PC Maintenance Tips Thread

[Krow Ames]

Well, it was coming eventually. I should have started this sooner.

In this thread, post all of your proven tricks to improve PC performance. To get us started, I'll post the first one.

KEEP IT DUSTED! Get a can of compressed air or something and keep dust out of your tower. Dust will insulate parts, like heatsinks, and they will no longer dissipate heat to the capacity they were designed.

If you've just turned your PC off to dust, the parts will still be kinda hot. To avoid ruining something, either let it cool off, or avoid tilting your can of duster too far so that the cold liquid from the bottom doesn't spray out onto a hot part (I'm totally at a loss for what that crap is).

[Cyphre Iredell]

Yes O_O

Do not touch after turning off. Heatsink HOT :(

[Nivanglus Aya]

Yeah I got toasted by the heatsink about a week ago... Do not touch. Like..ever.

A few tips from me:

CCleaner - Epic Program to do like..so much PC Clean up crap.

RnR - Reformat and Reinstall. I do it every 6 months because I've got 2terabytes of HD Space to back all of my programs up. VERY useful if you find slowdowns, and keeps those HDs clean and lets em live for a while longer

Gay & Furry Porn - Delete it.

Nanao Related Material - Delete it before it sets root in your PC and the FBI Kicks your door down Mr Pedo.

PC Checkups - Perodically do CPU and Ram tests on your set up to test if you have any bugs or errors in them, If they're fixable or serious.

GPU - KEEP IT CLEAN. Or it'll burn out rather fast.

Maxtor HDs - Don't use them

[Krow Ames]

:D Good stuff, keep it rollin'!

[Inoue Katsu]

1. Don't use IE .. Use FireFox with noscript.

2. Know whats physically in your computer! This will make asking for help much easier when there's something wrong.

3. Have a CD/USB stick with all the drivers you'll need before you can get on the internet! There's nothing worse then having to format and not able to get the latest drivers from the net .. this will force you to use old drivers from the original CD's and litter your brand shiny new install right from the start. (edit: only network drivers will suffice probably .. Get latest version of everything else from the net.)

4. Have some form of bootable recovery CD/USB device so you can get at your files in case windows stops working. Linux live cd's work good for this.

5. Turn off system restore .. it doesn't work and wastes space.

6. See point 5 but replace system restore with indexing services.

7. When using a 32Bit OS (XP/Vista32) with 4Gb ram, you will only have the amount of ram minus the amount of video memory on your graphics card available! Ie. with a 1gb video card you will have 3gb of ram in windows.

8. Vista keys which came with a pre-installed 32Bit Vista keys work on 64bit Vista.

9. Downloading windows media when you have a legal OEM key does not make your install illegal.

10. See point 1.

11. Defrag! It works .. Although 3rd party apps usually work better then Microsoft defrag. O&O is a good one but there are a few freeware apps as well.

12. http://www.google.com

13. Clean up windows patch backups every now and then .. these are usually blue and with a $ in the windows folder. Ex: $NtUninstallKB937894$

14. Know whats on your drive! Try and organise installations and keep games out of the program files folder. This will only mess things up further.

15. Have a virusscanner, you don't *need* to have it active if you followed point 1, just right click scan things you download from unknown sources (torrents .....)

16. There is no such thing as 'cleaning' your pc when you get a trojan or virus. Both are capable of hiding in much more places and different forms then your virus scanner is able to scan .. they also tend to disable your virus scanner in such a way that it still looks like its working .. but its not. Most trojans will install a whole array of other software as well. Format and don't do it again!

17. Don't re-install windows without formatting your C, else windows will be slow right from the get go.

18. When installing vista, only have 1 HD hooked up .. it will probably screw everything up with more then 1 physical disk.

19. see point 1..

20. 'invalid command or file name' does not mean your computer thinks you're handicapped in any way ..

21. PEBKAC!

22. If you don't get point 21, see point 12..

23. Don't install everything you can get your hands on and you can delay Nirv's RnR by at least half a year .. my windows has been running for a year (from when i originally put it together) and is still running just fine.

24. Do NOT under any circumstance install Vista when you have a Creative sound card! It will make you cry .. If you have the XFI, keep checking their forums for reports on people actually managing to get it to work.

25. Occasionally check your running processes for odd names .. see point 12 when you see something you don't know what it is.

26. Use 'msconfig' to see all the programs which get started during boot.

27. See point 1.

28. Never ever ever ever ever ever hook your computer up *directly* to the internet! Always use a NAT router of some sorts! It takes about 10-15 seconds for an unpatched windows to get infected when you hook it up.

29. When you have a lot of important files, invest in either a NAS with raid1 or onboard/pci raid card. This will save you a lot of drama should something break.

30. When you make your own computer, make sure there's no wire stuck in the video card fan ..

31. ... To be continued .. maybe

[Inoue Katsu]

Krow Ames wrote:

To avoid ruining something, either let it cool off, or avoid tilting your can of duster too far so that the cold liquid from the bottom doesn't spray out onto a hot part (I'm totally at a loss for what that crap is).

Its liquid co2 and its the most amazing office play thing you can get your hands on .. not counting explosives :P

You can freeze peoples pens, make air pressure weapons out of glue sticks and make time bombs out of zip lock bags

[Krow Ames]

Inoue Katsu wrote:

Krow Ames wrote:

To avoid ruining something, either let it cool off, or avoid tilting your can of duster too far so that the cold liquid from the bottom doesn't spray out onto a hot part (I'm totally at a loss for what that crap is).

Its liquid co2 and its the most amazing office play thing you can get your hands on .. not counting explosives :P

You can freeze peoples pens, make air pressure weapons out of glue sticks and make time bombs out of zip lock bags

You're scary, Inoue.

[Krow Ames]

Yeah, because of the heat difference. It puts too much stress on the glass. You could do it with a spray bottle of water, though. :D As long as the water has a significantly lower temperature than the glass of the bulb.

[Rei Kuhr]

Under no circumstances pee on your computer. Just saying.

[Vladimus Nikolaidis]

Running a magnet all over the inside of your computer can significantly improve performance in all aspects. Pop the cover, run a magnet over everything you see several times, put the cover back on and BAM you're done. The more powerful the

magnet, the better your performance gains will be. I recommend those really heavy

duty ones they use in garages and workshops.

[Cygna]

Vladimus Nikolaidis wrote:

Running a magnet all over the inside of your computer can significantly improve performance in all aspects. Pop the cover, run a magnet over everything you see several times, put the cover back on and BAM you're done. The more powerful the

magnet, the better your performance gains will be. I recommend those really heavy

duty ones they use in garages and workshops.

Vladimus speaks of an "angelic inverse computer magnet" which can only be obtained from the planet X in sector 5 of the Betelgeuse system. AkA you will never find that magnet.

[Trevor Russell]

Vladimus Nikolaidis wrote:

Running a magnet all over the inside of your computer can significantly improve performance in all aspects. Pop the cover, run a magnet over everything you see several times, put the cover back on and BAM you're done. The more powerful the

magnet, the better your performance gains will be. I recommend those really heavy

duty ones they use in garages and workshops.

BAD ADVICE. MY DESKTOP IS NO MORE! I HATE YOU VLADIMUS!!!

[Cygna]

Adding onto Inoue's deal:

32) When installing earlier copies of Windows Vista x64 Ultimate (maybe prior SP1), you can only have 1 GB or less RAM installed in the system to actually successfully install Vista OEM (Basically one stick of RAM). If you have more you'll get a BSOD after initial bios reboot. If you've already installed Vista with all your RAM sticks in, you're Vista install isn't broken. Just turn off, remove all but one stick of RAM, and restart. After you finish the installation of Vista x64 Ultimate, you can download a patch for all your ram to work or install SP1. Plug in the rest of your RAM, restart, and you should be good to go.

33) Firetune for Firefox. Best little program evar! (It's basically Inoue's #1 "firefox no-script" except it's not do-it-yourself but rather for the n00b ). I made it a direct link to the official download.

34) Forget Real Media Player. Download Real Alternative. (If you ever actually need to play a real media video/audio file.. they are getting less and less over the years)

35) CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack)

36) Windows Media Player 10/11 takes a lot of memory to run (and slows your computer down). Use WinAMP or some other cut-the-fat media player. CCCP comes with a modded and rescripted Windows Media Player Basic that is no-fat and will run just about ANY filetype or codec. See 35.

37) Never overclock your RAM unless you really, really know what you're doing. Most of the time it doesn't make a difference and it may ruin your sticks.

38) If you don't care about how Windows looks, right click My Computer, Properties, Advanced, Performance, Settings Button, and put it to adjust for best performance.You'll get a minute/trivial speed increase in higher-end computers, but it's quicker to navigate windows and it helps a lot for older computers.

39) msconfig works well for controlling unwanted startup programs.

40) If you don't know your system hardware/specs, Start -> Run -> dxdiag

41) Vista Ultimate Extra "Dreamscene" greatly inhibits a computers performance. Not recommended. (it apparently turns off if playing a game, but it's glitchy, so you return to the desktop and it doesn't start up again, or vista will crash).

42) When torrenting, utorrent is the current (free-ware) most lightweight client.

Does anyone know of an alternative for iTunes or Quicktime? I ABSOLUTELY HATE downloading these but I know of no adequate alternative to either.

[Krow Ames]

Moy Loon wrote:

Krow Ames wrote:

Yeah, because of the heat difference. It puts too much stress on the glass. You could do it with a spray bottle of water, though. :D As long as the water has a significantly lower temperature than the glass of the bulb.

yeah, my science teacher showed me about that...haha, aswell as lots of strange tricks to do with coffee creamer power, and how to make them into fireballs...

I learned it from MacGuyver

[Inoue Katsu]

32. TRY first when you have 4gb ram and are trying to install vista64 .. Its chipset specific and I didn't have the issue myself, only thing which made me go back to XP was the XFI.

[Cygna]

Aha, my chipset is an nForce 680i for anyone's interest.

43. It's been said before, but I'll say it again: Forget dealing with removing trojans or viruses, they will hardly ever be successfully removed without permanent and harmful damage to your software. The best way of dealing with them is formatting your infected drive(s), reinstalling Windows, and practicing safe downloading in the future (see Inoue's point 15).