Tech Help Site

Fishing the net is some articles of interest I have found whilst trawling newsletters and internet sites. Here you go:

Tips for Better Portraits

5 tips for taking better portrait photos with your digital camera

A brief history of Computers as told via TV ads

If you have used computers for a while you will recognize some of these ads and the machines in them. Just goes to show how good Apple usually is at it’s marketing.

Bit of trivia – as a teenager I owned both a Tandy TRS80 and a Commodore 64. The C64 was an excellent machine for playing games – I still remember some

Backup Your Mozilla Profiles

For users of Firefox, Thunderbird, Flock and even (god forbid) SeaMonkey.

Did you know that all the customizations, cookies, bookmarks, and plug-ins you add to your programs can be backed up? You can save them in case of a problem, copy them to another PC and so on. This link gives you a howto tutorial using MozBackup

Ultimate Windows Tweaker – Tweak UI For Windows Vista

Ultimate Windows Tweaker is a Tweak UI Utility for tweaking and optimising Windows Vista. It is modelled after the TweakUI program that was an ‘unofficial’ Microsoft product available for Win XP but never released for Vista. The Win XP version is available here.

Details of Tweaks :

The tweaks are classified under seven categories and can be accessed through a common interface, just like your Windows Vista Control Panel.
1) Personalization,
2) User Accounts & UAC,
3) System & Performance,
4) Security,
5) Internet Explorer (IE7 / IE8)
6) Network Optimization
7) Additional Options

 

 

The Complete Guide To Speeding Up Your PC’s Startup

A good summary of tips from Lifehacker on how to make your PC start faster. Follow the tips to speed things up. You can also investigate switching off some of the services on your  PC, although this is probably for more advanced users. I have personally tried the startup Delayer program they recommend and pretty quickly stopped using it – your mileage may vary

28 Powerful Photoshop Lighting Effects

Some tricks and tips for adding fancy effects to your pics using Photoshop or similar editing programs

Learn Photoshop in One Week

Interested in all this digital photography editing and manipulation but have never used Photoshop? Well here is a beginners tutorial that may suit you

 

There you go – that’s a few tidbits to keep you reading over the weekend

I just read this article at LifeHacker.com It’s about the myths around what works and what doesn’t  work when trying to speed up Windows. You should check it out

http://lifehacker.com/5033518/debunking-common-windows-performance-tweaking-myths

Windows XP and Vista do a fair job of self maintenance, etc. A lot of these techniques originated back in the Win 95 & 98 days when users could squeeze a little more performance out of Windows with a few behind the scenes tricks. They simply don’t work much anymore.

Now I don’t agree with everything in the article. Here’s my thoughts:

Disabling QoS to Free Up 20% of Bandwidth

Yep – this has little to no effect for most people. Your connection rarely runs at 100%

Clean, Defrag and Boost Your RAM With SnakeOil Memory Optimizer

I absolutely agree. In every case I have seen these programs used they have made the situation worse not better. I think they may have had a use back in Windows 95 but even by Windows 98 they were useless

Cleaning the Registry Improves Performance

I disagree with this one. I think a good registry cleaner can make a noticeable difference. Just make sure you use a reputable program that makes registry back-ups. For a free product I find CCleaner very good.

Disabling Services to Speed Up the Computer

I disagree. Some services can be disabled and DO make a difference. Some programs install their services that don’t offer much functionality and can be disabled. For example iTunes installs a number of services including 1 to check for software updates, 1 to launch iTunes when you plug in your iPod, 1 to communicate across a network with iPods and iPhones and others. You don’t need all these processes running in the background and if you have a lot of unnecessary ones it will slow you down. So check out your running processes and carefully and selectively disable the ones you don’t need.

Refer this site for detailed information on each service BlackViper.com

OK so now we know how NOT to speed up our PC. Tomorrow I will send you my suggestions on what you can do that WILL speed up your PC.

If anyone has any suggestions or ideas please email me or leave them in the comments.