subject: Optimizing your Computer for Online Work at Home [print this page] parsetable('98%', '', '[tr][td=1,1,720]Whether you use your PC for office-related work-at-home or for freelance revenue-earning work, your PC can be a bottleneck to getting your work done. Your PCs performance directly impacts on your efficiency and productivity that can spell your failure or success working at home. To say that you need to maintain your PCs performance in top shape would be an understatement given your home computing needs to remain fully productive
Optimizing Disk Performance
A healthy disk figures much in providing your PC with the performance levels it was meant to have right from the start. Problems arise when the disk is not operating at its peak with fragmented files that still needs to be pieced together every time you access them or not enough disk space to write virtual memory that your PC needs to run smoothly. It is clear that you need to clean your hard disk of apps and files that you no longer need and then have it defragmented. These are the two simple procedures anyone can do to improve PC performance.
Youre not actually boosting its performance. Optimizing disk performance is simply a matter of restoring its health that was in top shape when you first used it right out of the box. One rule-of-thumb that many IT professionals follows is to make sure that you dont use more than 80% of your hard disk space. The more content your hard disk has, the more indexes of file segment location addresses it has to search for every time you access an application or file.
Hence, you suffer longer seek times and slower response times. In addition, inadequate virtual memory on the disk severely slows your PC. It is advisable that once you hit 70% hard disk utilization, start looking for a more capacious hard disk to replace or augment your current storage. PCs can have a maximum of 4 IDE drives and 2 SATA drives.
Cleaning the Memory
The PC works by loading files and parts of applications into RAM or system memory when executing them. You need to make sure the memory is not clogged-up with useless apps it normally loads ready for execution. Windows use a caching method to load-up files and apps into cached memory to guess which files or apps are used next. Its called prefetching. Clog this facility up and your PC slows down. Go to Run in the start button and type Prefetch. The screen will display a box containing icons on the Prefetch cache. Just delete all of them every week as the PC refresh this regularly.
Start-up programs are loaded into memory every time you boot up. If they are not frequently used, youre wasting memory space that can otherwise be used by the applications you really use. Go the start-up folder under the All Users folder in Documents and Settings. You will need to know which programs are needed on star-up and delete all else you dont need. For a guide on this, check out netsquirrel to learn more start-up programs.
Cleaning the Windows registry is one of the best ways to restore your PCs health. Over time, the registry gets clogged with useless remnants of deleted and uninstalled apps, virus and malware and unused setting changes that can increase the time it takes for the PC to read its registry database. Unfortunately, unless youre a seasoned Windows XP professional, the registry isnt a good place to tinker with. But its good to note that there are online utilities that can automate the cleaning process. If theres any utility program worth paying for to boost PC performance, its a registry cleaner. GP
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