EHM The Blue Line

Yea, that the page where I took the info from Archi. They explain it very well.

I was wondering can anybody give me any advice about how to keep the computer operating at its fastest and most efficient. I have used disk cleanup and defragmented the hard drive-what else can I do to keep it running at full speed? Any advice appreciated.

Make sure to use ScanDisk and Disc Degfragmenter atleast once every 10 days - 2 weeks. Also, manage resources efficiently by knowing what programs automatically run at start-up with this program.

Is there a way to find the fragments of programmes that you may have uninstalled ages ago yet bits still remain?

BlackCats101 wrote:Is there a way to find the fragments of programmes that you may have uninstalled ages ago yet bits still remain?

Also, would having a seperate hard drive (a USB removable one) and putting all my games onto that, help to speed up the system? (when that hard drive was not plugged in)

An external hard drive like a USB one, is good for backing up stuff or just to store things on like photos and things, but I would not recommend running games from it. Generally an internal hard drive will be faster at accessing the data. Most modern games require constant reading and writing to the drive for graphics and an external USB drive may not push that data through fast enough.

About your other question, mostly when you uninstall a game from your system the only fragments that are left are some registry entries. You can probably find a pretty good registry cleaner for free online that can look for old fragments. I don't know of any to recommend off the top of my head though. But if you go to http://www.download.com/ and do a search under the Utilities section, I'm sure you'll find something.

Also, to make sure your computer is running at it's fastest, remember to regularly check for spyware and adware with at least two different programs like Ad-Aware. These can be a huge performance killer. And of course regularly check for viruses as well. That's the basic stuff though.

I use Avast! Antivirus, you can get it at download.com.

It's a good program for what it costs... and it costs nothing.. so it's good for free..

Ad-Aware is great too.

EDIT - http://img170.imageshack.us/img170/7668 ... sts4ih.jpg

Would you look at that? 1000 posts

I've got adAware-it's good, if a little paranoid. Thanks for the advice.

On another note-I've reached 500 posts!

noctambulist-what is the part of game that will be affected if you have a slower PC-it surely cannot be graphical quality- is it not just frame-rate and speed? Or can graphical sharpness be affected as well? Mine is OK, but I am worried that the AMD Athlon 64 1.8ghz will be burduned if we keep loading it with programmes...can you easily upgrade the processor speed, or is clip-in hard disk memory a better way to go? Cheers.

The graphical quality is determined by your video card, but if you have a slow hard drive, little RAM, or a slow processor it will affect the level of quality that your system can handle at a playable level.

An AMD Athlon 64 1.8ghz processor should handle most things pretty well. As for games, you might see some slowdown on some of the latest and greatest games playing them on higher settings like Oblivion, but most games it should handle without too much trouble. The total number of programs you have on your computer doesn't affect the processor, only if you are trying to run them all at the same time.

Without knowing the specs of your computer, I can't tell you where your speed bottle-neck is. But I imagine it's probably not the processor if you have an AMD Athlon 64. If your processor is a 939 pin configuration you should have no trouble upgrading to newer processors. Even the new X2 dual-core processors are 939, so you can just plop them right into your motherboard without any trouble.

To run most games these days, you should have at least a 3ghz Intel processor or AMD equivalent (which you have), a nVidia 6600 GT video card or ATI equivalent, 1gb of RAM, and a 7200 rpm hard drive.

Games take the most resources of anything you are likely to run on your PC except for maybe 3D animation and video editing software. So for just email, web browsing, iTunes, most Photoshop-type applications and the like, you can get away with much less.

noctambulist wrote:The graphical quality is determined by your video card, but if you have a slow hard drive, little RAM, or a slow processor it will affect the level of quality that your system can handle at a playable level.

An AMD Athlon 64 1.8ghz processor should handle most things pretty well. As for games, you might see some slowdown on some of the latest and greatest games playing them on higher settings like Oblivion, but most games it should handle without too much trouble. The total number of programs you have on your computer doesn't affect the processor, only if you are trying to run them all at the same time.

Without knowing the specs of your computer, I can't tell you where your speed bottle-neck is. But I imagine it's probably not the processor if you have an AMD Athlon 64. If your processor is a 939 pin configuration you should have no trouble upgrading to newer processors. Even the new X2 dual-core processors are 939, so you can just plop them right into your motherboard without any trouble.

To run most games these days, you should have at least a 3ghz Intel processor or AMD equivalent (which you have), a nVidia 6600 GT video card or ATI equivalent, 1gb of RAM, and a 7200 rpm hard drive.

Games take the most resources of anything you are likely to run on your PC except for maybe 3D animation and video editing software. So for just email, web browsing, iTunes, most Photoshop-type applications and the like, you can get away with much less.

Cheers! My video card is a Nvidia neolus geforce 6600-it seems pretty competent.