Kia ora tatou:

This post has very little to do with digital photography, that is until your computer runs slowly or falls over. However it is something all of us who work on a computer should care about. It is rather like your car. Unless it is a diesel, from time to time you need to tune it and make sure it is running smoothly. Servicing a car is a given (unless you won Lotto, then you can change the vehicle when the carpet gets dirty). Here are a list of free applications (read: programs) that you can download and install to keep things moving smoothly, along with hints. Note: these are all apps that work for me.

1.       Defragging. You should defragment your hard drive every few weeks. This puts the data back in the right place (think: the books back in the correct sections in the library). If you use your PC a lot, do it more often. The defrag utility in XP and Vista are both slow and not that reliable. Try Auslogics Disk Defrag. While you are at it, install and run Auslogics Registry Defrag. This does the same thing for your registry, which is where the individual files for your apps live. I also use RegCure from time to time to clean out my registry and remove unwanted files and invalid paths (usually caused by removing software/updating, etc). Sorry, this one costs! Caution: Unless you know what you are doing, DO NOT edit the registry. This can send you off to your tech for a major computer rebuild.

2.       Clean up your disk. Again, Windows’ inbuilt utility is OK, but it slow and relatively ineffective. I recommend CCleaner (the first C: is for Crap). This is “a freeware system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. Additionally it contains a fully featured registry cleaner”. Recommended. (more…)