Part 2 of Quick tips on how to improve your PC's performance

Posted By: D-A-L | Date Added: 15-08-2007 03:35 PM | Views: 2537

Quick tips on how to improve your PC's performance by Nathan Forrest Hi! Welcome to the second brief article in this multi-part series that will show you how to clean up your PC and improve its performance. We'll be giving you inside tips on all of the checks and improvements that we carry out when we visit our UK customers for a "health check" on a desktop or laptop PC. Each week, we'll be showing you how to carry out another part of the full "health check" yourself for free! Previous related articles: Part 1: Performance status (http://www.d-a-l.com/articles/library/143.html) Part 2: Clearing out temporary files There are several types of files that can be considered to be "temporary files" and these are stored in various places.The first type that is most commonly referred to as "temporary files" is the collection of files that is created by Windows and your other applications in order to temporarily save a version of a file that is being worked on or that will be referred to in a hurry during that session of a particular program. For instance, when you open Microsoft Word and start creating or editing a document, it will save one or more temporary files that contain information about your document text, fonts, tables and linked or embedded images before you save it on your hard disk (or USB drive, etc.). When Word is closed down, it should delete those temporary files. Another example is when you install some new software or an update from an installation file called "Setup.exe". That one file will actually be a packaged collection of lots of files required for the installation. So, in order to be able to run the installation routine, that collection of files gets extracted (or unpackaged) into the Windows temporary files folder so that they can be used during the installation process. When the installation is complete, the installation program is supposed to delete its temporary files. Unfortunately, some programs and processes are not so good at clearing up after themselves! Poorly written programs, installation routines and update processes, as well as inefficient hardware drivers and system crashes or incorrectly closed applications can all result in a build-up of temporary files that have not been deleted properly but are no longer required. As this build-up worsens, it takes your system longer and longer to scan through the temporary files folder in order to find the one temporary file that it is looking for at any given time. In other words, your system's performance suffers and it is time to tidy up. Let's take a look at how to do that on a Windows XP desktop or laptop computer. 1. The first thing to do is to reboot the PC. If you try to delete a temporary file that a program or process is still accessing, you'll receive an error message and you'll need to repeat the process whilst selecting a smaller group of files in order to avoid the file that is still in use. This task is, therefore, simpler if your PC has just started up and you haven't opened any other programs. 2. Go to the Start Menu and select 'Run...'. At the 'Open:' prompt, type %TEMP% and click 'OK' (see Figure 1). Figure 1. 3. A screen similar to the one shown in Figure 2 appears. This shows your Windows temporary files folder, which probably contains many temporary files and also some sub-folders that contain further groups of files. Click 'Edit' > 'Select All' on the menu bar in order to highlight all of the files and sub-folders. Then click 'File' > 'Properties' on the menu bar in order to see the total number of temporary files and the amount of disk space (measured in megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB)) that the files were taking up. Finally, click 'File' > 'Delete' on the menu bar and send those files to the Recycle Bin. As a rough guideline, deleting 50MB of temporary files will make the system more efficient. We have, in some cases, seen systems that were clogged up with up to 5GB (5,000MB) of temporary files and, after deleting those, we could definitely see a performance improvement! Figure 2. So, you may now think that those files have been deleted from your system and that the disk space that they were occupying has now been released and can be used for saving more files into. Well, actually, no - all that we have done is moved those files to the Recycle Bin. The Recycle Bin is a kind of "holding bay" for files that you think are no longer required. However, if you delete something accidentally, you can open the Recycle Bin and restore individual or multiple files back to their original location. This can be very useful and, therefore, it is normally a good idea to leave files in the Recycle Bin for a week or so in order to give yourself a chance to rescue something that you did not really mean to delete. Therefore, for the purposes of this article, the contents of the Recycle Bin could be considered as the second of the three types of temporary files that are held on your system's hard disk. The Recycle Bin was first introduced in Windows 95 and, even though that was 12 years ago, the majority of Windows users still do not realise that the free space on your hard disk will not increase until the Recycle Bin is emptied. 4. To see the contents of the Recycle Bin, simply double-click the icon that can be found on your desktop or in the My Computer or Windows Explorer screens. 5. In the Recycle Bin screen, select 'View' > 'Details' on the menu bar and you will then see a column showing the date that each of the files in the Recycle Bin were "deleted" (or, at least, moved to the Recycle Bin). Clicking on the 'Date Deleted' column header will sort all of the files into order of date and time when they were moved to the Recycle Bin as shown in Figure 3. Figure 3. You will see the oldest files at the top of the list and, at the bottom of the list, the files that we have just moved from the Windows temporary files folder in step 3 of this article. If you are happy to delete all of the contents of the Recycle Bin permanently then click 'File' > 'Empty Recycle Bin' on the menu bar. All of the space that those files were occupying has now been cleared and so there is now more room on your hard disk for saving new files or installing new applications and updates. Have you ever felt that your Internet connection is getting slower than it used to be? Have you dismissed it, thinking that it must be your imagination, yet you still have that niggling feeling in the back of your mind that it used to be faster? Well, in a way, you could be right. It's probably not your actual Internet connection that has slowed down but your web browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer could be struggling to display web pages more than it used to. The cause of this is a build up of the third of the three different types of temporary files - temporary Internet files. Internet Explorer has a clever way of trying to reduce the amount of time that it takes for web pages to display (note: other web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox probably have similar features but, as Internet Explorer is the most popular, this is the one that we will discuss). When you view a web page for the first time, Internet Explorer has to download the text in the page - a quick and easy task for it to do - and also all of the graphics on the page, which can be time-consuming. Web graphics are often broken down into lots of very small component images, which increases the download time even more. Even an apparently simple square could be made up of four images for the corners and another four images for the top, bottom and side bars, meaning that Internet Explorer has to retrieve eight images from the web site before the square can be displayed on the screen. Therefore, to make this process significantly quicker the next time that you view the same web page, Internet Explorer saves a local copy of all of those small images on your hard disk in an area that is often referred to as the temporary Internet files "cache". The idea of the cache is that Internet Explorer will read the HTML code in a web page and find out which images it needs to download. It will then check whether it already has a copy of those images in the cache on the hard disk. If it can retrieve them from the hard disk, it will not need to download them again from the Internet and, theoretically, this should make it quicker to display the web page. That was a great idea when it was introduced in earlier versions of Internet Explorer, around the time of Windows 95 when almost all of us were using 56k dial-up modem connections for the Internet. Dial-up was so slow that it was very likely to be quicker to retrieve those images from the hard disk. However, now that most Internet users are on broadband / ADSL / DSL connections, that benefit is much less significant. Furthermore, when the temporary Internet files cache on the hard disk contains lots of images, it could take Internet Explorer more time to search through the long list for the required images than it would to simply retrieve the images from the web site again. Let's look at how to clear the cache on the most common operating system and web browser combination, which is Windows XP with Internet Explorer 6. 6. Go to the Start Menu and select 'Run...'. At the 'Open:' prompt, type inetcpl.cpl and click 'OK' (see Figure 4). Figure 4. 7. When the Internet Properties screen opens, click the 'Delete Files' button on the General tab (see Figure 5). Put a check in the box labelled 'Delete all offline content' and click 'OK'. If this takes less than a second or two to complete, then your PC was not particularly affected by this particular issue. If it took 5-10 seconds, then it was worth doing. If you had to sit and wait a while, then you should definitely notice a performance improvement now! Figure 5. Click OK to exit the Internet Properties screen. I hope that you found this second part of our series on improving PC performance useful. Next week's article will show you how to reduce hard disk fragmentation, which occurs when lots of hard disk files are created, changed or deleted. It's a little complicated to explain exactly what fragmentation is and how it occurs but it is easy to show you how to rectify it in order to improve performance! Nathan Forrest - Future Systems (Sussex) http://www.futuresystems-sussex.co.uk This article may not be copied or distributed in part or in full from this site and is copyright D24 Media Limited.

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