If you want to squeeze every last ounce of processing power out of your new computer or aging system, overclocking is a great—if slightly nerve-racking—option. Here are some simple guidelines for safely overclocking your CPU. More »
Hardware – Intel Corporation – Components – Video card – Performance Tuning
If you’re not planning on getting into 3D gaming on your G1 or MyTouch 3G, and you’ve rooted your phone with the CyanogenMod ROM, you can get more memory performance from your Android handset with one hacker’s custom firmware.
The Absolutely Android blog posted a host of firmware images that can be quickly flashed onto a phone running nearly any recent version of the CyanogenMod firmware. Not sure which version you’re running? Hit the menu key on your home screen, head to Settings, scroll down to About phone, then scroll down to the “Mod version” section and note the number there, down to the last decimal point. You’ll then need to download the corresponding image from the blog, run a single terminal command, and then reboot.
You’ll need a decent terminal emulator and root access to flash the image onto your phone; the post offers up a download-able, installable APK file of the Better Terminal Emulator Magic, but you can just as easily download it from the Market—or just use the Terminal Emulator included with the Cyanogen ROM, or a free app like ConnectBot. However you pull off the command, the image will free up 10 MB of RAM, normally dedicated to 3D graphics, and hand it over to the general system.
It's a fair trade-off for the more business-minded Android user looking for a bit more snappy response from their phone—which we've seen, in light amounts, in our own test. Before taking on such a task, of course, be sure to back up your phone firmware.
Chrome is a speedy little browser, but that speed comes with a tradeoff: It also eats tons of memory. If you’ve got plenty of RAM, that may not be an issue; if not, you can reclaim that memory with a simple click.
As Lee Mathews over at Download Squad discovered, the most recent Chrome dev builds come with a command line switch (--purge-memory-button) that, when run with Chrome at startup, adds a Purge memory button to Chrome’s task manager.
Like other browsers, Chrome and Chromium can get a little RAM-hungry after extended browsing sessions. By adding the —purge-memory-button switch to your command line, you'll get exactly that — a purge memory button on the Task Manager screen.
Press shift + ESC after you’ve been browsing for a little while in Chromium top bring up the task manager. Press the purge button, and you’ll notice several of your memory figures drop (some quite drastically).
To put it to use, just edit your Chrome shortcut like so: Right-click the shortcut, select Properties, and paste —purge-memory-button at the end of the Target field in the Shortcut tab. Then just launch Chrome using that shortcut, hit Shift+Esc to bring up the Chrome Task Manager, and you should see the shiny new Purge memory button.
If you like the looks and features of Ubuntu 9.04, but want a lighter, swifter version of it, try this minimalist installation that can knock memory usage down by up to 75 percent.
Ubuntu Forums user TheShiv likes to build his system from the ground up, and doesn’t like a lot of software and services he’ll never use. So he installs a core, bare-bones system from either the Ubuntu Server Edition CD or a Minimal CD, then, when he gets access to a command prompt and he’s wired to the internet (presumably through a LAN cable, though perhaps wireless works as well), he uses two or three commands to install enough features to get a working desktop, but very little that won’t be used day to day.
TheShiv frames his installation as a script you can copy, save, and run, but users could also just copy the sudo apt-get -y install commands he has listed at the link below. It’s been linked to by a few approving Ubuntu heads, and seems like a pretty good way to get a lower-memory, but still GNOME-based, Ubuntu-based system running. Got another/better installation script to point us to? Pass the link along in the comments.
It's the little things that make a Windows system great—like utilities that use less than 10MB of memory to make your life easier. Here are 10 apps that pack a lot of greatness into very little space.
Note: Most of these apps do, indeed, use less than 10MB of hard drive space when installed, or use that much when they're running in the background. Some will scale in use as you demand more or less from them—DisplayFusion or UltraMon, for example, when handling very high-resolution backgrounds or a wall of monitors—but all should have an almost negligible performance impact on a modern system.
You don’t open your programs in the order you want them nealy arranged on your taskbar, you open them when you need them. Taskbar Shuffle knows this, and makes it easy to quickly swap windows around, along with system tray icons. It also allows you to close out windows with a simple middle-click, which alone could make it worth the roughly 6MB price of admission. You won’t know you wanted to fling windows out of your cursor’s way until you try it.
It’s probably smaller than your desktop wallpaper. But Everything is more useful and efficient than applications 25x its size. Everything only searches through file names, not inside the contents of them, but it does so stupid-fast as you type. You’ll usually find your file with a few keystrokes, and Google fans will appreciate the boolean operators that enable and/or elegance. Definitely an app you’ll want to right-click and create a keyboard shortcut for. There’s also Locate32, which does a bit more, is portable, and has more user-friendly features—we just like Everything for its single box that searches, uh, everything.
If you’re rocking dual, triple, or even quadruple monitors at home or at the office (and, let us just say, lucky you on that last bit), these apps have a relatively small system footprint, but make a big impact in how your system looks. They both manage separate or split wallpapers across multiple monitors, and can grab and rotate images from your computer, Flickr, or other sources. With DisplayFusion’s recent update, they also both maintain your Windows taskbar across all your monitors (or don’t, if that’s how you like it). Our resident multi-monitor enthusiast Jason still keeps both apps on his system for the little things, like multi-monitor screensavers in UltraMon, but both are among the very select paid apps we’ll admit to being worth shelling out for (although both have restricted “free” versions as well).
I know, it's like we never give up on promoting this, right? Well, what can we say—we (the royal "we," really) wrote it because it filled a need in our half-breed lives of alternating text and HTML. Turns out, though, that folks ranging from power emailers to military writers have found dull, boring text they can automate, misspelled words to catch on the fly, or perhaps powerful, seriously secretive acronyms they'd occasionally like to spell out. For less than 2.5MB of RAM on most systems, this one packs a pretty hefty punch.
In a magical world without computer stress, we’re all running virtual machines to try out software we might not want, and we simply uninstall it there, keeping one system nearly pristine. For the real world, Revo Uninstaller scrubs an application and all its traces off your Windows system. It can also turn off programs that are starting up with Windows, and uninstall applications with a crosshair “Hunter Mode” that doesn’t require you to know what it’s named.
Nir Sofer has contributed a wealth of great applications to the Windows world, but his Lifetime Achievement award for free software could be granted on his password utilities alone. Need to share your network password, but haven’t actually typed it in forever and a day? Network Password Recovery to the rescue. Need to unlock an Outlook PST file? Hit up PstPassword. Nir’s got you covered for email clients, IM apps, and, for every other app in your system that you can only see asteriks for, Asterisk Logger. Use them with the light side of the geek Force, and you’ll owe Nir a beer after he saves your unlucky day.
With good reason, this tiny, powerful little app has remained our readers’ favorite Windows maintenance tool. With a few clicks, it guns through your web browser remains, Recycle Bin, temporary system files, registry, and unnecessary application left-behinds, clearing them out and, in some cases, freeing up at least a DivX movie’s worth of space. It also offers a startup program analyzer and disabling tool, and can be run on a schedule for that light, regular crap-free feeling (ew, but good, right?)
Windows Task Manager isn’t a bad tool, necessarily, but it only gives you a layman’s view of what’s eating up memory or pulling serious CPU cycles. Process Explorer expands on the vagueries of “rundll” or “svchost” with a double-click, links background services to applications, and points to the folders they come from. You might not need it all the time, but when you’re rooting around and trying to free up system memory, it’s like a finely-tuned metal detector.
There are a lot of good reasons to keep on rockin' Windows XP, but some of the built-in utilities can feel a bit, well, dated—and that goes for a good number of Vista tools, tool. Notepads without tabs? A Paint app that can't really resize or undo more than one action? Skip the headaches and work-arounds and run down our list of power replacements for built-in Windows utilities, almost all of which are tiny litle buggers that do their work a whole lot better than Windows' own stuff. This editor, for instance, tries not to think about what file copying was like before TeraCopy came along—or, if he does, tries to keep himself calm about that 4GB transfer that failed out for no reason, overnight.
If you feel like you’ve heard this one before without really knowing why, you probably saw it listed as the best calendar application, or listed as one of the tools used to create a Featured Desktop. This customizable little guy gives you a floating, tiny, yet informative calendar on your desktop, along with a to-do list. It integrates with Outlook, Google Calendar, and most other iCal-supporting scheduling systems. The full app with offline Outlook, GCal and shared calendar support costs €10 (or about $14-15), but could totally be worth the price for anyone who doesn’t like to have to open a browser, or flip up Outlook, just to see what’s going on Monday.
As we’ve learned from reading our comments over many years (collectively, at least), any Windows power-user has their own stash of little helpers that can move the rock down the road. Which teensy-weensy little apps get past the velvet rope to your system tray, or into your must-install list? Share your links and the reasons why they win in the comments.
GoogleUpdate, ctfmon, iPodService—these rascally, auto-starting services and others like them can drive a memory-sensitive Windows user bonkers. Process Blocker does what it sounds like, with a DIY but simple method of choosing targets.
As noted in the instructions, Process Blocker runs as a system service, watching for certain processes and killing them off if it finds them running. The app won't provide you a list of background services or apps for selection, though—this is a text affair. If you look in your Task Manager (Control-Shift-Escape), or your super-charged Process Explorer replacement, and notice that, for instance, GoogleUpdate.exe refuses to stop starting up, even after you’ve told it not to do so with Revo Uninstaller or another app, simply add it to the list.txt file included in Process Blocker’s program folder. More detailed instructions on adding and re-starting the service are at the program site. You’ll know it’s working if you see a system tray pop-up noting that “SuchAndSuch.exe is blocked” when it tries to jump in and drink up a little memory.
You’ll definitely want to make sure the processes you’re trying to block can and should be blocked off, so making a few trips to Process Library wouldn’t be a bad idea. And if you just want to throttle back an auto-starting app’s memory use, not kill it entirely, try the previously mentioned Process Lasso, or dig through our guide to reclaiming memory by mastering Windows Task Manager. Process Blocker is a free download for 32- and 64-bit Windows systems (2000 and later).
In our latest browser speed tests, I half-heartedly complained that Firefox eats up memory over long periods of use. Our lovely, helpful commenters pointed out that there is, indeed, a tweak to help with that.
It’s important to note that this about:config tweak doesn't actually change how Firefox uses (and hoards) memory over actual use. For the purposes of user speed, then, it's not much change. But while Windows can normally grab memory back from applications that are minimized, Firefox prevents that and keeps all the memory it acquired during your multi-tab wanderings—unless you enable this tweak, which some have claimed also makes Firefox scale down the big memory pile it had going upon re-focusing.
Let’s get started. Type about:config into your address bar, hit Enter, and confirm to your browser that you’ll be careful messing with your configuration. Unless you’ve performed this specific change before, right-click somewhere outside all those period-separated values and choose New/Boolean. In the window that pops up, enter config.trim_on_minimize and hit OK, then select “True” in the next dialog. Close out your about:config window, restart Firefox, and you’re now demanding that Firefox give up some of that sweet, sweet RAM when it’s not even showing on your desktop.
This could lead, of course, to slower functionality when re-maximizing Firefox, or even bugginess. And those who are using Firefox just fine with its standard memory settings should probably leave well enough alone. You can read up on just what this trick does at the MozillaZine Knowledge Base. Need to undo it? Simply head back to about:config, start typing in the boolean variable’s name again (config.trim_on_minimize), and when it pops up, switch it back to “False” by double-clicking or right-clicking.
Have you used this little Firefox tweak to save memory and stuck with it? Finding it buggy and unreliable? Post your impressions and details in the comments.
Thanks to alejo0121 for pointing out this trick, and to our own Asian Angel and Gina Trapani for confirming its validity.
