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Written by Administrator
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Friday, 08 June 2007 00:00 |
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Enable ClearType Effect Windows XP comes with a very nice feature called Clear Type font smoothing effect. You will see a little black border on the fonts, what it does is blends the colours at the edges of type on screen, causing the letters to appear less distorted. While it is primarily intended to increase text quality for users of laptops and desktop PCs with LCD (flat panel) screens, it is worth experimenting with even if you use a traditional Cathodic Ray Tube commonly known as CRT monitor. Not always ClearType settings will improve quality on a CRT Monitor. If you use a flat screen or a laptop, you should definitely enable Cleartype as this will increase the text quality considerably. To activate ClearType: Go to the control panel -> display and click on the appearance tab. Click the effects button. Ensure that the check the box "use the following method to smooth the edges of screen fonts" is selected and change the drop down box to ClearType, press OK and you are done. 
Once you have enabled cleartype, you can go to the Microsoft website to fine-tune your ClearType settings. Click here. |
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Last Updated on Friday, 08 June 2007 19:30 |
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Written by Rafael
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Thursday, 07 June 2007 00:00 |
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This week I got my hands on a computer of a very nice couple that really takes care of their system, they knew of almost all the tools that I regularly use to clean up really messed up systems, but the computer was still extremely slow for a Pentium 4 3.0 GHZ. We changed the motherboard and the processor to a dual core PD 935 3.2 GHZ and we noticed that the system was still really slow. At that point I suggested Diskeeper 2007 in order to defragment the hard drive and keep it defragmented at all times. Bingo! The computer performance improve at least 500% and the Diskeeper will keep monitoring the programs that are mostly used in order to reposition them so that they could be accessed faster, that feature is called IFAAST. Even if I strongly suggest to all my customers to use Diskeeper, you could still use a defragmentation program that comes embedded in Windows. Is not as powerful but it's free! Open My Computer -> Right Click on your C:\Drive and hit properties then click on the Tools Tab Then click on Defragment Now, the task could take a few hours if is the first time you do it and your operating system is more than a year old, but if you do it often it could take a few minutes only. You will need to repeat this task every month at least in order to keep a good performance. |
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Last Updated on Friday, 08 June 2007 11:59 |
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Written by Administrator
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Thursday, 07 June 2007 00:00 |
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Change the priority of each program and improve performance Your computer is at all times running multiple programs to name a few you have your anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, browser, your email client (outlook), word, excel, adobe reader, Java runtime enviroment, etc... Not all of these applications require the same processor power to work effectively (for example using Adobe Photoshop at the same time than Internet explorer or other less demanding programs), you should set a custom priority for the high-demand applications. Priority is how the operating system decides how to share the processor time among applications. 99%of applications default to the 'normal' priority, so by setting a higher priority to the high demand applications, you will definetly increase the performance when multitasking. You can do this very easily: Open the programs you wish to change the priority for and go to the Task Manager by pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL or right click on the Taskbar and select Task Manager. Select the applications tab and click to highlight the program you want to customize, Right click and select Set Priority.' You will see 6 choices select the one that you consider more appropiate for your application. 
The higher the priority you choose, the more CPU power the program will steal from other applications when you are multitasking. |
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Last Updated on Thursday, 07 June 2007 13:37 |
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