful with:
Once you’ve rid yourself of your junk application habit and resolved to only use healthy, useful applications, you’ll want to make sure to keep your PC clean of any remaining clutter that doesn’t need to be there. You can set up a shortcut to manually run CCleaner silently with the push of a button, but your best bet is to set up CCleaner to run automatically on a schedule, so you don’t have to remember to do it.
Since CCleaner is only going to clean up temporary files, you’ll still need a good solution for keeping the rest of your PC clean-and Lifehacker’s own Belvedere can help you automate your self-cleaning PC or automatically clean up your download folder.
With all of this automated file deletion going on, your hard drive is likely to get a bit fragmented. If you’re already running Windows 7 or Vista, automatic defrag comes out of the box and probably shouldn’t be messed with, but Windows XP users will need to use Windows Tasks to setup a schedule and automatically defrag their drives.
If you still want to test out all of the latest software, including apps that look a bit rough around the edges, your best bet is to use a virtual machine to test out anything before putting it onto your primary operating system. You can install all of your software in an XP or Windows 7 VM just like it was a real PC, and with the latest VMWare player releases, you can even enable Windows Aero in a guest VM. If you are new to the idea and need some more help, you should check out our beginner’s guide to creating virtual machines in VirtualBox, or Windows 7 users can check out our guide to using XP Mode. If you don’t want to go the virtual machine route, Windows XP and Vista users can alternatively use Windows SteadyState to protect their PC and roll back all of the changes on a reboot.
The How-To Geek reinstalls Windows only every few years and has no speed problems at all. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker, How-To Geek, and Twitter.
Linux only: The Addictive Tips blog writes up a quick tip that can help you trim down some of the fat from your Ubuntu installation—do you really need the Bluetooth service running?
By default, Ubuntu starts a number of services that really aren't necessary for everybody—but they are started to make the operating system work for the maximum amount of people. It's not a bad thing, but since you are running Linux you are obligated to tweak and customize it to fit your own needs—most people probably don't need the Braille display management or Bluetooth services, for instance.
To tweak the services for yourself, head over to System -> Administration -> Services, click the Unlock button, and then remove the check marks from the services you want to disable. Hit the link for the full screenshot tour.
Whether you purchased your HDTV yesterday or last year, there’s a big chance you just plugged it in and fired it up. Tweak your HDTV for better viewing quality. Photo by blakespot.
While HDTV has a pretty awesome picture, and you've likely been enjoying your screen just fine how it is, your television didn't come out of the box pre-programmed for your living room. Your HDTV came out of the box preset for a showroom floor, with the settings cranked up to compete with a wall of other HDTVs to induce that certain feeling of, "Oh my God, I can't believe how HD-riffic this is!" Your living room is not the same as a showroom floor for a myriad of reasons—bright polo shirts and tube fluorescents among them—so the best viewing experience requires a few display setting switches.
For those with a factory default tube, the New York times put together a crash course in tweaking your television. Most of their advice, as you would imagine, involves cranking things down from their eye-searing in-store levels. Start by controlling the external lighting as much as possible, then start tinkering with your settings starting with the brightness:
A picture’s black level is controlled by the TV’s brightness adjustment; it needs to be set dark enough so that the screen displays rich, deep blacks. Set too low, many images will lose their detail. Set the black level too high, the picture will look muddy.
Black level is important because the truer the blacks, the greater the perceived sharpness of the TV image. A muddy picture will look less sharp than one that has true blacks.
To get the proper black level, you can use a PLUGE pattern, which typically consists of six vertical bars of varying black levels. Turn the picture level down until one of the bars disappears against the background. PLUGE patterns, and other patterns discussed here, are available on a variety of TV tuning discs.
Once you’ve got a handle on your brightness, don’t neglect the contrast and colors. But wait! Don’t run out and spend money on a calibration disc. Not only are there tons of free test patterns a Google Image search away, but there are hundreds of DVD movies that include test patterns tucked in the bonus features.
Check out the full article below for tips for your other HDTV settings.
Taking time out to evacuate your PC’s dust bunnies is a must for keeping your computer running in tip-top shape. If you’re not the desktop sort, DIY site Instructables details how to banish dust from your laptop.
The more dust that collects inside your computer, the hotter it'll run. The hotter it runs, the sooner it'll die. What's more, that accumulated dust has probably caused your fan to run more often and louder than it needs to. As you can imagine, then, a clean computer is a happy computer—which is where this Instructable guide comes in handy.
Granted, the inside of one laptop may vary greatly from the inside of another, but—as the author of this Instructable points out—the same basic ideas apply, so if you practice a little common sense you should be fine. While you're at it, if you feel your desktop computer is in need of some serious cleaning, check out how to clean your PC for more.
Windows only: Even on a snappy system, Photoshop has a bit of a hang time during startup as hundreds of plugins load. Photoshop SpeedUp helps you optimize your Photoshop install and startup.
Photoshop SpeedUp allows you to selectively disable plugins to speed up start time and increase performance. If there are plugins you never use there is no harm in disabling them, on the off chance you do need them while working in Photoshop they’ll be loaded then. You can also set Photoshop to not load Adobe fonts CMap and Base. In addition to disabling items you can optimize the amount of system memory Photoshop will use. If at any time things feel weird or quirky you can run Photoshop SpeedUp again and hit the Restore button to turn it back to its pre-optimized state. The documentation for Photoshop SpeedUp indicates that it’s for Photoshop versions 3 through 8 only, but in our testing it also worked on higher versions of Photoshop. This may indicate that the structure of Photoshop hasn’t changed enough to break the tool or that we simply got lucky, your mileage may vary. Photoshop SpeedUp is freeware, Windows only.
The CyberNet tech blog details how to create a set-it-and-forget-it scheduled task to automatically run Disk Cleanup every time your computer starts.
The setup requires a few steps, starting with running Disk Cleanup from the command line with the /sageset:1 parameter to choose your settings, and then creating a scheduled task with the /sagerun:1 option to automatically run using the saved settings every time you start your computer.
If you’d prefer to use the reader favorite CCleaner to clean up your computer, we’ve already detailed how to run CCleaner silently with a shortcut, or run it automatically with a scheduled task, which could be adjusted to run on startup. For more on automated maintenance, check out how to create a self-repairing hard drive.
