What Is Defragmentation

What is defragmentation? Well it’s basically giving your computer a good old spring clean so it runs more efficiently and faster too. Did you know that everything you do on your computer takes up some space – a lot of people don’t realise this – not just downloading files but even just looking at a webpage uses space. In time this becomes wasted space and it also slows everything down. Thankfully there is an easy solution.

The clean up is a two step process. Step one gets rid of everything that’s not needed so straight away you’ve freed up extra space. Step two takes care of the defragmentation. This is not nearly as strange as it sounds!
What it means is when files are removed and deleted they leave a space, but this space is more like a hole or a gap. Defragging repairs all the holes and gaps giving you a brand new space to work with and reuse.

This is good housekeeping and it only needs to be done approximately every few months or so. The good news is that your computer does all the hard work for you. With just a few clicks it locates all the unwanted files, deletes them and then it defrags. Easy!

Important Note:Step One could take an hour or so and, Step Two could take a few hours or more – depending on the size of your clutter! Choose an appropriate time to do this – bedtime is a good time to do Step Two and let it run while you’re sleeping. It’ll all be worth it in the morning!

Step One – Removing unwanted files

Go to Start – this is the green button bottom left of your screen.
Click on Start and then Select My Computer. Or you may have My Computer on your desktop.
This will open a new window where you will see Local Disk C – this is your main hard drive. This is where the clean up takes place.
Right click on it and Select Properties.
Another window opens – showing you three things: how much space you have in total to use, how much space you’ve already used and, how much space is still free to use.
Jot down the second two figures so you can see for yourself that you really do have more space to use when you’re done – this is optional!
Now Click on Disk Cleanup.
Another window opens showing you all the files that you can delete and, the amount of space that they are taking up.
Select all the boxes and Click on OK.
The unwanted files will now be removed – this may take a while – leave this same window open for Step Two.

Step Two – Defragmentation

When Step One is complete Select the Tools tab in the same window.
Click on Defragment Now and a new window opens.
Click on Analyze – again this will show you before and after Defrag.
Then Click on OK and Defragging will begin. Remember this takes a while.
When Defragging has finished you will need to Restart your computer.

And Voila! You have just removed files that were wasting space on your computer and then defragged the extra space. Everything is now neat and tidy and will run much more efficiently. Well Done!

Tags: computers, defragmentation

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How to Set Processor Affinity on Windows 7

In Windows 7, applications would run on all the cores of your processor by default. With dual or quad core processors, you can actually set a particular program to run on only one of the cores so that other programs can use the remaining cores. This is called a processor affinity, in which programs or applications are made related or attracted to a certain core of a processor. Doing this actually makes your computer performance much better when they run certain applications, allowing you to get the best of the multiple cores. This article teaches you how to set processor affinity on Windows 7.

How to set processor affinity is not difficult, and is almost similar to the recent Windows. First, you will need to access into the Task Manager. This can be one by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del, and then clicking “Start Task Manager”; or you can just click Ctrl+Shift+Esc which will lead you directly to it. Then, click the “Applications” tab where you will be able to see the applications that are currently running. From the list, right click on the application in which you want to have the affinity adjusted, and then choose “Show processes from all users”. You will then see the processes, and then click “Set Affinity”. After that, choose which CPU you want to allow the process to execute on, and then pressing “OK” would have you set its affinity.

Basically, to choose which application to run on specific cores depends on how much resources it takes. If a certain application takes up too much resource, set about the different applications, especially if you are likely to run them at the same time, to the different cores. This way, one core will not need to do so much work at a time to get an application up and running. As a tip, you could put a less resource demanding one on one of the cores, while the high resource demanding one on the other.

Other things you should know is that while setting affinities do help make system performance run much smoothly, it is not exactly the wisest thing to change the affinity settings for System Processes since they function best where they are. Applications that are alright to change affinities are the third-party applications, which are applications like your video and sound editing programs, 3D graphics programs, and so on so forth. Do also note that the affinity settings will only stay the way it is when it is opened; it will go back to its default settings once you close them. Thus, you will need to reset the settings each time you use a particular program.

All in all, choose your affinity settings wisely and you will enjoy a boost in your processor’s performance.

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How to Boost Your Wireless Router’s Internet Security

With Wireless Routers gaining popularity nowadays, more and more people are finding ways to either use the signals for free or using other people’s identity to do things online. These are possible because the router uses radio signals to transmit your information, in which anyone within the signal’s range can have access to if it is not secured. Thus, in order to buck up on your Internet security, here are some things you could do.

First, you could make your Wi-fi not visible. This can be done by logging into your base station management Website, and then have the SSID Broadcast disabled. This way, anyone looking for a wireless network will not be able to see your network in the list. By doing this, passers-by and neighbors cannot take advantage of your network, especially since they cannot see or detect it in the first place.

Another thing you can do is to set the range which your wireless network can reach. This means, if your router can reach maybe two block away, set it so that it can only reach the far end of your house or apartment. This can be done by purchasing the right router, in which signal range in limited to the intended space, or you can reduce the transmission strength by removing or readjusting the router’s antenna so that it will focus its strength accordingly.

Other than that, you can disable the remote admin. When it in enabled, you will be able to access the router through the means of Internet. Thus, disabling it means you can only access the router from the router itself. The disabling can be done by logging onto your base station Website, and then choosing to disable it.

One of the most obvious and simplest thing to do is o select a password that is difficult to crack. Do not use very common passwords, like your name, birth date, easy string of numbers, or anything extremely common. Try to use a combination of letters, numbers and symbols, which is much harder to figure out. Changing your password can be done by logging onto the base station Website and change the password from the default one.

There are many other ways to boost up Internet security, but here are some of the ones you can do with your wireless router.