Speeding up your system

Do you have the need for speed? Our computers are our one-seated sports cars that take us on our travels through the cyber autobahn that you call the World Wide Web. There are some measures that you can take to ensure that our systems continue to make internet traveling and computer operation one of speedy downloads and fast processing.

The first thing that you must do is free up some space by deleting all the “Temporary Files”, to include “Temporary Internet Files”. In a Windows operating system, you delete the computers’ “Temporary Files” by double clicking the “My Computer” icon on the desktop. Next, you double click the “ C Drive “ icon. This should open another window filled with icons shaped like folders. You want to double click the one labeled “temp”. Once the temp folder is open, you want to click the “Edit” option located in the upper left corner of the window. You then want to click the “Select All” option. This option saves you the time of selecting each file in this folder in succession. Next, you click the “File” option in the upper left of the window to the left of the “Edit” option. You then click “Delete”. You will be asked if you are sure that you want to send these files to the recycle bin? You can click the “Yes” button and then close the window. To delete the temporary internet files, you double click the start button in the lower left corner. Next, you simply take the settings option to the “Control Panel”. Once you have the “Control Panel” open, select the icon named “Internet Options”. It should open to the “General” tab. In the middle of the gray box that appears, you should see an area called “Temporary Internet Files” with two buttons. Click the one that reads “Delete Files”.

To improve your speed on the net, I would suggest upgrading to a broadband internet connection if you are using a 56k dialup modem. Your broadband options are usually a cable or dsl connection. Another option to increase your internet speed is to download memory enhancers or memory accelerators. These programs are designed to optimize your system by recovering memory from applications for you. You can find some of these programs on www.memturbo.com and www.download.com, for a nominal fee of course.

Other things that will speed up your computer are running a “scandisk” and “Disk Defrag”. Both of these are found under “System Tools” which is in “Accessories” in the “ Program” option from the start menu. Scandisk will look for bad sectors on your disk while Disk Defrag will reorganize the files on your disk. For those of you who are a little more comfortable with going under the hood, you can also add a larger hard disk or more RAM and clean power supplies and CPU fans. All of these will have your computer moving like greased lighting down the information highway.