Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

Windows has many options that are designed to make the experience of using the operating system more enjoyable.   There are animations, fading effects, drop shadows and many other things that can make objects in the interface look better.  Unfortunately most of these features will slow your computer down just a little.  With enough of them running on your system, you may notice the impact on your computer’s performance.

Fortunately Windows has a way of figuring out what your system can handle and making adjustments that keep the system peppy by turning off features that slow your particular system down.  Here is how you do it.

Right-click My Computer and select Properties.  When the System Properties window opens, click the Advanced tab.  There should be a section called Performance.  Click the Settings button under Performance.  This will bring up the Performance Options where you can select from:

1 – Let Windows decide what’s best
2 – Best appearance (most taxing on system)
3 – Best performance (all the eye candy will be turned off)
4 – Custom – You pick and choose what you want

If you aren’t sure, go with the first selection.  You can experiment if you like.  If you can’t figure out a better set of options, you can always go back to that first option and let Windows decide everything for you.

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If you are running Windows XP, you need 1 GB of RAM.  If you have Vista, double it to 2 GB.  To find out how much memory your computer has, press Shift-Ctrl-ESC.  Click the Performance tab and check the value at the bottom for Physical Memory.  The “Total” is the number you need to find.  Mine says

Total: 2095196k

which translates to 2 GB.  You can run with less memory than I recommend.  If you have several applications (browser, email, photo program, Skype, etc) running at the same time, your computer will bog down if you don’t have enough RAM.  Right now I have a dozen programs running, which is typical for me.  I have Firefox and IE running with three windows of each (I don’t use tabs – some please tell me one benefit of tabs).  My email is running plus all these things: RSS Reader, Paintshop Pro, AVG Anti-Virus, Hamachi, Skype, iPodder, Roboform, allSnap, Picasa and GoogleDesktop.  On top of that, my machine also runs Apache so I can test all my web apps without uploading them to my server.

You may not have this much running on your computer.  This box runs XP.  Its memory usage hovers right at 1 GB.  Because I have so many things going all the time, I have 2 GB of RAM.  It never slows down to copy information to a “swap” file on the hard drive.  That is what happens if you fill up your computer’s memory.  The operating system analyzes the programs in memory and removes items that aren’t active at the moment to make room for new processes.  As soon as the hard drive becomes involved in any process, things slow down.  The hard drive is mechanical.  It moves thousands of times slower than the electronic components can handle.

Having enough RAM to run all the programs you use will save you time.  When I went from 1 GB to 2 GB in this machine, I found myself waiting noticeably less time for almost all my normal processes.  It cost me $100 to add that second gigabyte of RAM.  It was well worth it.

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Every two years I get a new computer.  I’ve done this for the past twenty years.  On top of that I always have a laptop or two that I use along side my desktop.  Several years ago I started using external hard drives for most of my storage.  There are several benefits to doing this.

1 – I can move the hard drives to a new computer simply by unplugging from the old and plugging into the new.

2 – External drives make perfect backup drives that can be easily moved off-site.  During my recent vacation, I took three external hard drives with me just in case my house blew up while I was gone.

3 – Most of your files will be data not programs.  I have 25 gigabytes of programs installed on my computer and several hundred gigabytes of data.  My data files are the most valuable.  I created them.  I want them backed up and I need to move them to any computer I use.  External drives are perfect for data.

4 – External drives are inexpensive.  At my last pilgrimage to BestBuy, they had a 160 GB USB drive for $75.

When using external drives, it is important to keep things consistent.  For instance, my music is always on the M: drive.  I have an external drive with my music.  Using this technique – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307844 – I change the external music drive letter to M: on every computer that uses that external drive.  By doing this, I can unhook the drive from one computer, go to another and the same drive letter is used.  Music is always on the M: drive just like pictures are always on the P: drive.

Before you rush out and buy an external drive, check your computer to see what technologies are available.  External drives come in three basic flavors: USB, Firewire and Ethernet.  You will pay the most for an external drive with an Ethernet connection.  On top of that, unless you have a network switch, you won’t be able to attach the external drive to your network.  You will most likely use a USB connection to attach an external drive.  Make sure your USB port on your computer is USB 2.0.  Older USB connections (1.x) will be too slow to be useful.  Check your computer’s documentation to find out what you have.  If your computer is two years old or newer, you probably have USB 2.0 connectors.  If you have a Macintosh, you will have Firewire and USB connectors.  This means you can use either to connect an external drive.

You can also pay a little more and get an external drive with multiple interfaces.  There are some circumstances where you might need a drive like this.  Depending on your budget, you may find the extra options handy.

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Yesterday I explained how to use a zip utility to make files smaller before sending them across the Internet.  You should always use a zip utility, but you should avoid sending attachments if at all possible.

There are some efficiency issues.  Here is part of a previous post on the subject:

Do you realize the process involved in sending someone a file attachment? Since email is based on ASCII text, the email attachment must be converted to ASCII using Unix to Unix Encoding. This makes the file roughly twice as big as the binary version. This doesn’t include the extra overhead that is created by all the formatting code that goes into most binary files. An ASCII page of text is 2k. Copy the same text into Word and it becomes 4k. UUE the 4k and becomes 7k. So attaching a one page text document is like sending three and half pages of email.

Last year I received over 300 MB of file attachments. Most were only a few megabytes. The largest was 12 megabytes. If I consider only the attachments (not the accompanying email), this was more than three times the capacity of my inbox. Most of these attachments could have been avoided if senders would send links to files instead of attachments. With all the content management systems that we use to hold our information, emailing a link to something instead of an attachment saves everyone time. If I need the information, I can follow the link and I don’t have to clean it out of my attachment folder.

The last two sentences are the most important.  It is easy to give someone a link to a file instead of attaching the file.  If you have a photo you want someone to see, give them a link.  Here is a picture I took last week.  Click the link to see it.

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1308/634778526_04a7fc36a8_o.jpg

The number one method of spreading a virus is through email attachments.  In the last four days I have averaged six infected attachments each day.  My anti-virus program weeds them out, but a brand new virus could get into my inbox.  If I were to open the attachment, I could infect myself.

If you have a big file to give to someone, use a zip utility to make the file smaller, but don’t email the file unless the recipient asks that it be emailed.

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In a previous post, I mentioned that file attachments are something you should avoid.  There are times when they are unavoidable.  If you must attach a file to an email, Zip it first.

Zip is the generic term for “compress” with a compression program based on PKZip from a company called PKWare.  Not many people use the original PKZip any more.  There is WinZip and an assortment of free and shareware titles that most people now use.  An “unzip” utility is built into Windows, but you will need to install some software in order to create your own zipped files.  If you don’t want to spend any money, I recommend 7-zip.

Here is how I explain compression to my students.

Did you ever wonder why all orange juice is labelled 100% pure orange juice – from concentrate?  One gallon of OJ is approximately one half orange “stuff” and one half water.  In Florida, the water is removed.  One truck is used to drive the concentrate to Ohio.  In Ohio, the water is added and two truck loads of OJ (from concentrate) are profitted.  The savings is in the shipping.  It only took one truck to get two truck-loads-worth of OJ to Ohio.  With the price of fuel these days, that’s a lot of savings.

File compression “removes” redundencies in files that can be replicated later.  The process makes the file smaller for transport or long-term storage.  The compression process is complicated to understand (here is a good explanation), but the results are easy to comprehend and benefit from.  Compressing a file makes the file smaller.  Smaller files can be sent across the Internet faster.  This means it will take less time to send and to receive a compressed file.

Be aware that different kinds of files will compress with different efficiencies.  Some files (like Word documents) will compress down to 10% of the original size.  A picture in JPEG format may only compress to 95% of the original size.  Depending on the type of file you compress, your mileage may vary.

There is one other important benefit to compression.  All the zip utilities let you place multiple files into one zip “package”.  So instead of attaching twenty different pictures to an email, all twenty pictures can be placed inside one zip file.  The one zip file can be sent.  The recipient can unzip the file and get all twenty pictures.

That said, it is important to note that zipped files are only for transport and archiving.  To use the contents of a zip file, you must first unzip it.

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