Two Tips To Make Computer Run Faster

We all recognize that sinking feeling… the pc that accustomed spring to life in a very few seconds appears to require forever grinding its thanks to an affordable state of usability. little question you may have explore for a solution and located the same old recommendations on uninstalling extra programs, particularly those who begin mechanically.

What you may not have found square measure the subsequent 2 tips that that I actually have found to be useful and have a big impact on bootup time. They apply to any or all versions of Windows from XP to 7: deleting the icon cache files, and deleting the Prefetch folder.

For the following pointers one ought to unhide all files(*) and show extensions(*) – these square measure amongst the primary things I do once putting in windows anyway.

The first item involves the icon cache file: typically this becomes corrupt and loses the flexibility to enhance the boot-up time. One will tell if that went on because the file ought to have a similar date and time as once the pc was last shodden. If it doesn't, it's broken. typically I actually have found that ‘fixing’ the matter with Win seven even if the date/time is correct will facilitate.

All one must do is delete the icon cache file, that is found in /Documents and Settings/Username/Local Settings/Application knowledge on Win XP. The file accustomed be recreated mechanically on booting In Win XP, however that behavior was modified in a very service pack. Now, one must amendment the desktop’s color depth from its current setting to the opposite and back again; then logout and so login. solely then can one notice a replacement and uncorrupted cache file created. I do that color depth amendment on different Windows versions versions even if it should not be necessary. 

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The next tip involves the Prefetch system: this feature saves traces of the files used when windows boots and programs load, in \windows\Prefetch. The booting trace is always called NTOSBOOT-B00DFAAD.pf in every version of windows. It gets updated at every boot in Win XP and approx. every week in Vista and 7.

Also, by default, windows uses its in-built defragger to reorder the files traced so that they are close to each other on the hard disk for best performance. When this happens, every three days or so when the PC is idle, the date/time stamp of the LAYOUT.INI file gets updated. One should also find a new *.pf file created whenever a program is loaded. This reordering can be done on demand by running “rundll32.exe advapi32.dll, ProcessIdleTasks” (without quotes and with admin privileges in Vista and 7). The final thing to check is that when a program is run, a corresponding *.pf file should be created.

It will facilitate if one monitors the prefetch folder that this saddo did simply to visualize however it works unremarkably.

Now you ought to grasp what to seem for and notice, during a properly functioning prefetch system.If any of the on top of behavior doesn't happen, one must reset the prefetch system. One needs to delete the prefetch folder…it are created at ensuing boot and every one ought to work unremarkably. The system in XP appears significantly liable to failing. simply deleting the files within the prefetch folder won't do something and isn't a performance enhancing trick like another sites would have you ever believe. generally one finds that the boot trace doesn't happen once it ought to. That file may be deleted on its own because it is made at ensuing boot.

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See Who’s Connected to Your Wi-Fi Network

Do you grasp who’s connected to your router’s Wi-Fi network? Take a glance at the list devices connected to your Wi-Fi network from your router or pc to seek out out.

Bear in mind that several devices connect with your Wi-Fi of late. The list can contain laptops, smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, set-top boxes, game consoles, Wi-Fi printers, and more.

Use Your Router’s Web Interface

The best thanks to notice this data are to envision your router’s internet interface. Your router hosts your Wi-Fi network, therefore it's the foremost correct information regarding that devices ar connected to that. Most routers provide the simplest way to look at a listing of connected devices, though some might not.

The standard tips for accessing your router’s internet interface apply. If you’re undecided of its informatics address, you'll be able to typically seek for your computer’s entranceway informatics address via the control board. you'll conjointly run run the ipconfig /all command in an exceedingly electronic communication window.

Next, plug this informatics address into your internet browser’s address bar and press Enter. this could typically cite your router’s interface. If it doesn’t, check your router’s documentation — or perform an internet seek for its model variety and “web interface” to seek out out a way to access it. If you haven’t set a custom countersign and passphrase, you'll got to perform a research or check the documentation to seek out the default ones for your model of router.

Finding the List of Connected Devices

You’ll currently got to seek for the choice in your router’s internet interface somewhere. seek for a link or button named one thing like “attached devices,” “connected devices,” or “DHCP shoppers.” you'll notice this on the Wi-Fi configuration page, otherwise you could notice it on some type of standing page. On some routers, the list of connected devices is also written on a main standing page to save lots of you some clicks.

On many D-Link routers, a list of connected devices is available under Status > Wireless.

On many Netgear routers, you’ll find the list under “Attached Devices” in the sidebar.

On many Linksys routers, you’ll find this option under Status > Local Network > DHCP Clients Table.

On Comcast Xfinity routers, you’ll find the list under Connected Devices in the sidebar.

Understanding the List

Many routers merely give a listing of devices connected via DHCP. this suggests that, if a tool is organized with a static informatics configuration, it won’t seem within the list. Keep that in mind!

When you get the list open, you’ll typically see similar data on each router. The interface most likely shows you a table with a listing of connected devices, their “host names” on the network, and their mack addresses.

If the list doesn’t provide purposeful enough names, you'll wish to vary the hostnames (also referred to as “computer names” or “device names”) on your pc or device’s operative systems. The host name are visible here. sadly, there’s no thanks to modification the hostname on some devices — for instance, we’re not tuned in to the simplest way to vary AN automaton device’s hostname to a additional purposeful one while not ontogeny it.

When unsure, you'll continuously compare the mack address seen on this page (or the informatics address displayed) to the mack address of a tool you’re mistreatment to envision that device is that.

This List Isn’t Foolproof

Of course, this list isn’t utterly good. Anyone will set any hostname they need, and it’s conjointly doable to vary your mack address to spoof alternative devices. However, ready to|this may|this might|this could} mean that a tool of yours wouldn’t be able to connect with the network whereas another device with a spoofed mack address was taking its place, as routers typically block 2 devices with a similar mack address from connecting at a similar time. And somebody World Health Organization gained access to your router might created a static informatics configuration to be surreptitious.

Ultimately, this isn’t the foremost powerful security feature, or a foolproof thanks to notice folks connected to your network. It’s not one thing you wish to envision frequently. If there ar devices you don’t acknowledge, you'll be able to modification your Wi-Fi passphrase — you’re hopefully mistreatment WPA2-PSK coding — which can kick all the devices off till they will give the new passphrase.

However, even devices you don’t acknowledge is also one thing you own that you simply didn’t remmeber. for instance, AN unknown device may well be a Wi-Fi-enabled printer, a Wi-Fi connected electro-acoustic transducer, or your good TV’s constitutional Wi-Fi that you simply ne'er use.

Scan Your Wi-Fi Network With Software On Your Computer

The ideal thanks to check for connected devices can typically be to use your router’s internet interface. However, some routers might not provide this feature, therefore you'll wish to do a scanning tool instead. this is often a chunk of package running on your pc which will scan the Wi-Fi network you’re connected to for active devices and list them. not like router internet interface tools, such scanning tools haven't any manner of listing devices that are connected, however that ar presently offline. You’ll solely see on-line devices.

There ar lots of tools for doing this, however we tend to like NirSoft’s Wireless Network Watcher. Like alternative NirSoft package, it’s a convenient very little tool with none adware or nag screens. It conjointly doesn’t even got to be put in on your pc. transfer the tool, launch it, and it'll watch your Wi-Fi network for active devices, displaying their device names, mack addresses, and also the manufacturer of their Wi-FI network hardware. The manufacturer name is extremely useful for distinguishing specific devices while not device name — particularly android devices.

This tool might not work properly till you specify your Wi-Fi network adapter. On our Windows laptop, we tend to had to click choices > Advanced choices in Wireless Network Watcher, check “Use the subsequent network adapter,” and opt for our physical Wi-Fi adapter before activity a scan.

Once again, this isn’t one thing you actually got to worry regarding perpetually. If you’re mistreatment WPA2-PSK coding and have a decent passphrase, you'll be able to feel fairly secure. It’s unlikely anyone is connected to your Wi-Fi while not your permission. If you’re involved this is often happening for a few reason, you AN continuously simply modification your Wi-Fi’s passphrase — you’ll ought to get in it on all of your approved devices, of course.

Changing your Wi-FI passphrase may be a decent plan if you’ve given out your Wi-FI countersign — to neighbors visiting you, for instance — and need to make certain they don’t continue mistreatment it for years.

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Get Windows 7 Desktop Gadgets On Windows 8.1

With Windows 8.1, Windows users not only got a brand new flat UI design but also lost desktop gadgets that they had in Windows 7. Desktop gadgets are those handy apps like clock, calendar, unit converter, battery meter, weather app, feed headlines and more. If you miss those little ornaments on your desktop, here’s how to get desktop gadgets (back) on Windows 8.1.

You will need to install a program which will give you a handful of desktop gadgets that are not exactly the same but similar to those that came pre-installed on Windows 7. The program also allows you to download and install .gadget files from third party sources.

Get Windows 8 Desktop Gadgets

Head to 8gadgetpack.net to download the latest installer. Run it, and you will see a few gadgets on your desktop.

Don’t worry about the transparent sidebar that you see, the sidebar is also a gadget that allows you to have the desktop gadgets stay above your opened or full sized windows. It can be removed just like any other desktop gadget.

Adding A Desktop Gadget

You can add a desktop gadget the same way you used to add it in Windows 7, by right clicking anywhere on the desktop and selecting Gadgets.

Another window will open and from there you’ll be able to pick from a handful of classic Windows 7 gadgets.

Each gadget has their own unique option that you can access when you right click on it and select Options.

Installing And Uninstalling Third Party Gadgets

As mentioned, you can find and download old .gadget files from third-party sources to add to your WIndows 8.1. Once you have found a .gadget file you like, just double click the .gadget file to install it. Once installed, it’ll show up on your desktop.

When installing form third-party sources, please only install files from sources that you trust to avoid installing malware into your computer.

To uninstall any gadget, just open the gadget list, right click on a gadget and select Uninstall.

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Increase Your Chromebook’s Battery Life

Chromebooks are supposed to have amazing, all-day battery life — but not all of them do. Follow these tips to squeeze more battery life out of your Chromebook.

The same basic principles apply whether you’re trying to boost a Windows laptop’s battery lifeor squeeze more time out of a MacBook. But every operating system has its own way of doing these things.

Decrease the Display Brightness

When you want to make any type of mobile device last longer on battery — whether it’s a laptop, tablet, or smartphone — the first thing to do is decrease its display brightness. The display backlight uses a lot of power, and dimming the display makes it use significantly less power.

To dim the display, just press the brightness up/down keys. You should find these on the top row of your Chromebook’s keyboard.

If your Chromebook has a backlit keyboard, you can also temporarily disable that when you want to squeeze more battery life out of your device.

Disable Bluetooth and Other Radios

As on any type of device with wireless radios, the radios use power while they’re enabled. Even if you’re not actively using them, Bluetooth, cellular, and Wi-Fi radios are scanning for signals. Disabling those radios can save power with no real disadvantages if you’re not using them.

Bluetooth is used to connect with various peripherals. If you’re not using and Bluetooth peripherals, disable the Bluetooth radio by clicking the “system tray” area at the bottom-right corner of your taskbar and clicking the Bluetooth option.

It seems silly to consider disabling the Wi-Fi in a Chromebook, but — if you’re working offline on your Chromebook, or if you have an Ethernet cable plugged in — you can disable the Wi-Fi radio in the same way you can disable the Bluetooth radio. Just click the system tray area, click Wi-Fi, and disable it.If your Chromebook has a cellular radio so it can access cellular data, you may want to disable that if you’re not using it. You’ll see a mobile data option in the system-tray pop-up list if your Chromebook supports this. Click that and use the options to disable it.

Unplug Peripherals

Unplug any peripherals you’re not using, too. Dongles like the USB wireless receiver dongles shipped with many wireless mice use power while plugged in, as do USB flash drives and any other connected devices. The less devices plugged in, the less power your Chromebook wastes on peripherals.

View Per-Web Page Battery Usage

The current developer channel build of Chrome OS offers a feature that allows you to see how much battery power has been used by different web pages and Chrome apps. You probably don’t have this feature yet, but it should be trickling down to the stable release of Chrome OS soon. If you’re reading this long after December, 2014, you probably have this feature right now.

To access it, open the Settings page and click the Battery button under Device.

You’ll see a list of the web pages and apps you use ordered by how much of your battery power they’ve consumed, so you can make informed decisions.

Close Open Tabs and Background Processes

As on any other computer or device, doing more with your Chromebook uses more power. If you have a large amount of tabs open — especially if they’re refreshing or updating in the background — this will drain your battery faster. If you have background processes using CPU, they’ll use power too. If you have quite a few extensions installed and they’re running in Chrome or executing scripts on every web page you load, that will also use additional power.

You may want to trim things down. First, close any unnecessary tabs, especially ones that might have advertisements or other activate content that’d be updating in the background. Try to keep your tabs to a minimum. if you need to come back to something later, you can bookmark it. You can even right-click your tab bar and select Bookmark All Tabs to bookmark a set of tabs as a folder so you can easily come back to them later.

Second, open Chrome’s Task manager by pressing Shift+Esc; right-clicking Chrome’s window bar and selecting Task manager; or clicking Chrome’s menu button, pointing to More tools, and selecting Task manager. Examine the list of background processes here. If there are some processes you don’t feel are essential, you may want to disable or uninstall them.

While your’e at it, consider your list of installed extensions. If you don’t need an extension, you may want to uninstall it to speed up your browser and get more battery life. Click the menu button in Chrome, point to More tools, and click Extensions to view and manage your installed extensions.

Turn It Off

If you use your Chromebook constantly and it’s your main computer, you may want to leave it in its standard sleep mode all the time. Open your Chromebook and it will pop right out of its sleep so you can use it immediately.

However, sleep mode does use some power. It’s a small amount of power, so it’s better to use sleep mode if you’re stepping awy from your Chromebook shortly instead of going through the shutdown and startup processes.

However, if you use your Chromebook less frequently — perhaps it sits on a coffee table and you go days without touching it– you may want to consider shutting it down. If you find yourself picking up your Chromebook and being annoyed that its battery has drained while you weren’t using it, shutting down your Chromebook can prevent this from happening and ensure your Chromebook only loses battery power when it’s being used. You’ll have to boot up your Chromebook the next time you use it, but Chromebooks boot up pretty quickly.

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As always, none of these tips are mandatory. If you’re happy with your Chromebook’s performance, there’s no need to spend time tweaking it and disabling potentially useful hardware features and extensions to improve battery life. If you’re already happy with your battery life; that’s great — you don’t need to tweak!

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Easily Create Your Own Google Chrome Theme

Google’s Chrome Web Store offers a variety of themes for Chrome, which include background images for your new tab page and custom colors. Even better — you can create your own theme in just a few minutes.

This official Google app allows you to quickly and easily create a custom Google Chrome theme, complete with a custom background image and color scheme. You can even share the themes you create.

Getting Started

We’ll be using the My Chrome Theme app from Google for this – click the link and install it from the Chrome Web Store. It will appear on your new tab page, where your other installed Chrome apps do.

Choosing an Image

The first thing you’ll need to do is choose a background image for your new tab page. You can either upload an image file or capture an image from your webcam.

If you’re uploading an image, you can choose a personal photo or any other type of wallpaper image, such as one of the images from our 100+ wallpaper collections. The below image is fromour grasslands collection.

Adding Colors

On the next screen, you’ll be able to choose separate colors for the frame, toolbar, and background color. Of course, this is a Google app, so there’s an “I’m feeling lucky” button that will automatically select some appropriate-looking colors for you. The automatically selected colors will attempt to match the background image you selected earlier.

Installing Your Theme

Once you’re done, your theme will be generated and you’ll see an installation button that will add it to your browser. You’ll also get a link you can use to share it with others – just send them the link via email, instant message, Facebook, or anywhere else you can copy-paste a link. Of course, since this is Google, you can also share your custom theme on Google+ with a single click.

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Create Your Own Firefox Browser Theme

Firefox themes — also known as “personas” — can change the way your browser looks, making it more personal. If you like theming the applications you use, there’s no better application to theme than your browser.

This isn’t too hard — all you need to do is find a background image or two and crop them to the correct proportions.

Get Your Images Ready

A Firefox browser theme is made up of two images. There’s a header image displayed behind everything at the top of the Firefox window, and a footer image displayed behind the Find and add-on bars at the bottom of the window. The latest versions of Firefox remove the add-ons bar unless you install an extension to bring it back, so the top image is much more important. You’ll only see the bottom image when you press Ctrl+F to use the Find toolbar. Visit the Themes gallery to see pre-made Firefox themes you can use.

First, find a good-looking image that will work well on your top toolbar. Mozilla advises that “Subtle, soft contrast images and gradients work best; highly detailed images will compete with the browser UI.” The top-right corner should also have the most interesting bit of the image, as the top-right corner of the image will always be displayed in the top-right corner of your browser. As you resize the browser window, more of the left side of the image will become visible.

Here are the exact image specifications required:

• Header Image: 3000 pixels wide x 200 pixels tall, PNG or JPG format, 300 KB maximum file size
• Footer Image: 3000 pixels wide x 100 pixels tall, PNG or JPG format, 300 KB maximum file size

You’ll want an image of at least 3000 pixels wide in size to start with. With a sufficiently large image found, all you need to do is crop it to the current proportions. Many desktop image editors (like the excellent Paint.NET) can do this, as can online image editors (like the convenientPixlr Editor).

For example, in Pixlr, you’d open your image, select the rectangular selection tool, select “Fixed size” in the Constraint box, and enter a width of 3000 pixels and a height of 200. You could then select an appropriately sized area of the image. (Of course, you could also resize your image before cropping it in this way.)

You’d then crop your image — select Image > Crop in Pixlr — and you’d end up with a correctly sized image. You can now save it to your computer (File > Save in Pixlr). Repeat this process if you want a footer image, but make sure it’s only 3000×100 instead of 3000×200.

Enable and Configure Your Custom Theme

To create a custom theme without submitting it to the Mozilla themes website, install Mozilla’s official Personas Plus extension. Restart your browser after installing it, click the Personas Plus icon on your toolbar, and select Preferences. Activate the “Enable custom personas” checkbox and click OK.

You can now click the Personas Plus icon on the toolbar, point to Custom Persona, and click Edit. This will take you to a window with a simple interface to specify your images and desired text colors. Use the options here to browse for the header image file you created earlier and it will automatically appear on your Firefox toolbar.

Note that the footer image is optional — you’ll really only see if when you use the Find bar these days. If you don’t select a Footer image, the Find bar will just look like a normal part of the interface without any themes. Most people will probably be happy with that.

Select appropriate text and accent colors to make the browser’s toolbar text and icons stand out.

The resulting theme will work on every operating system, whether you’re using Firefox on Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X.

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If you’d like to submit your theme for other people to browse, install, and rate on the Mozilla add-ons gallery website, use the Submit a New Theme page on Mozilla’s website. You’ll need to create a developer account first.

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Execute An Emergency Restart In Windows 8

Shutting down your Windows quickly is almost mission impossible. Sometimes you have to wait for the timeout, other times you are prompted to save this file and close that document, and worst of all is when you have to sit through the tons of Windows updates bestowed upon your machine. For some of us, when we have to go, we have to go.

For those wishing for a much shorter Windows shutdown routine, here’s a quick tip on how you can execute an emergency restart on your Windows 8, and this restart will stop at nothing.

Perform Emergency Restart

To perform an emergency restart, start by holding down CTRL + ALT + DELETE keys all at once. You will be redirected to a different window.

In this window hold down CTRL key while clicking on the red power button at the bottom right of your screen.

When the "Emergency restart" screen shows up, click OK to immediately restart your PC.

Reminder: When you perform an emergency restart, your PC will NOT prompt you with an option to save any currently open documents. Therefore, it is best that you only use emergency restart as your final option or after you are sure you have saved everything that should be saved.

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