Upgrading Memory

Upgrading the memory in your computer is probably the easiest upgrade that you can do to your computer, and you will notice the benefits right away. The upgrade is a simple procedure that you can do yourself with little effort or computer knowledge. All you need to know is what make and model your computer is and preferably how much memory (RAM) that you have in your computer now. You can find this out by right clicking "My Computer" on your desktop screen and click "properties". You will see the amount of RAM that is in your computer there. If your computer is only a couple of years old, you probably have either 64MB of Ram or possibly 32MB of RAM (memory). Today, to run most operating systems smoothly with all of the newer memory hogging applications, it is recommended that you use 128MB of memory (RAM). I would suggest contacting your local CompUSA or BestBuy for information on what type of memory chips you will need. If you're using an older system, memory chips may be a little more expensive only because demand is low for these chips and the dealer may not stock them. You may have to special order them. Either way, you can do this on your own or you can have either of the places that I just mentioned do this for you at a minimal cost. If you choose to do it on your own, it's as simple as taking the cover off of your computer (unplug it first) and snapping the memory chip into place. The computer will recognize the new chip when the computer is rebooted. I would highly recommend doing this if you have noticed your machine continuing to run slower, especially if you are still using 64MB or lower of memory. Contact your local dealer to guide you.

Your hard drive is like a filing cabinet. It stores all of your data in what to us is files and folders, but what it really is doing is actually a much more complicated procedure. All of this data is really stored in tables and clusters on the hard drive in ways that the drive can find and read it as quickly as possible. Without having to go into it all, we'll stick to the filing cabnet example. Imagine that you have a large filing cabinet that you have been storing all of your files in for years. In order to keep this file organized, you have had to keep all of your files in alphabetical order and dispose of any outdated files. If you didn't do this, your filing cabinet would become very large and virtually impossible to find specific files without a great deal of time and effort. This is what can happen to your hard drive if it is not maintained properly. When you delete files from your hard drive, it forces your hard drive to rearrange it's file tables and this can cause a slow down when accessing files. Your operating system (Windows) includes tools that will allow you to correct and maintain your hard drive to keep it operating as smooth as possible. Assuming that you have not noticed or have not experienced any serious problems with your hard drive, these tools should run without problem and should be run on a regular basis. Before running either of these two tools that I will mention, you should close any programs that you are currently running. What I usually do is close any document files that I may have open. I then press "ALT", "CTRL" , and "DEL" all at the same time (ONCE! Do not push these three buttons twice or you will reboot your system). Then highlight each program running there and click on "End Task". You will have to do this for each one and it may take a couple of times to get the program to End Task. The only two that you need to leave running (Do Not End Task These Two) is Explorer and Systray. Don't be alarmed about doing this procedure. It may seem a bit lengthy and hazardous to your system, but it really isn't. In fact, it is designed specifically as an aide to your system. Besides, after you do this, the first couple of times you'll see that it only takes less than a minute to get it going. There is nothing here that can cause any damage to your system. If you accidently End Task on Explorer, just reboot your system. After you have closed all of your programs, the first tool that your going to need to access is "Scandisk". Scandisk will check your hard drive for errors and correct them. You can access this by going to "Start", "Programs", "Accessories", "System Tools", then "Scandisk". Scandisk will open and will have your primary drive highlighted, which usually is your C: drive. It will give you the options of a "Standard" scan or a "Thorough" scan. If you have never done this or it has been a while since you have, I would recommend a "Thorough" scan. Also, click on automatically fix errors. This will allow Scandisk to mark any bad sectors that may be on your hard drive so that the hard drive will not attempt to access them again. Once this procedure has been completed, there is one more step that you should do. The next tool that you will need to access is the defragmenting tool. Defragmenting your hard drive will place all of those broken up segments closer together so that it takes less time for the hard drive to find all of those files. After you have run Scandisk go back to "Start", "Programs", "Accessories", "Sytem Tools", then "Disk Defragmentor". When the program comes up, it will ask you which drive that you want to defragment. It will probably have the C: drive highlighted. Click "OK". Now, if you have never done this before and depending on how big your hard drive is, this could take a while. I would suggest doing both of these when you don't plan on using your computer for a while. I would give yourself about an hour or more to complete both of these. After they are both finished, restart your system. This will restart all of the programs that normally run at start up. Now your computer should be running much smoother. These are really simple procedures and should be done regularly. I would suggest running Scandisk once a week as a standard scan, and I would do a thorough scan about once every month or two. Defragmenting should be run once a month after running Scandisk.

Here is a tip that will allow you to not only free up some disk space on your hard drive, but also possibly speed up your system a bit as well. Did you know that each time you visit a web site objects are downloaded onto your hard drive from that site and left there. These objects can be a number of things, although usually they are some form of .GIF or .JPG (pictures or graphics) images or maybe even sound files. These objects are things that take the most time to download when you go to a web site. This is not necessarily a bad thing because when you return to these web sites it takes much less time to download the site because these images are already on your hard drive. So, this cuts down the time that the web site needs to come up. One problem with this is that over a long period of time these images or files start to accumulate and take up disk space that you may need, and also cause the hard drive to work a little harder having to read over all of these extra files while searching the drive for data. This can contribute to a bit of a slow down to your system. These files that are downloaded are kept in a temporary internet file on your computer, and can easily be removed. These files can be deleted without worry. You will not be losing anything that will cause your computer harm. In fact, it will be quite the opposite. I would recommend doing this at least once a month or more depending on how often you are on line. I do this at least once a week, even though I don't spend that much time on line. I just don't like giving up unnecessary disk space to anything. The procedure is simple. Open your browser (Internet Explorer), then go to the top and click on "Tools". The option window will pop up. Click on "Delete Files". It will then ask you if you want to delete all of these temporary files. If you have never done this, it may even let you know how many of these files that you're about to delete. For example, "Do you want to delete 2,358 files?". Of course you do, that's the whole point of this. Click "Ok" and watch them disappear. Now check your recycle bin to make sure that these files haven't been dropped in there. They shouldn't have been, but I have had that happen a time or two. Usually that only happens when you delete these files from Windows Explorer, which is a different procedure that will give you the same results, but this way is easier.

Backing up your files is the most important thing that you can do to ensure that you don't lose any of your important data files that you have spent so many hours creating and modifying. This can be done several different ways. The way that most of us are already familiar with is to use removable disks to store your files. That's fine if you mainly store small document files and little else. But, thanks to modern advancements in removable storage technology, there are other alternatives that are able to store much more data and retrieve it quicker than the 3.5 inch 1.44MB floppy disks that we have grown accustomed to. A couple of the more popular ways of backing up and/or storing data are ZIP disks and CD-RW disks. ZIP disks have been around for a few years now and have been the removable storage media of choice by most, until now. The CD-RW uses rewritable CD's that are capable of storing up to 650 mega bytes of data on one disk. In comparison to the ZIP disk, which allows you to store 100MB or up to 250MB of data per disk depending on the drive, this is quite an improvement in removable storage technology over the past couple of years. I think for most, the ZIP disks are still a great way to store your data. I use mine mainly for storing document files and pictures. I do plan on getting a CD-RW in the near future for backing up all of my large files at once, such as the large bank of music that I have accumulated over time. Chances are, if your computer is only a couple of years old, you probably already have a zip disk installed. If you do have one, do yourself a favor and take advantage of it. If you don't, they are inexpensive and are available as internal or external drives; as are the CD-RW's. The blank ZIP disks are a little more expensive than the CD-RW disks, but the CD-RW drives are much more expensive than the ZIP drives (for now). Also, when you realize that it would take (70) floppy disks to equal the capacity of (1) ZIP disk the cost balances out. Either of these will serve you well in storing your data, and I would highly recommend using them. You will be glad you did.

Your recycle bin, as you may already know, is where all the files you have chosen to delete await execution. They remain there until you drop the lever and dispose of them once and for all. There are a couple things that you can do to your recycle bin properties that you probably aren't aware of. The first one is that annoying "Are you sure you want to delete whatever?" box that pops up each time you delete a file. When you delete a file it is moved to the recycle bin, where if you decide that you probably shouldn't have deleted it, you can go to the recycle bin and restore it or you can just clear the recycle bin. This pop up box is to question your decision to delete the file. If you feel pretty confident in your decision making capabilities, you can turn this box off by right clicking on "Recycle Bin", then click "Properties". This will bring up a box that will now allow you to adjust a couple of things. The first thing that you would do if you don't want that box to pop up when you delete a file is to uncheck "Display delete conformation dialog box". This will allow you to delete files without this box popping up. The second thing, and even more important, is the "Maximum size of recycle bin" setting. The setting you have by default right now is probaby around 10%. If you have a 10 GigaBytes hard drive, this means that this setting is reserving 1 Gigabyte of your hard drive for deleted files to your recycle bin. Chances are, unless you are extremely unhappy with your data files and enjoy deleting them with a vengeance, you will not need anywhere near this much space for your deleted files. I highly suggest moving the setting here to 1%; unless you are deleting video files, which can be quite large, I would leave it at 10% and then remove them immediately from your recycle bin. Video files take up too much space to be sitting on your hard drive without a purpose. After you have clicked on the control level and moved it to 1%, click on "Apply" to activate the change. Then click "OK". You will need to click on these two last things wheather you have decided to do away with the pop up dialog box, or to reduce the size of your recycle bin storage, or both.

Creating folders is one of the easiest things that you can do to keep your files organized, and to simplify your efforts while working on your computer. These folders can be created anywhere that you store your files. Creating them is a must for consolidating all of those file icons that you have sprawled all over your desktop, or your "My Documents" folder, or anywhere else for that matter. All you have to do to create these folders is go to the area that you want to create the folder, "My Docunents", "Desktop"(your opening screen), etc. and right click a blank area inside of the window that's open. A pop up menu will appear. Click on "New", then "Folder", then type in the name that you want for the folder. Such as, "Finance", "Pictures", "Notes", etc. Then left click a blank area. This will remove the curser and now allow you to add files to it. You can now drag and drop any file that you would like to keep in this folder by left clicking on the file to be added and holding down the mouse button as you drag your mouse over to the new folder (the new folder should be highlighted as you hover over it). Once you are right over the file, you can release the button on your mouse and the file will be added to your new folder. If you would like to check it, just double click on the new folder and the file that you have just put in there should now be there in this folder. You can continue to do this for as much a you need. This is a good idea to do if you have a lot of files on your desktop or My documents file that are related.