Upgrading your computer

Everyone of us might have undergone the feeling that after few months of buying a new computer, we would feel unsatisfied with its performance and so wanna upgrade in a short time after buying a new computer. And the scenario gets more worse if you like to switch to Vista from XP. With Microsoft announcing that it would stop providing support for XP in few months, every PC user is forced to use Vista. But buying a new Vista compatible CPU is too costly and the better option is to upgrade your old PC. So, here are the things you should do for upgrading.

Back up your data : First of all, if you plan for an upgrade back up all your important data onto an DVD or external harddisk.

Choose your hardware : Then, choose your hardware for your requirements such as a tv tuner card if you wish to watch tv in your computer etc. You aren't going to buy things for your computer frequently, so do thorough analysis of your requirements and select the suitable hardware

DVD Drive : If you are upgrading to vista, you need an DVD drive for sure because vista comes in dvd only. So get a good dvd drive for your system. Upto my knowledge, the better dvd writers are liteon, sony and asus.

RAM : Vista needs a mininum of 1GB RAM to perform to a satisfactory level. So a RAM of 1GB or more is required for Vista.

Drivers : When you buy any hardware, do check whether the drivers for the same are available for vista. If you donot have driver for the hardware, the chances of your hardware not working are high.

New BIOS : If you are planning to upgrade your Motherboard, then check out for the Motherboard with latest bios. A crash free bios would be good.

Graphics Card : Are you mad about gaming? Then you really need a good graphics card for the latest games to be played. Choose a latest graphic card with a suitable memory and according to your budget. The power requirements for your graphic card also should be met. So, choose a graphic card that suits your motherboard and power supply. And do go for a graphic card that supports DirectX 10.

IDE to SATA : If you are going to upgrade your harddisk, optical drive etc, then go for SATA drives because they are much faster than IDE.

Software Compatability : Be sure that you have your softwares updated or upgraded to make them work in your new environment. If you donot find any upgrades for your softwares, then run the software in compatibility mode.

USB Upgrade : If you have been using USB 1.1 in your old system, upgrade them to USB 2 as they provide a much more faster data transfer.

Above all, if you plan to run vista in your system, then run the vista upgrade advisor to get a rough idea about the hardware requirements for your PC.

Speeding up your computer - Part 1

Well, this has been a great problem for every one of us who use their PC for many hours and complain to their buddies that their computer has slowed down and need to upgrade theirs.

There is no need to get into upgrade kinda stuff unless if you wished to go for a hardware hungry OS like Vista. If you are using Windows XP as your OS, then here are few tips to make it yield a optimum performance continuously.

Speed Start up:

After a few days of buying a PC, after you install some of the softwares which you use, your PC seems to take a lot more time to start than before. The reason for this is these newly installed softwares set themselves to start automatically on system start up and the loading of these programs consumes quite some time thereby increasing the start up time.

So forcing these kind of programs from running automatically during system start up is the only solution for this problem. How could be this done? Read on.....

• Click the START button of your taskbar and click on RUN. [ Shortcut: WINDOWS key + R button ]
  
• Type 'msconfig' [ without quotes ] and press enter
• In the newly opened window, search for the START UP tab and click it
• Under start up tab, you will see a lot of things with check boxes. The ticked or selected checkboxes contain those programs which are set to run on system start up. DESELECT those programs which you donot wish to run automatically and click APPLY and then OK
• Restart your system
  

P.S : This start up menu contains the drivers and other essential programs which are necessary to run your system. If you have no knowledge on what a program is meant for then please do not mess with it.


Delete Temporary Files :

Temporary files are those which gets clustered in your system when you visit a webpage or you click on 'Open' on downloading something from the internet. As days pass by, these temporary files occupy hundreds of MB's of spaces or GB's at times which will degrade your system performance. So to keep your system for optimum performance and to protect your privacy you need to delete these temporary files.

How can this be done?

Well for this, you need to download a software named C Cleaner, formerly known as Crap Cleaner and whats more advantage is that it is FREE.

To download this software, Click here

What you have to do is to download, install and run this software. At the first page of the software click 'Run CCleaner' and there you go your system is free from crap.

Other features of this software are

Registry Cleaner - Delete unwanted registry keys of softwares from the system memory

Start up Manager - Disable unwanted programs from running on system start up. This seems to be a better option than the previously mentioned method.

Uninstall Manager - Uninstall programs that are no longer required or not installed properly. Add or Remove programs from control panel takes a hell of a time to load the installed softwares and this software has them preloaded and you need not to wait.

This software is compatible with Vista too and hence Vista users can also use this software to free up system space.

Other optimization techniques will be posted later. So keep checking.