Top 20 Tips To Keep Your System Faster

Follow these tips and you will definitely have a much faster and more reliable PC!

 1. Wallpapers: They slow your whole system down, so if you're willing to compromise, have a basic plain one instead!

2. Drivers: Update your hardware drivers as frequently as possible.  New drivers tend to increase system speed especially in the case of graphics cards, their drivers are updated by the manufacturer very frequently!

3. Minimizing: If you want to use several programs at the same time then minimize those you are not using.  This helps reduce the overload on RAM.

4. Boot Faster: The 'starting Windows 98/XP' message on startup can delay your booting for a couple of seconds.  To get rid of this message go to c:\ and find the file Msdos.sys.  Remove the Read-Only option.  Next, open it in Notepad or any other text editor.  Finally, go to the text 'Options' within the file and make the following changes: Add BootDelay=0.  To make your booting even faster, set add Logo=0 to remove the Windows logo at startup.

5. Restart only Windows: When restarting your PC, hold down Shift to only restart Windows rather than the whole system which will only take a fraction of the time.

6. Turn Off Animations:  Go to Display Settings from the Control Panel and switch to the Effects Tab. Now turn off Show Windows Content While Dragging and Smooth Edges on Screen Fonts.  This tip is also helpful with Windows XP because of the various fade/scroll effects.

7. Faster Start-Menu Access: Go to the Start menu and select Run.  Now type Regedit and hit Enter.  The Registry Editor will appear on the screen.  Now, open the folder HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop.  You should see a MenuShowDelay value.  If you don't then do the following: right click on a blank space in the right pane and select New\String.  Change the name in the new value to MenuShowDelay.  Now that we have the MenuShowDelay value, double click on it and enter 0 in the value data field.  This sets the start menu delay to 0 milliseconds.

8. Resolutions: If you are willing to do anything for faster performance from your PC, then try lowering your display resolution.  The lower it is, the faster your PC.

9. Turn off Active Desktop:  Go to your Display Properties and switch to the Web tab.  Uncheck View My Active Desktop As a Web Page.  Since the Active Desktop option under Windows 98 uses a lot of system resources, this option can have a dramatic effect on the speed of the whole system.

10. Defragment Often:  Windows 98's Defrag tool uses Application Acceleration from Intel which means that when you defragment your drive, data is physically arranged on the drive so that applications will load faster.

11. Take your PC to Bed:  Using the Advanced Power Management feature under Windows 98 gives you the option to use the sleep command.  That way, you can send your PC to sleep instead of shutting it down and then restarting it.  It's as simple as pressing a button and then pressing the same button to wake it up.  You can tell Windows after how many minutes/hours of inactivity to automatically sleep the machine in the Advanced Power Management section of the Control Panel.

12. Faster Internet Access: If you use the internet for reference and the sites you visit are rarely  updated then try the following.  In IE (the same can be done in Netscape) go to Tools, Internet Options.  Next, click on Settings... in the Temporary Internet Files  section.  Finally, select Never for the first option and double the amount of storage space to use, click OK!

13. Benchmarking: Benchmarking can be very useful when run frequently.  It can tell you how your PC's components are performing and then compare them to other machines like yours.  For example, when you overclock your PC, you want to know how much more speed you have and whether it is stable.  All this and more can be discovered using benchmarking.  An excellent piece of software for doing this job is SiSoft Sandra which can be found in the Downloads File Archive!

14. Refresh the Taskbar without restarting: If you in some way change the taskbar, either in Regedit or elsewhere, you can refresh the task bar without restarting.  Hold down Ctrl Alt Del, and double click on Explorer.  Say Yes to close Explorer, but no to closing Windows.  This will refresh the Taskbar and system tray.

15. Quick CD Eject: Instead of pushing the button on your drive, right-click your CD drive letter in My Computer and click on Eject.  This will also remove any icons that have become associated with the CD drive.

16. Start Up Programs:  Windows can be slowed down when programs run on start up.  To eliminate this, check your Start up folder.  You can access it from the start menu: Start, Programs, Start Up.  Another way to eliminate programs from loading even before Windows actually starts is by doing the following: Click on Start, then Run.  Type msconfig.  It will take quite a long time for this program to load, but when you finally see it on your screen, explore the different tabs.  They all have to do with how quickly your PC boots, so select what you want, and uncheck what you don't want!

17. Fonts: When Windows starts, it loads every single font in the Fonts folder.  Therefore, the more fonts you have, the slower the booting process.  To get rid of unwanted fonts, simply go to the Fonts folder under c:\windows and remove whatever you don't want.  Fonts that have a red letter 'A' as their icon are system fonts, so don't delete them.

18. Stretching Wallpapers:  Don't "stretch" your wallpaper in Windows 98 since it actually slows Windows down when you drag icons around on the desktop.

19. RAM Matters: If you have less than 32MB then you should seriously think of upgrading it to at least 64MB.  Windows runs much more smoothly with 64MB or higher and tends to use less hard disk space for virtual memory.

20. Partitioning: A very nice little thing you can do to boost system performance.  By partitioning your hard drive, splitting one physical drive into several logical ones, you can gain several advantages.  1. If you get a virus or you accidentally format a drive, not all will be lost.  2. By placing the swap file (Win386.swp) on a separate drive, The swap file will be less fragmented and thus, faster. 3. Place Windows on a separate drive and whenever you need to reinstall it, you rest assured that your data is safe on a separate drive.  Partitioning can be done using a few programs such as FDisk which comes with DOS.  However, FDisk formats everything on the hard disk before partitioning. Alternatively, you can use Partition Magic from Power Quest to partition your hard disk without losing your data.

 

Increase your RAM and so system speed

1). Start any application, say Word. Open some large documents.

2). Press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC to open Windows Task Manager and click Processes tab and sort the list in descending order on Mem Usage. You will notice that WINWORD.EXE will be somewhere at the top, using multiple MBs of memory.

3). Now switch to Word and simply minimize it. (Don't use the Minimize All Windows option of the task bar).

4). Now go back to the Windows Task Manager and see where WINWORD.EXE is listed. Most probably you will not find it at the top. You will typically have to scroll to the bottom of the list to find Word. Now check out the amount of RAM it is using. Surprised? The memory utilization has reduced by a huge amount.

5). Minimize each application that you are currently not working on by clicking on the Minimize button & you can increase the amount of available RAM by a substantial margin. Depending upon the number and type of applications you use together, the difference can be as much as 50 percent of extra RAM.

                In any multitasking system, minimizing an application means that it won't be utilized by the user right now. Therefore, the OS automatically makes the application use virtual memory & keeps bare minimum amounts of the code in physical RAM.

How to open office 2007 files into Office 2003

How to open office 2007 files into Office 2003

Today tip will help you to resolve the compatibility issues between the Office 2003 and Office 2007. Because all programs in office 2003 used the old file extensions for its different programs.  For example Word 2003 saved files with extension .doc, Excel 2003 with .xls and PowerPoint with .ppt. but on the other office 2007 used the new file extensions for its different programs.  For example Word 2007 saved files with extension .docx, Excel 2007 with .xlsx and PowerPoint with .pptx. Now the problem is that when you will try to open office 2007 files into office 2003 and you will not open the file due to compatibility issues between both office versions.  Microsoft provides a free compatibility pack to convert office 2007 documents to the office 2003 format. There are many third party free converter are available but here we are using Microsoft office compatibility pack.

Follow the given steps to download free Microsoft compatibility pack and install it.

To use this feature, you will need to be logged into your computer with administrative rights.

Visit the following link to download the Microsoft compatibility pack:

How to access the sharing data offline

How to access the sharing data offline

Access the shared data offline allows you to keep using your shared files, folders and software programs when disconnected from the data server. When you reconnect to your data server, all files will be synchronized to the files on the network.  

There are two types of configurations required to set the access shared folders offline available, one for data server and other for client computer. 

Configuration on Data Server.

First locate the folders that you would like to share or make new folders then share these folders so they can be accessible to any one on the network.

Now right click on that folder and click on the option "Sharing and security".

A small dialog box will appear with the title "data properties". Under the "Sharing" tab, select the check box "Share this folder on the network" under the "Network sharing and security".

Now set the share level permissions that you want to give the users on every folder. Enable cache of share folders by click on cache button (by default it will be enabled).

Configuration on Client Computer 

On the client computer, first open My Computer then click on Tools.

In Tools menu bar, click on Folder Options, a window will appear with the title Folder Options.

Under the Offline File tab, check the option Enable Offline File. Here you can choose the synchronization process "Synchronize all offline files when logging on", "Synchronize all offline files before logging off" and others.

Click on Apply button to save the settings and then Ok button to close this window.

Now sitting on the client computer, try to access the shared folder from the data server.

First Right click on the shared folder and Click on Make available offline.

To synchronizing the offline work from client computer to data server, again open My Computer then click on Tools. Click on Synchronize then click on synchronizing button. 

After that down to data server and then try to access share folders by give the UNC (Universal Naming Convention) path of data server. But it will be accessible weather the server is down or up.