 |
|
Hello boys and girls and welcome to another IT question of the week (insert theme music here). Today, we are going to talk about something pretty simple that plagues a lot of people, long start up times, and general annoyances when you first log into your computer.
A lot of people don’t realize that you honestly have full control to almost everything your computer does. The first tip would be; Pay Attention. I don’t know how many times someone has told me, “…I don’t know where that Farmville, Facebook, MySpace, etc. toolbar came from…” When you install software that you might need or want it almost always says do you also want to install X. Software companies use this as a simple way to make money as they realize most people don’t pay attention. In general, watch for check boxes when installing your favorite apps. Don’t let things install in the system tray, or the quick start. I go as far as to not let things install desktop icons as there is nothing worse than a cluttered desktop.
So what if it’s already too late? What if your machine takes 20 minutes to boot up and your system tray (the part by the clock on the right) is stretching across the screen? Never fear, there are things that you can do. First off and more simply you can just hide inactive icons. This isn’t going to do much for your performance, but at least it will clean up your desktop appearance. To hide icons in the system tray simple right click on the taskbar, and go to properties. On the bottom of this screen you can click hide inactive icons and then press customize. With that you can customize the notification of every one of your applications. We also can do another number of simple fixes to a cluttered desktop. If you right click anywhere on the desktop screen and go to properties. Then, go to the appearance tab and click advanced appearance you can customize the spacing between your icons. If you need 100 copies of your resume on your desktop in easy reach then at least you can see behind them to the picture of your dog.
Now let’s try and tackle performance issues. Most programs simply have a setting in their ‘options’ to turn on at startup. If you turn that off you can normally cut off the problem at the source. If you cannot find it in the programs or maybe if that’s not an option you can shut them off at the window level. To do this, you need to use a tool called MSConfig. MsConfig is a utility used to troubleshoot the windows startup process. It has been bundled with windows since windows 98 with a brief hiatus in windows 2000. To access msconfig go to; start->run->msconfig. This will bring up a simple GUI. At this point don’t worry about everything else in it and just go to the startup tab. From this tab you can shut off as many executables you want that are set to start when windows starts. It might seem big and confusing. To make it easier I normally sort by the command column. This will give you the location of the executable and normally the name of the program. Anything you don’t want, just uncheck the box. After this restart your machine and you shouldn’t have to worry about that software till you want to.
There is a lot to be said for treating your computer like you would your house. Don’t clutter it up with boxes or junk and it’ll work nice and fast. Hopefully we here at It’s Geektime have again shed light on all your PC problems. If you have any questions in the future please feel free to let us know. Finally, remember, when you’re scared and feeling technically unsure. Never fear, IT guy is here!!!
blog comments powered by Disqus
