Computer tips and tricks

PC running slow?

A question I am often asked is "My computer is running slow. Can you speed it up?" 99% of the time the answer will be yes. There are three primary reasons for a slow machine; excessive CPU activity, RAM activity or Hard disk activity. To see why these components are important lets take a step back and explain why these are important. When your computer starts up the CPU (central processing unit) gets instructions from the ROM (Read Only Memory) to load up the Operating System held on the Hard Disk. What the CPU does next is load the Operating System on to your RAM. The reason it does this is because the RAM and CPU can talk much quicker to each other than the Hard Disk and CPU. So, to check the running speeds of these three the first place to go is "Task Manager" which can be found by entering "taskmgr" from the run command. Click on the performance tab to see CPU activity, the amount of RAM compared to the amount of available RAM and Page File Usage. The CPU history should be mainly around the 0% mark. The amount of used RAM can vary greatly. Check the "Physical Memory" stats that will tell you the amount of total RAM and the amount of available RAM. Open up some programs and you will see this drop and the PF Usage go up. PF Usage is Page File Usage an area reserved on your hard disk for extra RAM in a single file called a Swap File.

RAM: Typically Windows XP will be at it's happiest with 1GB to 2GB or RAM although 500MB will run OK and Windows Vista/7 will be happiest with 2GB upwards although 1GB will run OK. Have your programs open that you use and then open Task Manager checking you have plenty of available RAM if you don't then it could be time for an upgrade, alternatively you can enter "msconfig" at the run command, click the "Startup" tab and uncheck any programs that you think don't need to be running in the background. Under the performance tab you will see a list of running programs loaded into memory. It is here that you will be able to detect any viruses on your computer.

CPU: If you have excessive CPU activity, click on the processes tab in Task Manager and click on CPU in the CPU column to put the list in CPU priority. System idle should be at the top. Here you can see the programs using up your precious CPU activity where you can google the file name to see who the culprit is.

Hard Disk: Hard Disk activity is the result of CPU activity therefore there is no meter for this. Your best bet to find out the hard disk hog is to put the Task Manager into CPU mode mentioned in the previous paragraph and compare the Hard Disk light on the computer with the CPU. Once you know the culprit you can either reconfigure or uninstall.

The windows registry will become larger over time and consequently will benefit from a clear out. There are free registry cleaners on the net or you can opt for the PC reload to take it back to the speed of day one as a new computer fresh out the box.

Backup Windows drivers before a computer reload

Last week I had a PC in for repair which although had various spyware removal software ran it still suffered some damage to windows. The only thing for it was a reload. The owner of the PC didn't have his motherboard drivers so I found this rather useful utility to back up the drivers for quick and easy install on the PC after the reload was complete. For many who have tried tracking down drivers particularly for older machines, they'll know it is pure luck whether they are easy to find or not. All you do is download the software from the DriverMax link to a USB stick. When installed you backup to the USB stick. When Windows is re-installed you just install the software again from the stick and click restore and job done!

Browser hijack removal for Internet Explorer

A common problem with modern day internet browsing is browser hijacking. This can happen for a variety of reasons such as a misspelt website or perhaps more commonly a hijacked legitimate URL or bogus website has popup code installing the unwanted redirection via active x and usually without the knowledge of the surfer. If you're reading this now and have no problems with your PC you're not off the hook just yet, there are a few precautions that could save your PC should the dreaded happen in the future. Firstly keep Windows up do date. Most of Microsoft updates these days seem to be security related which will give you some piece of mind when surfing. Secondly I run one of the free anti-spyware software programs. My favourite is Malwarebytes but there are two others that I recommend; Spybot S&D and Ad-aware. All need to be updated and ran manually but for free programs, it's a bargain. Next, go to "options" click "security" tab and set to high. This will stop active x from running so in order to display legitimate websites properly you will need to add the legitimate site to "Trusted Sites". The final advise I would recommend is Hijackthis. This software again free will look through your machine and allow you to see any new registry entries. If you already have problems there's plenty you can do. My first line of attack is to see if I can install, update and run any anti-spyware programs. If not then I will create a new user profile to see if it is just the user's profile that has been infected. You can do this by pressing the windows key down and "r" bringing up the run command. Type "control userpasswords2". Here you can add a new user and reboot. If this fixes the problem then you just install malware software and run or, just copy your data across to the new profile. My next move would be to install another web browser. This can be done by downloading onto a USB stick from another machine. Next it's time to check "Task Manager" click on processes and see if there are more than one instance of iexplore.exe running. If there are two, the best way to rid this type of hijack is to boot in safe mode, remove the security permissions on the Internet Explorer folder in Program Files so that you can delete the folder and re-install. Another method of hijacking is done by using the lmhosts file. This can be found at c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. You can open the file with notepad. Personally I've never seen hijacking done this way. Lastly flush the DNS by going to the DOS command prompt and type "ipconfig /flushdns"

Protecting your data

For many people, their data is irreplaceable and so the need for the piece of mind backups. There are numerous ways to do this which can make deciding confusing. Here are some practices that I would recommend for data protection: 1. On a new PC install, make a partition on your hard disk and have one partition for the operating system and the other for your data. That way if you get a problem and need to re-install, all of your data will be safe on the other partition. Don't forget to use drivermax and backup your drivers to the data disk as well. 2. There are a number of ways to keep copies of your data. You could start with Windows NTBackup which will create a backup file on another hard disk. This can also be run as a scheduled task. The disadvantage of this method is that if for some reason your backup stops working, you will get no notification. 3. Another method I used regularly in the past is to have two hard disks installed in my computer and download Microsofts free Synctoy. This is a folder replication tool which will replicate two folders on different hard disks. The disadvantage with this method is the need for manual operation. 4. My current method so far seems to tick all the right boxes. It's a NAS drive (Network Attached Storage). It's a little box that sits on your network or directly to your PC via USB3. Don't worry if you haven't got USB3, you can always buy a plugin card. The beauty is that this device can be immediately plugged into another PC and used straight away should the dreaded happen you your computer. Inside the box are two hard disks that run as a RAID 1 mirror, meaning that whatever is written to one disk is mirrored to the other in real time. 5. If your data is less that 25GB why not use Microsofts Skydrive? A very useful online tool giving you up to 25GB of free hard disk space accessible to you anywhere in the world. It can be set for auto login on the machine you regularly access it from. It also has the ability to edit MS Office documents.

Tackling the problem with SPAM

Dealing with SPAM is a daily part of an internet users life. In order to shop online, join groups and forums we inevitably need an email address and once this happens the SPAM starts knocking at the door with Rolex watches and Viagra and even offers from people wanting to give you huge sums of money (for a small fee of course). My first line of attack was to try out some of the free SPAM software packages but sadly I never found one that worked. They either slowed down the machine, didn't catch all the SPAM or needed weeks of manual input to tell it what was SPAM and what was not. In the end I opted to use Microsoft's Outlook 2007 which has a very good Junk Mail filter. Not only this, you can tell Outlook to bin email by country. Seeing as a large percentage of Junk Mail comes from abroad this is a very handy tool to have. Yesterday I had a total of 18 junk mails which I find quite acceptable. You can track the source of these emails from the message headers. Sometimes these have a false line put in them by the spammer to mislead you but the real source is always added to the header by the mail servers. The message header will contain the IP address that the mail was sent from. Bring up a DOS box and type nslookup followed by the IP address and this will give you some information. Also go to Geobytes.com for an IP locator.

Please wait your internet-connection has not yet been established

I had a PC in this morning with this message on a grey screen stopping you booting into windows. When plugging in a network cable I got a screen up claiming to be from the Metropolitan Police demanding £50 for illegal music downloads. Complete rubbish of course. If the Police wanted to convict you for illegal music downloads they would be knocking on your door and then you would go through the court procedure before any money changed hands. If you have suffered the same problem here is how I cured the machine: Keep presssing the F8 key when booting the PC to get the safe mode options. Choose Safe Mode with Command Prompt. When the Command Prompt appears type regedit to access the registry and navigate to HKLM (H_Key Local Machine), Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\MSconfig\Startupreg. Here you can delete the entry which will also give you the path to the .exe files which will need deleting. Mine were in the users profile at c:\documents and settings\user\application data\ Next go to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\Winlogon. Find the "Shell" key and change it back from the path to the Malware to Explorer.exe. This allowed me to boot into windows where I was able to install Malwarebytes from a USB stick. This picked up disabled desktop, hidden desktop amongst other problems. I had to re-enable taskmanager go back into regedit and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System. Disable Taskmanager should read 0. To unhide desktop icons just right click on the desktop - arrange icons and check the "hide desktop icons" Good luck