Archive for the ‘Windows Tools’ Category
Here’s the shocking truth: dubious default settings, wrong configurations and wasteful processes are sapping many of your PC’s valuable resources. And what’s to blame? Windows.
Windows is deceptive. After you’ve installed it, the OS happily connects to the internet, downloads all the necessary drivers, configures itself and there you go – one stable PC all ready to roll. It couldn’t be easier or more convenient.
But the problem is, Windows doesn’t come optimised for performance. And it’s much the same story for most of your applications: they’re all set up to work, not roar along.
So what’s the answer? We say take control and don’t trust Windows’ default settings. Sure, they’ll yield a machine that is stable and dependable, and to a degree that’s the point. That’s what the average user wants, and it’s what Microsoft and PC makers need. By keeping configurations nicely conservative they’ll keep PCs the world over ticking along happily and calls to their technical support divisions low.
But we aren’t average users. We’re demanding users who want to squeeze every drop of performance out of our computers. So, join us as we declare war on default settings and automatic configurations. Take control of your PC and release its full potential!
Remove processes
A good first step when speeding up your system is to identify and remove the processes that are currently wasting its resources. Windows runs a slew of processes by default. Some are essential to the functioning of your machine, but many others are unnecessary resource hogs.
Process Hacker (a Task Manager-type utility with many more features) is perfect for sorting the wheat from the chaff, so go grab a copy from here.
Launch the program and rightclick the Name column header to define what information it should display. Ensure that ‘Name’, ‘PID’, ‘Pvt Memory’, ‘CPU’, ‘I/O Total’, ‘Username’, ‘Description’, ‘CPU History’, ‘Handles’ and ‘I/O History’ are all checked.
Now click ‘OK’ and you’ll see two small graphs – CPU History and I/O History – that give a visual pointer as to how each running process has been behaving in the past few seconds.
This is helpful information: if your hard drive has been thrashing for some unknown reason, for example, scan the I/O History column. Anything showing spikes of activity is a suspect.
Exactly what Process Hacker uncovers will vary depending on your system, but on our test PC we noticed that ‘IBurn.exe’ (a packet writing program provided with Cyberlink Media Suite) had regular I/O read spikes and that a process associated with VMware Workstation, ‘vmware-tray.exe’, was tying up CPU and I/O time.
It’s important not to overreact and start shutting down resource-hungry processes, because if you pick something important, your PC will crash. Instead, try to identify the process, and if it proves to be unnecessary, make sure it doesn’t reload next time.
To do this for IBurn.exe, we loaded the InstantBurn System Configuration Tool and clicked ‘Disable InstantBurn’ to stop it launching when Windows next started. The vmware-tray.exe process was just as easy to turn off: we launched VMware Workstation, clicked ‘Edit | Preferences | Workspace’ and cleared the ‘Show Tray Icon’ box to ensure it wouldn’t start again.
The next thing to do is click the Pvt Memory column header to sort your processes by the amount of RAM they’re using – a handy way to see the real resource hogs. Once again, we found programs that could be removed.
‘SkypePM.exe’ was the Skype Extras Manager, but we didn’t use them: clicking ‘Tools | Options | Advanced Settings’ and clearing ‘Automatically start extras’ meant that the process wouldn’t load next time.
If you’re looking for more savings, target ‘iTunesHelper.exe’. It launches iTunes when it detects an iPod or iPhone being plugged into the PC. If you don’t have one, run Regedit, head to ‘HKEY_ LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsCurrentVersion\Run’, right-click the iTunesHelper key and click ‘Delete’.
We’ve only carried out four tweaks so far, then, but we’ve freed up at least 47MB of RAM, as well as reducing background I/O and CPU activity. That’s not bad, but some judicious tweaking of Windows services may be able to deliver even more.
Stop services running
Windows services are small programs that run in the background, providing things to the OS and your applications. Click Start, type Services.msc and click the ‘Services’ applet link to see the services installed on your PC, which is almost guaranteed to include some that you don’t need. Here are some examples.
If you don’t use Media Center then the Windows Media Center Extender, Receiver and Scheduler services are all surplus to requirements. The Distributed Link Tracking Client maintains links between NTFS files over a network. If you don’t use that feature then it’s unnecessary.
Similarly, IP Helper is useless for those without an IPv6 network; Offline Files has no purpose if you don’t use its sync features; the Tablet PC Input Service is only for tablet PCs; and the Secure Socket Tunnelling Protocol Service is generally only useful if you’re connecting to a virtual private network (VPN).
APP BLOAT: Bloated apps like iTunes come with lots of unnecessary services and processes that slow your PC down
Potentially redundant third-party services include Apple Mobile Device and iPod Service, which come with iTunes and can be safely turned off if you don’t have an iPod or iPhone. Bonjour Service is only required if you need iTunes or Safari to discover network services; Nero BackItUp Scheduler belongs to Nero Burning ROM, and can be turned off if you’re not using the back-up tool; and Nvidia Stereoscopic 3D Driver Service is useless unless you have the 3D glasses needed to use Nvidia’s 3D Vision technology.
Think carefully about the services that can be safely disabled on your PC. (And we do mean carefully: get this at all wrong and you could prevent Windows from loading, even in Safe Mode, so if in doubt about something, leave it alone).
Then go to work turning off the unnecessary components. In some cases you may be able to do this by uninstalling a program from Control Panel. That’s where you’ll find the Nvidia Stereoscopic 3D driver, for instance. But with most options you’ll have to launch the Services applet (‘services.msc’) and tweak the settings yourself.
SERVICES: Change a service’s Startup Type to ‘Manual’ to ensure that it won’t load automatically but can be started if needed
The safest approach is to double-click the redundant service and set its Startup Type to ‘Manual’; it won’t be launched automatically, but will still be available if another service requests it. The problem is that this can leave some services running unexpectedly, so if you’re 110 per cent sure that something isn’t in any way system critical – Apple Mobile Device, say – then set its Startup Type to ‘Disabled’, and you can be sure that it won’t be launched again.
Create a Turbo mode
Some of the most resource-hungry Windows services shouldn’t be turned off permanently. We found that Windows Search consumed more than 250MB of RAM on our test system, for instance. That’s annoying, but we’d miss the service if it weren’t there.
SEARCH: Shutting down Windows Search recovered more than 250MB of RAM
The SuperFetch caching service can grab plenty of RAM, too, and it isn’t always effective, but on balance it’s still worth keeping it running. You wouldn’t want these services to disappear forever, then, but what about if you created a batch file to turn them off just temporarily? This could free up a considerable amount of RAM.
You may then get better performance out of a game or some other heavy-duty application that you’re trying to run, and you could use another batch file to restore the services when you’re done.
To give this a try, launch ‘Services.msc’, double-click each service you’d like to disable and make a note of its short name. This is labelled as ‘Service name’ on the dialog. Now create a file called Turbo-On.bat that uses the net stop command (as shown below) to close each service.
Feel free to leave SuperFetch enabled if it helps the particular app that you’re trying to prioritise, and of course you can add as many other services or programs as you like, just as long as they’re not system critical.
Here we’ve included a sample line that would shut down Skype’s services:
net stop wsearch
net stop sysmain
‘\program files\skype\phone\skype.exe’ /shutdown
Then create a second file called Turbo-Off.bat that uses the net start command to relaunch everything, as here:
net start wsearch
net start sysmain
‘\program files\skype\phone\skype.exe’
Store these files somewhere safe, and create shortcuts to each. Next, right-click the shortcut, click ‘Properties | Shortcut | Advanced’ and check ‘Run as administrator’. Now, whenever you need the maximum possible performance, launch the ‘Turbo-On.bat’ shortcut to free up some RAM and system resources. Then fire up ‘Turbo-Off. bat’ when you’re done to restore normal operations.
So far we’ve concentrated on absolute ways to divert your PC’s resources. But what about those programs that you must leave running, but aren’t system-critical – such as mail apps? It’s possible to recover resources from these applications, too, although it may take a little extra work to do so.
Let’s assume that you always need to have Outlook running in the background. By default this may grab processor time on any of your CPU cores (assuming you’ve got a multicore CPU). You can restrict the app to just one, freeing up the others for different programs.
In Process Hacker, right-click the ‘Outlook.exe’ process, click ‘Affinity’ and ensure that only ‘CPU 0′ is checked. Repeat the process with other non-essential programs that you have launched (nothing security-related though, and no Windows components).
Their performance will fall a little because they’re restricted to one CPU, but the rest of your apps should now benefit, as they get improved access to the rest of your system’s cores. Another way to make other apps run quicker is to reduce the CPU and I/O priority of a background process.
Windows does this itself with the Windows Search indexer and other components so that they don’t interfere too much with foreground apps, and you can apply the same trick yourself to limit a program’s impact on your system.
In Process Hacker, right-click the process you’d like to change (avoiding security tools, Windows components and anything system critical) and select ‘Priority | Idle’. Then right-click the process again and select ‘Miscellaneous | I/O Priority | 0′ to make sure that it gets the least possible share of your system’s attention.
You could also increase the priority of more important processes to High, which may mean that they get more CPU time, but be careful – doing so is risky. It’s more likely that your programs will block Windows’ own processes from running, and that could result in your PC crashing or locking up.
Don’t expect too much from these techniques, though, especially if you don’t have many background processes. With just Outlook and a browser running in the background on our machine, our tests showed that priority and affinity tweaking delivered only a two to five per cent improvement in foreground application performance.
However, if your PC is packed with busy background processes, this can be a very useful way to manage them. If you see good results then you can change your program shortcuts so that you’re able to launch them using the command line ‘start.exe’ tool, which can set their priority and affinity without Process Hacker’s help.
LASSO: Process Lasso can optimise all your process priorities to help deliver improved system speeds
It may also be worth trying Process Lasso, which assigns and manages process priorities automatically. It’s a commercial product, but it’s reasonably priced (from $20), and there’s a free trial available so you can see if it works.
Further basic rules
If you’ve followed our advice so far, you’ll have discovered and tamed resource-hungry processes, turned off unwanted Windows services and taken steps to reduce the impact of many other programs on your PC’s performance.
That’s great, but to get the most from your PC you’ll still need to follow two simple rules while you’re working. If you have a bulky application open but you won’t be using it for a while, don’t leave the window open on your desktop – minimise it. Windows will often free up some of the RAM it’s using immediately.
If you’re walking away from your PC and leaving an app running some lengthy task – rendering video, say – then make sure that the program is running in the foreground (just click its title bar). Windows gives more CPU time to the foreground app and you should find it completes more quickly.
Nothing is quite as demanding on your system as a cutting-edge game. To get playable frame rates you’ll generally need lots of fast RAM, a powerful graphics card, a decent CPU and a speedy hard drive. But if your PC isn’t quite up to scratch, don’t give up immediately – there are a few tweaks you can apply that may improve things.
As we’ve already mentioned, detecting and removing resource-hungry processes, freeing up RAM and keeping your hard drive defragmented and optimised will make a real difference. Updating your video drivers can deliver even more benefits.
For example, Nvidia claimed that its 195.62 release would increase performance by 10 to 20 per cent in many 3D games, as well as by 38 per cent in Far Cry 2, and by up to 80 per cent in Lost Planet: Colonies. Impressive? Yes, but unfortunately the driver was soon withdrawn because users were reporting that their cards were overheating, so updating on the day of release probably isn’t the best idea.
KEEP UPDATED: Keep your video drivers up to date to ensure the best possible performance
Stay aware of what’s going on, but let others try out new drivers for a couple of weeks before you jump in. In the meantime, you can always get an immediate speed boost by overclocking your video card. It’s surprisingly easy.
Overclock your card
Launch the Display Settings applet, click ‘Advanced Settings’, choose your display adaptor’s tab and fire up its control panel. If this is an ATI card then you should see an Overdrive section with sliders for GPU core and memory clockspeeds; Nvidia cards have the same, and add a Shader Clock slider for good measure. (Don’t see that? Make sure you’re using the Nvidia drivers, not those provided with Windows, and install the Nvidia System Tools from here.)
Tempting though it might be, don’t immediately push all these sliders to the maximum just to see what happens. Your PC will almost certainly crash, unless your video card overheats and dies before that happens. It’s much better to take a gradual approach, one slider at a time.
Push up the Memory Core clock by maybe 10MHz, save the changes and then run something like the Crysis benchmark (demo at www.crysisdemo.com, benchmarking tool here). If the demo looks fine then repeat the process, perhaps reducing the increment to 5MHz after a couple of overclocks.
CRYSIS: Tweaking just two configuration settings almost tripled our Crysis frame rate
If you’ve pushed the card too far then artefacts will begin to appear: strange lines, noise and general video oddities. In this case you should make a note of your last successful clockspeed, return to the default settings and move on to the next slider.
When finished, you’ll have the highest successful value for each clock, so try setting all the clocks at the appropriate value. This probably won’t be stable, so wind back the clocks you pushed furthest and try again until you’re artefact-free.
OVERCLOCKING: RivaTuner is an excellent video overclocking tool that works with both ATI and Nvidia cards
We tried this on a test PC and managed to increase our GeForce 8800 GTS performance by 14 per cent – nothing spectacular, but not bad for a couple of hours’ work. Be sure to monitor your GPU temperature and increase fan speeds if necessary. RivaTuner has everything you need to safely tweak both ATI and Nvidia video cards.
Find the bottleneck
If everything we’ve discussed so far still doesn’t get you close to the frame rates you need, your system may have a bottleneck that’s holding everything else up. Is your system RAM up to the task, for instance?
When equipped with only 2GB of generic DDR2 DIMMs, our test PC barely reached 20fps on the Crysis demo (1,600 x 1,200, high quality). We replaced these with 4GB of Crucial’s finest Ballistix offerings and frame rates went up by almost 25 per cent – not bad for an £80 to £90 outlay.
And that’s just the start – faster and more reliable RAM means you’ll probably be able to overclock your CPU further, too. A RAM upgrade didn’t offer the same benefits if we tried to run Crysis at the very highest-quality levels, though: the 2GB test returned 11.75fps, the 4GB a near-identical 11.915fps.
That’s because the graphics card is now the bottleneck. It simply couldn’t deliver acceptable performance at the settings we’d chosen.
As a last resort, then, you can always change your game settings. There’s usually an intimidating list of quality-related options, but tweaking just one or two of these will often be enough.
In Crysis, for instance, just changing the Shading Quality setting from ‘Very High’ to ‘Medium’ was enough to see our test PC’s 1,600 x 1,200 frame rate leap from 11.915fps to 23.61fps.
Although Crysis will by default use DirectX 10 when installed on Windows Vista and 7, switching to DirectX 9 gave us a further big performance jump to a new frame rate of 35.49fps. There’s no guarantee that other games with a similar option will see such a huge improvement, but it’s worth a try.
We finished by applying some of the techniques we mentioned earlier. Disabling PC resource hogs increased the frame rate by four per cent; turning off pointless services gave us a three per cent increase; using Process Lasso added more than five per cent; and overclocking returned an extra 14 per cent.
They’re small gains, but every little really does help, and the incremental effect meant that a previously unplayable game was now purring along at more than 45fps. That’s close to a 400 per cent improvement – a real result.
Check out important recommendations about the topic of cheap PlayStation 3 – please read the publication. The time has come when concise information is really within your reach, use this opportunity.
There are two types of computer freeze – when only one program has froze or when your whole system has crashed. Both are very annoying and both results could lead to data lose.
To clear your Windows freeze, press CTRL, ALT, DEL together and open up the Task Manager. Select the program that is described as ‘Not Responding’ and click on this to close the offending program. But if everything has crashed – meaning that you can not even use your mouse, then press CTRL, ALT, DEL and shut down. Wait for a minute and then re-boot. As said before, information could be lost if you were in the middle of something.
Diagnosing the Windows freeze is the hard part. If it keeps on happening then it will need to be stopped before it worsens, possibly causing alot more problems than needed. Eliminating certain reasons will narrow down the solution to the crash. Retracing your steps can help. For example, if you have installed new hardware then check that the device driver is the right one. Incorrect device drivers are a main cause for alot of computer errors so check your Device Manager for any issues with your hardware. This can be found in the Control Panel. If there are any problems here it will be shown with a warning symbol. Disable the offending item, restart your PC and see whether this rectifies the freeze. If it does then go back into the Device Manger and update the driver effected and install the latest version.
Viruses or spyware can cause strange behaviour on your computer with crashing being just one of them. If you browse online then it is an absolute necessity that you have a reputable antivirus package installed. If you do have antivirus protection onboard then check that you only have one package installed. This may sound daft but if you have decided to install different antivirus protection without uninstalling the last then both will conflict with each other resulting with a Windows freeze.
If new software has been installed recently since the freezes have happened then uninstall it, reboot and see if this helps.
A corrupted registry is a huge contributor to a computer crash. The registry holds all of the system’s configuration settings that makes things happen between the user, the software and the system itself. Without a registry your PC would not function. Incorrect, obsolete, corrupt registry files can easily occur due to the sheer size and complexity of the registry. So if a value within the registry is corrupt then the reading of this to the system is misunderstood, which can relate to your system crashing. Install a registry repair tool for instant results and a worry-free registry repair.
For further information on any of the above or any other computer problems please visit www.ComputerResurrection.com
DivX is an upcoming digital media firm operating from San Diego and deals in creating digital video developments that make customers in a position to watch movies of high quality using a big selection of dissimilar devices. The technology utilized by DivX focuses on the three latest kinds of screens obtainable in today’s market, that is private pc displays, TV and gadgets alike to the Blackberry. The firm develops technologies and gives licenses that permit customers to play and watch video on the respective devices, and presently works tirelessly to create more superior media environments. DivX additionally creates a significant variety of internet services for video including internet players and video converters. The other significance of the technologies supplied by DivX is realized amongst editors and filmmakers, who can access video through a multiplicity of devices, thus easing production and editing. Information of how to use DivX is due to this fact important for anyone concerned about modern technologies in media.
DivX’s software program is downloaded from the corporate’s web site, and comes with help features just incase customers discover difficulties. To use the software, one must have a personal laptop with a TV output jack and a video card, an X10 broadcaster, and a DivX enabled video player such as the 2.0 Alpha. These options allow users to access their video via their TVs as well as personal computers.
Customers additionally need to attach the private laptop to their TV. For this objective, a dual set of wires is required, one for the audio element and the other for video. The private computer too is to be connected the X10 device. The receiving unit is connected to link the X10 and the TV. This creates a very good movement of data via the personal computer, the X10 and the TV, thus facilitating high quality show of video or connectivity to the Internet.
DivX is flexible and can be used with both Windows and Macintosh computers. Customers must download the software from the web site http://www.divx.com/divx/windows and ensure that their personal computer systems have the have the fundamental requirements such as Windows 2000 or Windows XP and Pentium III or higher versions.
By adhering to the above requirements and procedures, users of the DivX software are able to create media that meet their diverse needs. Thus, they are able to store movies, watch them and develop a wide range of fascinating video by screening them to fulfill desirable specifications.
Fetch helpful tips about cheap PlayStation 3 – read this web site. The times have come when concise info is truly within your reach, use this possibility.
Whether you realize it or not, every piece of hardware in your computer uses software called drivers to function correctly. Drivers are what make it possible to play games, print documents, surf the Internet and read this review. They are sort of the spine of your computer’s ability to function at all. Unfortunately, your drivers need to be updated on occasion, and in general most people have no idea when this needs to happen; they only figure it out when they go to use a particular application and get an error message telling them that they do not have the proper driver. One great way to get around this confusion is with a driver scanner, such as Uniblue’s DriverScanner 2009.
So how does it measure up? Well, downloading and setting up this software was just as easy as you’d wish for. It was quick and painless. Delving into the actual functionality of it, I found that DriverScanner 2009 was very easy to use. It has large easy to find and read buttons and tabs that make it very obvious when you have any questions as to what you need to do.
Click here to read the full Uniblue DriverScanner Review…
With the proliferation of the Internet, everybody’s computers these days get bogged down with all sorts of extra detritus that you pick up the more time you spend online. Temporary files, cookies, and other junk files just slow down your PC, not to mention more dangerous things like malware or viruses. Uniblue’s SpeedUpMyPC is a new piece of software that looks to help those of us suffering from bogged-down PCs.
Out of the box, Uniblue’s SpeedUpMyPC is a piece of cake to install and get up and running. It’s a very simple step-by-step process that only requires you to click a button, aside from having to enter a registration key.
Click here to read the full Uniblue SpeedUpMyPC Review…
Everybody loses files; it’s just a matter of time until it happens to you. Whether you have an unstable system as a result of a faulty program you downloaded online or have deleted something vital by accident, you are going to lose something you need one of these days. There are quite a few solutions to this problem, but one very convenient solution is to pick up a file recovery program. R-Studio is one such program and we’ll be reviewing it here.
The first thing I always look for after downloading new software and getting it up and running is the intuitiveness of the program. R-Studio was a snap to download and get going (only taking a few minutes for each step), and thankfully it was just as easy to use.
Click here to read the full R-Studio Review…