Switching the Windows Background to black has two advantages

You may have a family photo or a scenic image as your background on your Windows desktop but did you know that you laptop experience would be vastly improved if you just changed it to pure black?

Windows has to constanly remember the pixels used for you background image, placing a full size image from a digital camera makes it redraw the background image after anything passes over it which slows things down.  The less layers Windows has to cope with the faster it can run and the less precious memory it’ll need.

Having a complex image as your desktop background can slow down your reading as well as your physical computer.  The black text and image icons used for programs and folders can get lost in the image and you can find yourself frantically searching for the icon you want to click on.  The contrast of the icons against the image is to blame for this, white on black or vice versa is the highest contrast you can ever achieve.

Tip: If you are trying to find an icon in a sea of icons then keep pressing the first letter of that icon and Windows will eventually highlight it.  If you wanted to find a folder named “Holiday Snaps” the press ‘H‘ on the keyboard for example.

If you change the background to black and decide it’s not for you then it can be quickly changed back, if you MUST use an image from a digital camera as the background try making it smaller so it fits only 50% of the screen.

Changing the background is simple, start by minimalising all your windows and then right clicking on the desktop:

Right click on the desktop and chose "Properties"

Then chose background image “none”, select black and press “Apply”:

Remove any background image and change it to pure black

That’s it, now notice how smoothly you can use Windows compared to before, you could use a very dark orage or blue if the black seems a bit depressing!  Get more shades on the “other” option in the background properties.

A quick and easy way to speed up a slow laptop is to adjust the way Windows looks and moves.  This can quickly speed up how quickly new windows and tabs load up and generally speed up the laptop in any other aspect.

Don’t worry about doing this; you won’t lose any work or make it harder to use Windows it’ll just look a little different that’s all…

Find the system icon on the control panel - the control panel will be in the start menu (where you turn the computer off)

Find the advanced settings for your computer - this may be on a tab for earlier versions of Windows

Select the performance option

Now select "adjust for best performance" and press OK

Now you’ll notice that everything have been simplified on the look of Windows and things move around and open much faster.  If you don’t quite like the (admittedly boring) look of the new performance options then perhaps you could only speed up certain aspects with the “custom” settings.

Does your desktop look something like this? You're slowing the whole system down!

It’s easy to get a bit lazy when it comes to sorting your files out on your desktop.  Over a period of times you may have images, shortcuts, folders and web-pages scattered all over the place when you switch your computer on.

Windows Desktop is like a permanently open folder and every icon on the desktop takes up vital computer memory.  This mean that having your desktop cluttered not only makes it hard to spot a specific file it also drags the general speed down of Windows Explorer.

How do you store your files neatly and efficiently?

Simple, make lots of folders!  Make a folder for your images (or use the on in your documents folder), make a folder for your music, another one for your word documents etc. etc. and throw all the files into the right folder.

If you are very lazy then you could just throw all the icons into a folder called “junk” for example!

You may want to leave the icons for your most used programs, the dustbin and your internet browser on the desktop for ease of access.

Internet Explorer is a slow and un-friendly way to browse the Internet

Are you still using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to browse the Internet?

Internet Explorer is pre-loaded onto all versions of Windows and many people never switch away from it or know an alternative even exsists!

The browser is well known to display many websites incorrectly; you will have a much better online experience with another browser (another program to read the Internet’s many webpages).

Another bad point about IE (there are many!) is the amount of computer memory it uses plus it displays new websites in whole new windows creating IE clones all over the place.

If you Google the term “IE problems” then you get an incredible 722 MILLION results!

So what browser should you use instead?  It only takes about 5-10 minutes to download and set up a brand new web-browser on your laptop so don’t be put of making the effort to do so.

Firefox is the most widely used browser on the Internet today and the best too

There is one clear winner when it comes to choosing the right surfing software; the  top Internet program called Mozilla Firefox.

It uses significantly less RAM which speeds up your laptop and it has add-ons, tabbed browsing and a zoom function if you find it hard to read small text.

Some add-ons can save you time, one add-on can control your favourite music player (such as itunes) fom the bottom of the web-browser meaning that you don’t have to switch windows to change the track or volume.

Tip: Tabbed browsing allows you to have multiple webpages on the same broswer window, press “CTRL + T” to open a new tab and “CTRL + W” to close them.  These save time by not needing to load up a new window each time you want another web-page open at the same time plus it saves on computer memory too!

Enough of me talking about Firefox, you should go and install it right now: here’s the link to the official download page

If you already have Firefox then you may want to make sure you have the latest version, version 3 is slightly quicker than version 2.  Not happy with Firefox? Try Google’s great new browser which is still currently under development called Google Chrome, it has a few bugs at the moment but may soon become the best ever browser and it’s the fastest yet.

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 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