A hot room or direct sunlight will slow the inner working of laptops down

Did you know that NASA scientists put some of thier computers in liquid nitrogen so they can run them uber-fast?!

The cooler a computer is, the better it runs.  A laptop already gets mightily hot inside with all it’s power hungry components, these get cooled by lots of little fans and air racks called “heat sinks”.  If the air being drawn into the laptop is already hot then it’s not going to work half as good is it?

If a laptop gets too hot then it starts using less power to product less heat from the electricity; this unfortunately means a big slow down for all programs and operations.

Get your laptop out of direct sunlight and keep it in a well ventilated, cool room.

If you cannot achieve this environment then one option is sticking a big fan just above the laptop.  Make sure you don’t point the fan directly at the laptop or you may ruin the flow of air inside, we just want the wasted hot vented air to be blown away.

Music visualisation may look cool but it drags down other programs

Your favorite music player may be constantly blasting out your favourite radio station and lovingly made play lists but did you know it can be a big drain on your laptop if it’s set up wrong?

Visualisations (patterns made from music) are a big factor in “memory hogging”, the music program can bully other programs out of using the computer’s memory vital to make it all work quickly.  You can fix this by turning it off in the “options” or “preferences” tab at the top and finding the “Visual” options.

But wait, what music player are you using?

Apple Mac’s music player iTunes had a big big problem in version 7 of the program where it would take around 600MB out of the free memory.  Laptops with 1024MB of total memory literally shut themselves down once the program kicked into life; others just went incredibly sluggish.  If you have no special settings on your iTunes (a setup iPod, podcasts etc.) then you can grab version 6 of it by visiting oldversion.com which is a very handy site with older versions of programs on it.

There are lots of great music players out there so why not give them a go? If you don’t like the way they work then go to the start menu and un-install them, WinAmp is the fastest one I’d recommend currently and iTunes is really easy to use.

Do you really need an analoge clock when you have a digital one in the bottom right corner? What's with the random image too?

Another thing that slows your system down are the gadgets that appear when you start Windows Vista for the first time.  You may like them and a lot of newer computers that come pre-loaded with Vista can easily cope with the demands on the system from these widgets.  If you seriously don’t need two clocks on the screen or have to be up-to the minute on the lasted news from your favorite RSS feed then get rid the whole widgets bar and quicken things up slightly:

Right click on the gadgets bar and then click "Properties"

Tell the sidebar never to appear again when you start up Windows Vista

As mentioned in a previous post you can stop lots of programs starting up with Windows so your computer loads up quickly but what if you cannot stop these programs from starting?

Even worse a malware program (malicious program that harvests your data) could be present every time your laptop loads up and you may never know about it!

Windows have made a handy little program called “Autoruns” which checks to see which programs load when you start Vista or XP – start by downloading it here from Microsoft:

Open the zip you downloaded and open it (I used WinRAR), run the program "autoruns.exe" and agree its terms

Microsoft's Autoruns Tool for stopping unwanted programs starting up in Windows

WARNING – do not touch anything you don’t understand on Autoruns it has every little cog that runs the Windows environment and all of your internet protocol, mouse settings etc!

The only boxes you can un-tick safely are the ones at the top with little icons next to them if you don’t know what the program does then you can either Google it’s program name (example: “ehTray.exe”) and see what type of program it is or leave it well alone!

In the example above I’ve spotted the free office program “OpenOffice” pre-loading itself (when I never asked it to) so that can be stopped, also a webcam chat thingy from Dell is pre-loading itself so that must be killed and “Microsoft’s Media Center” is taking up my memory for no reason so I’ll kill that too.  Click the disk icon and save the changes you made to a handy place on your computer to save the settings.

You may be unfortunate enough to find some strange looking/named programs near the top of Autoruns and these could well be malware or trojan viruses!! Again Google the names of anything suspicious and delete them if they turn out to be harmful when you find out about them online; you may save yourself credit card fraud or worse!

Don't use the battery if you don't need to

A very quick tip here for your laptop – don’t run it off the battery at all if you can help it.

If you run your laptop of the mains then you’ll keep your battery as good as new as it never really needs to use it.
Keep running the laptop off the battery power then you’ll notice it’s charge deteriorates over time until it can only last two minutes before dying on you!

If you buy a laptop rest then most have a little handy hole to shove the power converter in and all you have to do is locate the nearest plug.  I know a laptop should be mobile but most of the time people just use it in the very same spot so why not look after it a little?!

Did you know your laptop can run in different power modes?

You can run your laptop efficiently which dims the screen and never taxes the processor too hard to save battery life.  This is great if you are travelling on the train for example and cannot plug your laptop in, you may find the computer will stay alive another hour or two with this setting!

If you have the laptop running off the mains then why skimp on this power-saving mode?  Unless the battery is in great need of a recharge you should tell Windows to run the whole system as fast as possible and make your screen as bright as you want it!  Loading times for programs will half and you’ll see streaming video like from YouTube run without any annoying jitter.

So how do you change these settings?  Most laptop makers show a little plug & battery icon in the bottom right icon tray, if you cannot see it then click the little arrow to see all the icons present:

Reveal the hidden icons in the icon tray if you cannot see the battery image

Click the left mouse button once on the battery icon and chose the correct setting

Remember to switch the power mode settings back to “power saver” mode when you’re not running from the mains or you’ll damage the battery’s longevity

Don't start up loads of program at once

When you switch your laptop on how long do you have to wait until you can properly use it?  Even if you do stop a lot of programs from starting up with Windows things can be painfully slow when you computer is getting upto speed.

Behind the scenes lots and lots of little programs run themselves when you start Windows from boot up plus your internet card is trying to connect to the internet and your anti-virus may be updating itself.

If you try and open your browser, music player, email client etc. whilst the computer is still starting up then expect a computer traffic jam!

This bottle neck effect will jam up the processor as it has 40 or so jobs to do at once already.  If you keep making it run extra programs then it’ll do each job bit by bit and the overall time it takes is a lot longer that if they all ran separately.

The best thing to do is be patient, go and make yourself a cup of tea or do some stretches whilst your laptop wakes up from it’s slumber!

Want to time how long it takes to get upto speed with your laptop?  Try pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL at any time and you’ll bring you the task manager:

You can see on the “Performance” tab what percentage of your processor is being used every second.  When it gets to a steady 1 – 5% usage then you can open up other programs and avoid any bottle necking.  Another good indicator of when your computer is not extremely busy with programs is when the hard drive stops making that annoying ticky sound.  When new SSD technology comes out for hard drives this problem will be a thing of the past, bring on the new technology!

P.S. You can use the task manager to see what “Processes” are taking up the most memory and processor power if Windows is being consistantly slow

Set your mouse pointer to move quicker

When you use your mouse do you ever bash it into your laptop trying to reach the icon you want to click on?
Even worse do you have to pick up the mouse to continue moving the pointer!?!

If you want to be quick with a computer then it’s time to take off the safety wheels and make your mouse move a lot quicker.

When you have a fast mouse you’ll be able to whiz from file to file and quickly hit what you’re after, it may only save you a few seconds at a time but in the long run you’ll be saving hours or wrist aching mouse movement.

To change your mouse settings go on the start menu (bottom left windows icon) and then go to the control panel.  In here you’ll spot the “mouse” icon, double click it to open the “mouse properties”.
N.B. You may find this is the “Hardware and Sound” section.

You can always slow down the mouse speed again if it's too fast for you to use

Displaying things like pointer trails will only be useful if you have bad eye-sight, these pointer tricks only slow down the system.  Coincidently if you do have bad eye-sight then make sure you use the zoom function on firefox and you can make the pointer bigger in the “Pointers” tab within the mouse properties.