In this four-part web strategy series, we'll look at smart and easy ways to organize your digital life
Now that your electronic life is organized, there's one more thing you can do to take advantage of all of the time you're saving: Make sure your computer is in good shape so that you don't waste all of that newly found spare time waiting for it to do its work.
“The truth is that your computer gets a little slower each day. It's very subtle and hard to notice, but if you think about a task you do today that you also did when you first got your computer, it's likely that the same task took much less time for the computer to complete when it was new. ” said Leslie Babel, chief executive officer of Oakville, Ont.-based computer services supplier Digitalfire Inc.
“This small and almost imperceptible daily deterioration can cost huge amounts of money,” he added. “Everyone is so busy these days that minutes count. Five minutes may not seem like much but in a five-person company, five minutes each, every day is almost 90 hours of extra work time in a year.”
The top three things you can do to improve performance may not be those that come immediately to mind, such as defragmenting the hard disk or cleaning up temporary files, according to Mr. Babel. Although these tasks can help, their importance has diminished over the years.
Instead, he said, the first thing to do is to “check running programs. Tthey slow down a computer. Do a quick check down by the clock on the right - how many icons do you have? Any more than three or four, and your computer isn't running as fast as it could.”
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t defragment your hard drive. It’s just not one of the top performance enhancers.
“Defrag only makes a big difference if you haven’t done it for a long time,” he explained. “Finding 150 running processes when there should be 80 or 90 can make a big difference.”
Those extra processes are often for a software vendor’s convenience, not yours. Many programs install processes that run all the time to speed things up when you launch the software. That’s a waste of computing resources to create the illusion that a program is faster than it really is.
In most cases, you can easily disable these processes from the main program’s options settings and improve overall performance.
“It makes no sense to slow down your computer for the entire day so that a program you use once a week can load half a second faster,” he said. “Just wait the half a second longer when you need the program and speed up your computer overall.”
The second performance killer can be antivirus software.
Mr. Babel recommended replacing what he called “bloated” antivirus that does its job, but drags the entire system’s performance down in doing so.
“A thorough test is to uninstall your antivirus and use your computer for just a few minutes. Be sure to have the disc or files to reinstall it promptly afterwards,” he said.
“If your computer is much faster without the antivirus, then you might want to reconsider the brand of antivirus you use. You'll find that they are not all made equal when it comes to how much they slow down your computer.”
Third, he suggested getting rid of the extra toolbars that breed like rabbits in your browser.
“All sorts of helpful software installs browser toolbars, some for utility and some just to advertise,” he noted. “They slow down the browsing experience by making the browser sluggish to respond.”
The quick way to do this in Internet Explorer is to go to the Advanced tab under Tools/Options and uncheck the box, “Enable third party browser extensions.” That will make all third-party toolbars go away.
However, if there’s a particular toolbar you can’t live without, you’ll need to remove the unwanted extras manually, one at a time.
At the same time, look at the other installed add-ons. Programs frequently install startup accelerators in browsers as well that may speed themselves up but cause an overall performance hit.
On the housecleaning front, there are several easy-to-use utilities that help to keep a system running well.
The Windows Disk Cleanup utility scans the hard drive for temporary files and others that can be safely removed, displays what it finds and will delete them with your approval. The Disk Defragmenter takes care of that once- or twice-a-year defrag.
To detect and remove spyware that sneaks by the installed antivirus software, Mr. Babel uses Malware Bytes, and recommends an occasional scan even if you don’t think your system has been infected.
“Most users are surprised to see spying or phishing software on their computers, not knowing how it got there,” he said.
And for that all-important backup (you do back up your files, don’t you), he suggested SyncBack.
The important thing to remember is that maintenance is not a one-time task. It has to be done regularly, like changing the oil in your car, to keep performance at its peak.
“The biggest mistake people make," Mr. Babel said, "is assuming that a computer will run at 100 per cent for as long as it runs, and then die one day.”
Special to The Globe and Mail
Other Stories can be found on the Web Strategy section of the Your Business website.
