You know, I've frequently been told by my clients that they have a slow computer. There are some very simple steps they can take to actually speed up that computer of theres. I will actually give a few free pointers on how to speed up your computer at home or in the office.

Listen...

1.    firstly.. check your hardware. It may not be your operating system that sucks. Slow hard drives can cause slow access speeds. Also drive fragmentations (mainly  windows) can cause slow access times. Linux and BSD (aka mac) usually don't suffer disk fragmentation because of the way the disks are formatted. Also, if possible place your swapfile or swap partition on a seperate hard drive. If you are running a machine with low memory and the swap file is on a slow drive which also reads and writes programs you will experience a disk lockup. This is because it is trying to read and write at the same time that it is caching memory to the swap. So  it pays to have a fast swap drive or more memory. I commonly see manufacturers such as Dell, Samsung, Sony placing memory and resource hungry  Operating Systems such as windows Vista  on machines that have 512 megs of memory.  You practically boot right into Swap!  For you windows users  I suggest windows server  over XP or Vista since it is more resource friendly.

2.     Try running MSCONFIG and take off alot of those bullsh*t startup programs. Try running HIJACKTHIS... it is a free program. Mac/Linux try taking off all those services you do not need. Mac and windows both load the machines full of spyware. I know MAC says "Think Different". We'll think about spending hours trying to clean that itune spyware and crap they emmbed in there systems. A clean system is a fast system.

 3.    Memory. Fill all memory slots. This is because alot of times the proccessor is faster than the memory and if you have one or two banks installed it may bottleneck the bus. Right now I am working on a quad Xeon machine with 4 667Mhz busses but only one 667 memory stick. I might as well be using a single processor machine! This is how HP sent it! Amazing.

4.    Windows users...go to folder properties and disable "search network folders" Tab. That will make everything one hundred times snappier.

5.    If you are running mostly 32 bit programs use a 32 bit OS. A hyperthreading or dual 32 bit chip will outperform a 64 bit chip on 32 bit applications hands down. Why, because it can run two 32 bit threads over one 64 bit one!

Well I hope that was helpful! 

Randy