Widescreen monitors are great for watching movies and organizing windows side by side, but much of the time all that screen space goes to waste. Even if you don’t have a huge monitor, you can still get a great benefit by adjusting the Taskbar.

Why not move the Windows taskbar to the side of the screen? This may sound crazy at first and you’ll need a few days to get used to the results, but since web pages, Word documents, and the like run top-to-bottom, the more vertical space you can give them, the easier it will be for you to read them and the better it will look.

By relocating the taskbar to the left side (or the right, if you prefer), you’re freeing up vertical space for the stuff you use every day while making smarter use of wasted horizontal space, and you may even speed up your work by doing so.

To try this, right-click an empty area of the taskbar and clear the check mark next to Lock the taskbar.

Next, left-click and hold on an empty area of the taskbar, and then drag it to the left or right side of the screen. Once you get close, you’ll see it lock in, at which point you can release the mouse button.

You can also extend the width of the taskbar by clicking and dragging the right edge to make it wider and to better see the labels for the programs which are currently running.

One easy & fast way to free up disk space is to remove unwanted programs, as mentioned in another post, which will speed up your pc. Another way to free up wasted disk space is to use the Disk Cleanup tool by following these steps:

• Open My Computer, right-click Local Disk, and then click Properties.

• On the General tab, click the Disk Cleanup button. Disk Cleanup will spend a few minutes examining your disk.

• The Disk Cleanup dialog box opens. As you can see below it shows you exactly how much space you can free up:

That’s it. Dead Easy and Fast and you should instantly see the difference.

Cheers

Amazing! Even though there is a new serious security hole in IE8, we are still being advised to upgrade asap.

No wonder really. If you sold someone a kettle 10 years ago (Windows times) and they kept coming back asking you to fix it again and again, wouldn’t you also try and persuade them to get the latest model?

Microsoft issued a warning telling people to upgrade their internet browser, after the zero-day exploit that was used to attack companies such as Google.

According to Microsoft’s security advisory: "the vulnerability exists as an invalid pointer reference within Internet Explorer. It is possible under certain conditions for the invalid pointer to be accessed after an object is deleted. In a specially-crafted attack, in attempting to access a freed object, Internet Explorer can be caused to allow remote code execution."

In other words, a nasty net person could get remote control of your computer. If you’re anything like me, you wonder how the hell that can happen in reality – But, believe me. I’ve seen it done and it’s scary stuff

The same issue exists also in IE7, so regardless of what version you have you should make sure you have the latest updates and patches. Simply go to Microsoft’s homepage and get them as soon as you can.

Further advice from Microsoft is to run the browser in Protected Mode and ensure users aren’t running with administrator privileges.

My advice would be to ditch IE (if you haven’t already, where have you been these last 5 years??) and switch to Firefox. It’s FREE, much more user friendly and you can get hundreds of different official (safe) add-ons to make it do almost anything you want.  As soon as I get it to make me a cup of tea three times a day as well, I’ll let you all know.

Cheers

Windows 7 Vs Windows XP/Vista

Microsoft claims that Windows 7 is a lot faster than Vista or XP, but is it really so? There are so many factors to getting a faster performance pc, especially considering hardware and the programs you run, but there are some simple tweaks you can use to get a better performance.

Two quick examples:

Cheers
Paul

A quick and easy way to make your Windows XP computer start faster.

Here’s How:

• Find the ‘My Computer’ icon on your desktop and Right Click on it.

• Click on ‘Properties’ from the menu box.

• Click on the ‘Advanced’ tab on the top right side.

• Click ‘Settings’ under the lower ‘Startup and Recovery’ section.

• Change the time from it’s default (normally 30 secs) to 5-8 secs. Or whatever time you prefer.

• Click OK.

• Click OK again.

That’s It. Job Done – your computer will now start a lot faster than before.

Cheers

Disconnect Unused Network Drives

If you’ve ever used a computer on a network, you probably found it useful to share files and folders between the computers using a mapped network drive. Network drives allow one computer to read and write files to another computer’s hard disk as if it were directly connected. I use network drives a lot and discovered that on some of my computers, they were the biggest source of slowness.

The problem with network drives is that Windows XP will attempt to connect to the network drives when Windows starts. If the remote computers don’t immediately respond then Windows will patiently wait and wait and wait. Also you may find that some programs attempt to connect to these network drives when you browse for files and folders. If you’ve ever tried to open a file and had to wait several seconds (or minutes), it’s probably because the program was trying to establish a network connection — even if the file you are opening is really on your local computer.

1. Open My Computer (found on your desktop).

2. On the Tools menu, click Disconnect Network Drive.

3. Select the undesired network drive(s) and then click OK.

After I disconnected three network drives from my computer, it started on average about 30% faster than before.

Hope it helps.

Speed PC Up Quick Tip List

Here is my quick list of things you can try to speed up the start up process of your pc if you are frustrated with your slow windows computer.

1. Detecting & removing viruses and cleaning your registry – this is probably the most important thing you can do! Getting rid of viruses and repairing broken registry files can help in many ways including faster start times. Try some of the best free and safe programs here.

2. Harddisk maintenance – start by defragmenting the hard disk. This makes your computer access the data on the disk faster as it is arranged much closed together. When your harddisk is fragmented, data is stored in many areas and this means it has to be searched for and found before being used. You can use Windows’ own "Disk Defragmenter" option in the System Tools or you can try a program which I use called UlitmateDefrag. Also, harddisks can over time develop bad sectors and this can cause slow access or even lost data, therefore it’s a good idea to scan for them and repair them regularly – again using Windows’ own ‘Tools’ which can be found when you Right Click on your C: drive and select ‘Properties’.

3. Install more RAM for the cheapest way to instantly speed up your pc. Memory is so cheap nowadays that this is the best start you can make to improving pc performance. .

4. Remove unwanted start up programs – there will probably be several programs that automatically are set to load up when the computer boots. Removing unwanted ones can seriously speed up your machine.

This is just a quick check list. For more help, check the blog for other helpful tips and tricks.

Cheers

Set a System Restore Point Before Making Any Major Changes to Your PC.

Before you make any changes to your PC, I always advise people to set a system restore point so that if something should go wrong or you don’t like the changes you made, you can easily set the computer back to how it was before you changed anything. It’s very simple to do and can save you many hours of frustration and maybe even money, too.

Here’s How:

• Click on the Windows ‘Start’ button – bottom left corner of your screen.

• Select ‘Help and Support’ from the menu list.

• Select ‘Undo changes to your computer with System Restore‘ which you should see in the Tasks section on the right.

• On the next window, select ‘Create a Restore point’ and click Next.

• Give it a name – anything you want, but I always use something like ‘Pre Registry Changes’ or similiar depending on what I am changing. That way if you get distracted and have to come back to it later, you know exactly what you did.

• Click ‘Create’ and it is automatically given a time and date stamp and your restore point is created & ready.

• That’s It.

If you ever need to use one of your restore points, follow the same steps to get to the Help & Support section and use the restore point menu. It’s that simple.