Source: Tom's Guide | Keywords: troubleshoot, upgrade, fix | Themes: Desktop Computers
12. Slow Display
Windows applications make heavy demands on the computer, especially the video card. Waiting for the screen to catch up can drive you nuts, especially in graphics-intensive programs such as drawing or image-editing software. Before you make a change to the hardware, check to see if you are running too many graphics-intensive programs at the same time. Do you really need to have four browser windows, a digital image-editing program, and an animated cursor running at the same time? Sometimes the easiest cure to slow display action is to cut down on the system resources drain.
Graphics and publishing packages can use as fast a video card as you can afford. The plummeting price of memory has made it reasonable to consider 256MB of RAM a minimal level of memory for a new graphics card, and 512MB a very worthwhile upgrade. The additional memory enables greater resolution levels and a larger number of colors. If you’ve got a current machine, the best place for a graphics card is in a PCI Express x16 slot. On older machines be sure to take advantage of any special-purpose bus extensions your PC may offer, including AGP, or if none exists PCI. Graphics cards can pick up significant speed boosts by direct connection to the CPU through these slots.
Nearly all modern graphics cards lay claim to an accelerated graphics label. Computer magazine reviews of the latest crop of cards show their rankings on standardized benchmark tests.
I recommend that you stay away from no-name video cards at the bottom of the price lists. Some storefront PC makers who concentrate entirely on price use these cards in their systems. The price difference between brand X and an established name is usually not all that much, and for the extra money, you can expect more current and advanced technology, better technical support and warranty, and availability of software driver and hardware upgrades. As soon as you install a new graphics card, contact the card’s manufacturer to determine whether you have received and installed the latest device driver. Companies often produce new drivers after boxes of hardware are in the sales channel and often update drivers to improve speed and fix bugs. You can find the new drivers on the web sites of many display adapter manufacturers.
- Previous page Liquids and Page Fault Errors
- Next page Memory
Not bad, but I'll take a few exceptions:
1 - cleaning up and defragmenting your hard disk is Windows specific.
The Microsoft block allocator is brain dead, was made that way, and will remain so for as long as Diskeeper and Norton Systemworks create revenue: a Mac OS X, xBSD or Linux-based system doesn't need defragmentation(*), as it is done by the OS on every disk access. You can get efficient defragmentation by:
- disabling System Restore: it doesn't work very well anyway, is a virus nest, and eats up to 6 Gb on your hard disk.
- setting your swap file to a fixed size.
- disabling file system indexing.
- deleting DrWatson's log.
- running Ccleaner once in a while with most settings enabled: once you have applied hotfixes, you don't need the uninstall files anyway. You'll need to clean up IE7's and WMP's patches yourself though.
- make Pagedefrag run at every boot after 0 second wait: the first time it may take a while to run, but it'll keep the Registry and swap file in one piece.
(*)to be fair, such a system may still fragment if you fill up a partition with huge files when it is already more than 80% full - Windows will fragment any file if you get past 10% partition capacity. Some say it's a way to prevent data corruption, as usually adjacent sectors are more likely to get corrupted, but then if that's the case Windows doesn't fragment ENOUGH.
2 - a resident antivirus is a resource drain.
Using a limited user account, a well configured firewall (in software or hardware, preferably both), and scanning downloaded files before you run them (and not making use of MS Outlook Express, which runs files for you) will keep you safe enough.
Not using IE may help, too: Opera or Firefox can operate as pure user level processes. Firefox 3 will be able to notify antivirus when a file is downloaded (if it interacts well with ClamAV, you can dump Norton and forget about the yearly AV tax).
3 - power surge protection.
A sound advice. However, a beefy PSU that you change every 1-2 years and a good power surge preventer are, in my experience, less costly and more efficient than a pack of batteries you'll need to renew every year. A good PSU in great shape can handle brown-outs, especially if your system doesn't draw too much current, and a surge protector will cover the PSU's most damaging attack. Changing the PSU regularly ensures that its capacitors remain at peak efficiency, and that its voltage regulators work as required. It is also unsound to clean up a PSU (it's dangerous!), so getting a new one is the most efficient way to get a clean one. With Vista, no UPS lasts long enough to allow you to save your files and shut down a system cleanly.
Clutz. I eat and drink around mine everyday and I've never once spilled so much as a drop of milk.
Milk eh?
I'd suggest keeping your files on a NAS drive or USB external drive and formatting your MS OS every year.
Besides running a limited account try Virtual Machines for avoiding those pesky viruses