I want to take a minute this week to talk about new computers and some of the deals we are all seeing. I have had a lot of customers ask me to rate new PC’s to aid their purchasing decision. The new breed of $300.00 laptops are ‘relatively’ slower than a 4-5 year old XP laptop. Computer manufacturers build these to the operating system’s lowest requirements. Windows 7 requires much more processing power than XP. My suggestion is to pass by the low cost PC’s and either upgrade the old or increase the budget. Now to the real questions:
Jesse is concerned that her computer may be running slow because of too much data: “If I remove the pictures from my hard drive will it speed up?” Jesse, I have some bad news for you. It will speed up your computer only negligibly; however, there are a few things you can do to make your computer faster.
Pictures only take up space on your hard drive which does not affect read/write times. Let me rephrase that. The benefit of removing all your pictures and data will be virtually unnoticeable. Hard drives and the operating system work hand-in-hand. Windows creates a ‘map’ of where the data is located on the drive and seeks it out.
Some things you can do on your own to change the speed of your computer are to run disk defragmenter (defrag). A defrag will reallocate free space, making your data seek times much faster. Another thing you can do is to use the msconfig command and turn off startup items which aren’t necessary. I believe the msconfig command to be almost more beneficial than any other for speeding up your computer.
I would not invest in any of the software packages advertised on radio or late night television. Those packages aren’t very helpful and in some cases create more problems than they fix. We have had more than one customer in the shop with damaged operating systems caused from snake oil shams.
Tom is a salesman who uses his laptop to manage his clients. He asks: “Is there a way to make the data safe in case I lose my laptop?” Tom, there are a couple solutions which you can use in case your laptop is lost or stolen. No matter the system you employ I would suggest duplicating your data and storing it away from your laptop.
Encryption is the method of converting data in a way that others can’t access. In your case, you are most likely going to be changing a database (and contents) into an obfuscated file which cannot be opened without the appropriate permissions. In some cases the files can be opened; however, they will not be usable.
Certain versions of Windows Vista and 7 have encryption built in. Before you start searching for it on your system, only Business and Ultimate versions are so equipped. Unfortunately most systems aren’t going to have this option available to them. There is a free solution that is available to everyone and is truly safe.
You can download a free program called TrueCrypt which is fairly easy to use. Successful implementation of TrueCrypt requires “mounting” the encrypted files each time the system restarts. When I first started using TrueCrypt I found it quite annoying; but I soon realized the purpose of encryption is to keep the data safe. Consider the original question which is based on losing your laptop. The data is still stored on the machine; however, upon restart the data won’t be visible or usable without your password.
Tech-Tip of the week: Consider backing up data – even on brand new computers. A recent statistic states that one in 4,000 brand new electronic components fails right out of the box.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can e-mail him at Jeromy@LocalComputerWiz.com or call him directly at (978) 919-8059.)