Windows has a number of recovery features to get up and running again quickly after a problem occurs. These simple tools are easy for anyone to use, and are a good first step to try before taking your computer in for professional service.
I’ve written before about the non-intuitive nature of visual effects in recent versions of Windows, where offloading the desktop rendering duties to the graphics card can result in considerable performance improvements. While this is true for nearly any modern PC, including those with ‘integrated’ graphics cards, there are still steps one may take to enhance performance.
If you’re looking for a new PC, you can ask any geek and they’ll tell you to build clean. Their reason is simple: the manufacturer’s cripple their own products before they ever send it to you. Even if you buy direct, original equipment manufacturers make money by pre-installing trials, games, bundles, even spyware on to their computers. Resellers from BestBuy to Walmart are even worse. Make no mistake: you’re being sold out before you even buy.
Has your computer ever re-drawn the screen slowly? Or has a lagging program ever turned black or duplicated itself like this as you try to drag it around? You can alleviate these slow-downs and even prevent GDI driver-mode related crashes by using Windows Aero, available in Windows Home Premium and higher editions. You can tell if Aero is on by looking at the top of almost any window. If the window controls (known as caption buttons) are touching the edge,…
Why do I love Windows 7? Today, because it lets me multitask like never before. Right now, I have no less than 16 applications running. One of those is a virtual PC of Windows 2000 that I use to connect to my workplace (they use a legacy VPN system). So really, I’m running two full operating systems and dozens of applications… But you’d never know because the computer is as zippy as ever. I can minimize, switch, resize, move, compute,…