More PC Speed Tips

Earlier, I talked about using JKDefrag to defrag and speed up the Hard disk in Windows. In addition to that, here are some additional tools that I use:

(1) PageDefrag Utility

To squeeze out that additional speed boost from your PC, check out the PageDefrag utility from Microsoft Technet (previously Sysinternals). This program allows you to easily defrag your Windows Pagefile during boot time, every time.

(2) Registry Cleanup Tools

It is no secret that after a period of use and software installation, your Windows registry will bloat to some degree. To trim those unwanted fat off your Windows registry, you could do it manually or turn to some automatic tool. One such tool is Regcleaner by Juoni Vuorio. Be mindful though if you have a Multicore Core CPU. An extra step of assigning CPU affinity for Regcleaner is required. To do that, see my posting on using Imagecfg.exe.

Alternatively, try the wonderful ccleaner. Combine this with the equally handy click&clean utility, trimming unwanted registry fat and removing useless temporary internet cookies and files becomes a real breeze (just with the click of a button).

(3)Registry Compacting Tool

Finally, once you have trimmed those unwanted fat from your registry, you may wish to compact it to squeeze out that additional speed boost. To do that, download, install and execute the NTRegOpt tool.

(4)Turn Off Unnecessary Programs That Load At Startup

Perform a review of the startup programs to access their necessity for loading at startup. Turning off those non-essential startup apps e.g. MSN messenger, Adobe Reader etc, can improve memory utilization and System start up times. One useful tool that I use for this purpose is Autoruns from Microsoft Technet (previously Sysinternals).

Excellent Scheduler Freeware For Windows

nnCron LITE is a small, but full-featured scheduler that can start applications and open documents at a specified schedule. Works with Windows Win9*,ME,NT,2000,XP,Vista. nnCron LITE is a perfect freeware Windows clone of a well-known UNIX scheduler Cron (including all the useful Anacron features). In my personal opinion, nnCron Lite outperforms more reliably than the default Windows Task Scheduler.

To use it to schedule the automatic execution of the cool JKDefragCmd.exe utility to defrag and speed up hard disks in Windows for instance, this is what you can do:

Steps in Brief:
(1) Download nnCron Lite from http://www.nncron.ru/ ,and install it to the directory of your choice (e.g. D:\gnu_fw\cron\). Allow the installer to add nnCron Lite to run and start up as a service automatically in Windows.

(2) When done, navigate into the utility's installed program directory and open up the cron.tab file (you can use any text editor such as notepad or the excellent notepad++)

(3) Entries in the cron.tab file follow the standard Unix/Linux cron convention format. Each field entry is separated from the next by a space, like so:
          # Minutes Hours Days Months WeekDays Command

Note: The # symbol in the above illustration denotes a comment line.

(4) In my case where I use nnCron Lite to schedule my JKDefragCmd.exe file, these are some scheduling options that i have put into my cron.tab file:


          # Minutes Hours Days Months WeekDays Command
          # Uncomment the line immediately below to execute JkDefragCmd.exe for initial run
          # 45 11 * * * "D:\gnu_fw\defrag\JkDefragCmd.exe -a 7 -d 2 c:* d:*"

          # Command line execution of JkDefragCmd.exe (subsequent run) at 12hrs 15min everyday
          15 12 * * * "D:\gnu_fw\defrag\JkDefragCmd.exe -a 3 -d 2 c:* d:*"

As you may have gathered from the above reading, the path "D:\gnu_fw\defrag\" is where i had unpacked the excellent JKDefragCmd.exe defrag software that I run everyday to speed up my hard disk performance in Windows.