Solution

If your PC feels like it's going in slow motion, and taking an age to get to the desktop, then follow these tips to really claw some speed back on your machine. There are various reasons why your Windows PC will have slowed down over time and there's dozens of apps that claim to help you out. But, really all you need to know is the following tips that can all be done for free using Windows itself.

1: Monitor Startup list

MSConfig is the classic Windows way of reducing startup clutter. Type 'msconfig' into Vista's search bar or just Run > MSconfig in Xp to launch. Head over to the Startup tab and uncheck any items that you don't want to start. Remember programs like iTunes and Quicktime add themselves to Strtup everytime there's an update to them!

2: Turn off indexing ... read more »

Recently I’ve encountered a relatively new and crafty Trojan called Infostealer.Banker.C (Symantec’s codename), it’s a general data stealer Trojan that sends your information in packets the original programmers, however it has a few nasty tricks up it’s sleeve, like it’s ability to block your antivirus and antispyware applications from launching. It also shuts down your PC if any AV software tries to meddle in its affairs and the piece de resistance, it hides itself, I don’t mean hides as in just utilising hidden folders, on some PCs it’s hidden even further and won’t appear regardless of your view settings, even using Windows search will yield no results for the sdra64.exe file. So all around it’s a pretty nasty piece of work. ... read more »

One of the keys to a fast and happy PC is having plenty of disk space. However, a huge hard drive won’t help you in the long run – it’s like a bin bag. If you have a bigger-than-usual bin bag then you just put more rubbish in it until it’s full. The only difference between this and a small bag is that it’s a bit harder to struggle out the door with it. As well as having more files to wade through, disk access steadily becomes less efficient as the drive fills up. Furthermore, because the system uses the disk almost constantly for virtual memory among other things, this affects overall system performance. So, to keep disk usage low and manageable a tidy regime works wonders for your system.

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Are you noticing immense slow down? Does your hard drive and CPU seem to be working overtime? There could be something underlying sucking up your resources. Now most people know about [Alt] + [Ctrl] + [Delete] and how you can monitor memory and CPU usage through the Task Manager, even close unresponsive tasks and graph the performance of you PC over time, but the Task Manager doesn't always give you an accurate reading. If an errant Windows function or system call is acting up for whatever reason you won't be able to view this with the standard Task Manager.

Thankfully there's Process Explorer by Sysinternals, this application enables you to accurately monitor your system's actions and it by-pass' Windows built-in process mask for Windows specific process', so you can truly see what's doing what and what percentage of your resources is being taken up by tasks.

Using the tree method all process' are locially bundled together, it's a little cryptic, but a quick search online will reveal what each process is. The beauty of Process Explorer is in taking the Task Manager functionality further, by sorting the process' by system usage you can visually see what's gobbling up your hardware, armed with this information you might be able to fix the problem all together. ... read more »

If you're sick of starting up your PC and having to hit a key to skip the check disk sequence of one of your drives then follow this extremely quick and simple guide to remedying the annoyance.

Why does check disk run when I start my PC?
One or more of your drives contains a "dirty bit"; this occurs when either a change was made to said drive, but the computer never committed to it (either because the process was interrupted or otherwise, this is usually the case with external USB drives) or you have a serious problem with your drive and the data is corrupt.

With the latter it's best to let chkdsk try it's best to recover your data, however if your drive is running fine and you're constantly seeing the tedious chkdsk sequence then it's time to sort it out! ... read more »

If you've been keeping up to date with PCAnswers then you will have seen our exclusive Video Tutorials that work hand-in-hand with our "How To..." section within the magazine. Well now you can watch selected video online without inserting your CD via our PCAnswers YouTube channel.

Each month we will upload selected videos that may be of use to the masses, also on occasion we will upload web exclusive videos of shorter, yet just as handy tutorials. So watch this space!

Right now we have two amazing tutorials on speeding up your PC, one for the XP users and another for the early Vista adopters. ... read more »