Posted by Brian Cui on August 27, 2011 at 12:13 pm
It’s always encouraged here to uninstall programs that you no longer use – not only saving you a little bit of disk space, but allowing you to speed up your computer by removing startup entries, context menu entries, and other things. Using the standard Windows uninstall tool in the control panel will get rid of the application’s files, and will likely leave user data and registry entries still in your computer. It’s convenient if you want to reinstall the software later – unless you want to get rid of it completely. Enter Revo Uninstaller, a third-party uninstaller tool that will scan for leftover files and registry entries after you uninstall a program.
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Posted by Brian Cui on August 19, 2011 at 12:00 pm
No doubt about it, YouTube is the number one online video portal, with millions of videos online and hundreds of hours of video uploaded each minute. It’s mostly the content and vast quantity of videos that draw viewers in, something other video sites can’t compete against. When you dig a little deeper though, you’ll find that YouTube doesn’t provide the best viewing experience for its users all the time – with excessive advertising blocking access to video content, and the inability to natively download videos to be viewed while offline or on a portable media player. Thankfully, there are two Opera extensions that can fix both those problems and make using YouTube a more pleasant experience.
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Posted by Brian Cui on August 13, 2011 at 3:55 pm
You normally won’t touch it, but your computer’s BIOS is a plays a crucial role in keeping your computer running smoothly. It’s the firmware run before Windows launches, normally accompanied by grey text on a black background that identifies devices and hardware plugged into your system and then proceeds to (usually) launch Windows, depending on your setup. Updating your BIOS can fix stability issues and may even increase your machine’s performance. ASUS netbooks (Eee PC’s) can use a tool called ASUSUpdate – which makes updating your BIOS a fairly easy process.
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Posted by Brian Cui on August 11, 2011 at 2:47 pm
Whenever I need to check the time, I instinctively throw my mouse towards the lower right corner of the screen because that’s where the Windows Clock sits. Most of the time it’s spot on, but sometimes it can be one hour or maybe even a couple hours off. Even after adjusting it back, it stays inaccurate the next day. The problem? It kept syncing with the wrong online clock, hence it would adjust back to the wrong time regularly.
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Posted by Brian Cui on August 8, 2011 at 4:32 pm
It’s guaranteed to happen: over time, your system will run slower and slower as you use it more and more – regardless of how clean you keep it. My netbook was beginning to face such problems, with notable slowdowns in boot speed, application launch speed, and general performance. So I backed up all my data, whipped out my Windows 7 CD, formatted my hard drive, and did a clean install of Windows, hoping that it would fix the performance issues encountered before.
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Posted by Brian Cui on August 2, 2011 at 7:19 pm
While the installation and uninstallation process for most programs is fairly clean and simple, there are some programs that hide leftover data that system cleaners are unable to detect even after removal. Or maybe you want to run a suspicious application but want to know what it exactly does to your system. WhatChanged is a simple piece of software that allows you to scan your disk and registry state, save it, and later, re-scan and compare with the original to see what changed.
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Posted by Brian Cui on July 29, 2011 at 9:07 pm
I’ve talked about CCleaner many times on this site as my favorite system cleaning tool. It removes temporary files and cleans out the registry for broken entries. The downside to using system cleaners however is that most of the time you don’t really know what it’s actually cleaning out. Through a series of PCWorld tests, it’s been determined that system cleaners can actually make your system slower than it was before – depending on which cleaner you use.
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