Many clients of ours call us complaining that their laptop or desktop  is running very slow or sluggish.  The computer may appear to ”lock up” or just does not seem to be running at peak performance as it once did when they first bought it.  And as more time goes by the problem seems to get worse.  What they are all experiencing is a degradation in the perfomance of their computer.  Over the course of time junk such as cookies, temp files, history files, etc. accumulate onto the hard drive which tends to slow the computer system down when you need to access information on the drive.  In addition, installing software programs after you first buy your computer system has a profound negative effect on the system performance as vital memory is used up during the start-up of windows operating system to run these software programs. Also what happens over time is the hard drive tends to get fragmented (parts of a file gets spread out to different areas of the hard drive making it take longer to access information).  This also will slow your system down considerably.

What we do is to apply a tune-up and clean-up to correct the above issues.  This will allow your system to run back at peak performance as it once did when you first bought your computer system.  The tune-up includes defragmentation, removing unnecessary start-up files during the boot process of windows, and disabling any services you don’t use.  The clean-up requires us to run a hard drive scan to remove any “junk” files and registry clutter that may have accumulated over time.

In general, tune-ups and clean-ups should be maintained at least once a year but we recommend at least every 6 months to keep your computer system running at peak performance.  As time goes by and if your computer system is well maintained as we recommend, the system will respond faster and more efficiently to your requests and you will enjoy a more happy computing experience with it.

It will never happen to me!  That is what we always hear from our clients.  The dreaded “hard-drive failure” does indeed happen quite often and when you least expect it.  Careful planning and good maintenance practices is a must for every computer system to help circumvent such a catastrophe.  If you boot up your computer system and and you receive an error message stating that your “operating system is not found” or you receive a “data read error” on your monitor, you may very weill have a failing hard drive.  Another common sign of a failing hard drive is if you hear clicking noises originating from the drive itself.  Still another common symptom of a failing hard drive is when you get a blue screen suddenly appear on your screen with an error message.  All these signs should  be of great concern and careful planning ahead can alleviate the headaches associated with failing hard drives.

There are various computer data backup software programs available on the market to help you backup your important files. Most will allow you to create backups on CD’s, DVD’s, external hard drive, or even a USB thumb/ flash drive .  Norton Ghost is a backup program you could use or True Image by Acronis. The latter is the one we use at our offices and highly recommend. We like it the most and it is very reliable.  It runs on all current windows operating systems and with this program you have the ability to to make an exact duplicate or “image” of your entire partition or you can do scheduled or inremental backups of single or groups of files. The entire partition can then be restored or individual files can be restored at a later date if needed.

When you suspect a hard drive failure or crash has occurred its always best to immediately have the hard drive diagnosed by a trained certified computer technician.  Sometimes if caught early enough, you can get most or all of your data saved off the drive before any further damage.  Its always best to first try a local computer repair shop to try and retrieve your hard drive data as there are also data recovery companies that may be able to retrieve your data from expired hard drives but they typically will charge much higher fees.

So please make sure you give backing up your important files strong consideration. It does not take long to set up a backup program and believe me it will save you a lot of heartaches and headaches if your hard drive crashes or goes out on you.

Computer memory is a very importanthardware component that should not be overlooked when purchasing a computer system.  With low or inadequate memory, your system may run very slowly or even lock up from time to time.  Running multiple programs at the same time can lead to sluggish systems as the memory resouces are used up to run the programs which leaves litte for reserve.  Its always best to have too much memory than not enough in your computer system.

Requirements for memory are quite different depending on the operating system you are running.  Years ago, Windows 98  only needed 64K to 128k memory for the system to run at peak effeciently.  That changed dramattically when windows xp  came out.  The recommended amount of memory for the xp operating is 512k with 1GB RAM being optimal.   Then new windows Vista operating system has memory requirements that are considerably higher than XP’s simply because there is so much more to Vista than XP. There are far many more background tasks to take care of, a more complex UI, and a code base that’s significantly larger than that of Windows XP. All of these items require memory, and therefore when you boot up a Vista machine with 512MB of memory, almost all of it is already being used.

Microsoft and software makers in general notoriously understate the minimum system memory requirements. So, for example, if you try and run a Windows Vista system with 512MB of memory, you should know right away that this will slow the system down. Although Vista will do its best to disable background tasks and neat effects to make using your computer less painful with 512MB, we simply wouldn’t recommend it. You can get by running a single application, such as IE7 or Outlook, but multitasking is out of the question.

Although Windows XP is more tolerable with 512MB, 1-2 GB should really be the minimum for any Vista machine and not just those that are Premium certified. Vista uses a lot more memory and in turn, you’ll need quite a bit more memory to get a similar experience to what you had under XP.
As applications and usage models get more demanding, and as memory prices drop, the move to 2GB or even 3GB of memory makes more sense for windows vista systems.