I am sure you've heard a lot of things about computer optimization. Everywhere you look you see ads that invite you to "boost your performance" or "improve your computer". So, what's the idea? Is anything true about it? Does your computer really need optimization?

Unfortunately, it does. There are many weak zones in Windows operating system. Here are a few of them:
- registry
- hardware management
- internet connection

Registries are Windows's internal database. All sort of information are stored there, from hardware and drivers info to applications' settings. After each removal of any device, like a printer or video card, pieces of information remain there. The biggest problem is when you uninstall a program. Unfortunately, many applications fail to erase all their data on removal. A solution for this is to run "regedit" and manually search for all references to the program and erase them.

By hardware management I mean memory and hard-disk management. As you know, each program uses some of your computer's memory. Memory allocation is determined by how much the program needs and, of course, if the resource is available. When the application stops, the used blocks of memory should be freed. But this is not happening all the time. So, when a new programs requests memory to run, your computer will slow down because it will compete with other applications for the remaining resources.

The same situation appears when you remove files from your computer. They are not really erased. They remain on your hard-disk and affect other files that you want to read or write. It's the same principle as described above regarding memory usage. To avoid problems you should use at least once a month a hard-disk defragmenter, in order to clean remaining pieces of information.

Because so many people use the Internet today, internet speed has become very important. I am talking about download speed and browsing speed. Actually it's the same concept. When you browse a webpage, you computer creates by default a channel with the page's server and starts downloading it. Download speed is of course given first of all by your internet subscription, but there is something that affects it too. The connection channel can be single threaded or multi threaded. As I said that channel is by default single threaded. What your computer should do is to break the downloaded file (image, text, archive, etc) into several smaller parts, and create a download channel for each of them. After they are all downloaded it should, of course, rebuild the source. That is what all download accelerators do.

Those are only a few ideas why your computer needs optimization. Registry tweaking, memory flushing, hard-disk defragmenters and an accelerated Internet connection would speedup your activity because you won't have to loose so much time waiting...

You can find several software releases that would do the job on CoreDownload, a software archive with over 23.000 titles to choose from.

Ted Peterson writes for CoreDownload - Download essential games and utilities.

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