Frequenty Asked Questions
First aid for your computer
Does your PC or laptop sometimes run slowly or freeze? Stick this article on the fridge: it could save your machine's life and your sanity, writes Dan Warne.
If your computer has been running slower lately, no doubt you've sought help from friends, family and the IT people at work. Suggestions may range from the merely outdated "have you defragged it?" to the misinformed "there's too many icons on your desktop . . . they're clogging it up" or the fatalistic "mate, nothing will fix it except blowing it away and starting again".
We've all heard the lines and none of them are particularly helpful. In fact, the computer industry thrives on people who've been given bad advice, throw up their hands in despair and end up buying a new PC.
Here are some ways to clear out your computer and get it back to optimal performance.
Find stuck programs and kill them
This is a technique you need to keep in mind at all times, because you'll need it frequently. Since modern PCs can run many programs at once, sometimes you won't notice when one is stuck. Worse, these programs will often consume more and more processing power, slowing down the rest of your computer. Fortunately, they are easy to find.
On Windows XP or Vista, press Ctrl+Shift+Esc, which will bring up the Windows Task Manager. Click on the "processes" tab to see all the software running on your system. Click the "CPU" column heading to sort the column in descending order. This will show apps using the most CPU at the top. Look at the list for 30 seconds or so and if one is consistently using a very high percentage of CPU time, it might be a hung program. You can click on the process name and then the "end process" button to kill the troublesome app (note, this will instantly shut down the app and you won't have an opportunity to save any files).
On a Mac, you can use the Activity Viewer to see hung apps. This is found in the Applications/Utilities folder. Open it up and click the "CPU" column heading until the applications are listed by their CPU usage, from highest to smallest. If one is consistently using a very high percentage of CPU time, it may be stuck and you can click on the program name then click the "Quit Process" button on the toolbar. Programs listed in red are ones that OS X has detected are hung (though this is not always accurate - sometimes a big app like iPhoto is just taking a long time to save its database and close down).
Find apps that have been causing problems
Most people don't know this but your computer keeps a log of just about everything you do. A lot of it looks like gobbledegook but it can surrender useful hints about what's going wrong.
On Windows, to view the system log, go to Control Panel. If it says "switch to classic view" in the left column, click that. Then click "administrative tools" and then "event viewer". In the event viewer that opens, select "Application" or "System" from the column on the left. You can then scroll down the log and look for warnings (yellow exclamation mark) or errors (red cross). Double-clicking on one of these entries will show you the detail of the error. It might not mean anything to you but you can search for the error wording on Google to find out what other people did to stop it from happening again.
On a Mac, the app you need is called Console. It's found in the Applications/Utilities directory. In the left column, under the "Log database queries" heading, click "All messages". This will show all log entries from all software on your computer. Scroll through the log file on the right-hand side. If you see an error message popping up frequently, you can search for the exact message in Google to see if someone else has a suggestion about what the problem is.
Uninstall 'free' apps that came with your computer
Some major computer makers love to load up their computers with "free" software (the truth is, they get paid for it by the software makers and this subsidises the cost of the computer so they can sell at a lower cost against other manufacturers). This free software can be annoying, pestering you to subscribe to the full version and may slow your computer down if it auto-loads at startup. This so-called "crap-ware" has annoyed so many people that there are specialised programs to help you delete free trials and other rubbish that comes on your computer. PC Decrapifier is a program that started as Dell Decrapifier and then spread its wings to cover other manufacturers' pre-loaded crap, too.
You might have particular trouble getting rid of some security suites that really get their roots deep into the core of Windows. Symantec makes a special tool to delete all versions of its Norton security suites (www.tinyurl.com/killnorton), as does McAfee (www.tinyurl.com/killmcafee) and Zone Alarm (download available at www.tinyurl.com/killzonealarm). You can find removal tools for other security suites by Googling "[security suite brand] removal tool".
Apple doesn't load much third-party rubbish onto Macs - though it does load some of its own very large apps and sometimes a trial version of Microsoft Office. These are mercifully easy to remove - just go to your Applications folder and drag the apps to the trash. However, this may not remove all traces of an application and some apps like GarageBand and iDVD leave gigabytes worth of support files hidden away elsewhere on the hard disk. You can delete these by downloading AppCleaner (www.tinyurl.com/appclean) and then dragging the icons of the programs you want to delete onto the AppCleaner icon. It will then delete the app and all support files.
Find out what's filling up your drive
If your hard drive is almost full, it can dramatically slow down your computer, because (in a nutshell) when your computer runs out of its high-speed memory for running software, it has to start using the hard drive as memory. If the computer has plenty of free space, it can use large continuous blocks of space for this "swap" memory. However, if the hard drive is very full, the computer has to hunt for vacant blocks of space to use - and this can be slow.
Sometimes, there are huge amounts of space taken up on your hard drive by things like downloaded movies that you've watched and forgotten about and removing them can see great speed improvements.
Disk space analysers do a wonderful job of exposing the biggest files on your disk and helping you delete them (be sure you know what you're deleting). On Windows, WinDirStat will do the trick (www.tinyurl.com/diskspace) and on OS X, Disk Inventory X (www.derlien.com) does a good job.
