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Is your Windows 7 machine grinding to a halt already? Don’t despair as we’ll explain how to restore brand-new PC performance-and then go faster still.

There’s a lot to like about Windows 7, not least its many improvements over Vista: the new OS is faster, less demanding on resources, has better designed security and contains many new productivity-boosting features.

If you were an early Windows 7 adopter, though, you may already have noticed that one old problem still remains. The more you use your PC, adding and removing applications, the more junk builds up throughout your system, and the slower and more unstable it eventually becomes. You need to treat the problem, detoxing your PC on a regular basis to remove the leftovers – but how, exactly? Which areas of Windows 7 are most susceptible to this gradual degradation? Are there any tools or benchmarks you can use to reveal problem areas? How much can all this clutter slow you down, anyway, and what’s the best way to remove it all and restore your system to its optimum performance?

As we researched this article, one point was clear. Windows 7 is very different internally to Windows XP, and we couldn’t simply assume that old tricks, like optimising services, would work in the same way. What we needed to do was design a test, something that would reveal exactly why Windows 7 systems slowed down over time, and help uncover the best way to restore that initial new PC performance. And so that’s exactly what we did.

Designing the test

We started our trial by obtaining a powerful new 3XS Intel X58 Core i7 PC from Scan Computers. The machine featured a quad-core Intel Core i7 920 (which was overclocked by 20 per cent), 6MB of RAM and a speedy SATA 300 Samsung hard drive. It was an excellent performer that we knew wouldn’t choke unless it was faced with a set of major performance problems.

When the 3XS PC arrived, we installed the latest Windows 7 (Ultimate Edition, 32-bit) and driver updates and then set about establishing baseline measurements of our PC’s performance.

The best Windows boot time – which we’re defining as the time that elapses between the ‘Starting Windows’ message and the desktop appearing – was 22 seconds. Seeing the desktop means nothing if you can’t use it, so we also measured the time between the ‘Starting Windows’ message appearing and the point that we were able to launch IE and have it display our Google homepage 
(28 seconds).

We also used Task Manager to collect data on free memory and system activity (processes, threads, and so on). Finally we checked how long it took to launch apps, including Firefox and Outlook (both around four seconds).

With the performance of our clean system safely defined, we set about abusing it. We installed Windows Live tools, iTunes, Adobe Reader, browsers, antivirus apps, Microsoft Office, DVD-burning suites, video-editing tools, a large Outlook inbox, hundreds of fonts and more. We accepted every extra that was on offer, then reinstalled and updated the apps before moving plenty of files around to ensure hard drive fragmentation.

Installing apps like iTunes can slow down your system performance in several different ways.

And what did this do to the benchmarks? The plain Windows boot time increased by around a third, from 22 to 30 seconds. Our system was unusable after that for a long time, though, with IE not displaying Google for 140 seconds. Task Manager showed that system activity had more than doubled. Outlook now took five times as long to launch (21 seconds), and shutdown time increased by 50 per cent to 18 seconds.

So even a powerhouse like our 3XS system can be seriously affected by clutter. Now our really important tests began: discovering how to reverse this slowdown.

Defrag options

The hard drive is a big bottleneck on most PCs, and defragging has traditionally been one way to boost performance. Windows 7’s own defrag tool completed the task in a little over 20 minutes, confidently reporting that there was now 0 per cent fragmentation. But this had little effect on our PC, shaving one second off boot time and leaving other benchmarks unaffected. We weren’t convinced, and ran Auslogics Disk Defrag immediately afterwards. This produced some interesting information: it thought our drive was still 16 per cent fragmented. We told the program to optimise our file layout (go to ‘Settings | Program Settings | Algorithms | Move system files to the beginning of the disk’) and set it to work.

Auslogics Disk Defrag optimised the layout of files on your hard drive and gave a real speed improvement as a result.

This delivered real benefits. Boot time fell from 29 to 26 seconds; IE was usable after 107 seconds, a 23 per cent improvement; and launch time for Outlook fell by a third. We can’t guarantee you’ll see similar results, as every defrag situation is different, but it’s clear that Windows 7’s defrag tool alone won’t necessarily do the job. We advise you click Start, type defrag, click ‘Disk Defragmenter’ and make sure that scheduled defrags are turned off for the moment. Then install Auslogics Disk Defrag, turn on the option to relocate your system files, click ‘Settings | Program Settings | Schedule’ and set it to run every few days to keep your drive running optimally.

At your service

A near two-minute wait before we could access the web was far too long. To cut this down we needed to reduce the work that Windows had to do during the boot process, and one effective way to do this was to work on our Windows services. Launching the Services applet (‘services.msc’) revealed the many changes that could be made.

For instance, the Distributed Link Tracking Client maintains links between NTFS files across a network and is started by default. We don’t use the service, though, and you probably don’t either: double-clicking it and setting the Startup Type to ‘Disabled’ will turn it off. IP Helper is similarly pointless unless you have access to an IP6 network, and the Windows Media Player Network Sharing and Media Center Extender services can go unless you’re using them to share your music and videos.

Other services can be configured to start with a delay, giving priority to other tasks and helping your PC to become usable more quickly. The Background Intelligent Transfer Service is important when downloading Windows Updates, but it doesn’t have to be available when you start your PC. Double-click this and set its Startup Type to ‘Automatic (Delayed Start)’. Try the same with Disk Defragmenter, Windows Backup, Windows Search and Windows Update.

We noticed many unnecessary third-party services. Installing Nero 9 got us a Nero BackItUp Scheduler 4.0 service, for example; a LightScribe service assists when labelling discs; and a Visual Studio 2008 Remote Debugger had appeared from somewhere. We weren’t using any of these, so we disabled them all.

Many more could safely have their start-up type set to ‘Automatic (Delayed Start)’: Apple Mobile Device (bundled with iTunes), seven SQL Server services and five from VMware (part of VMware Workstation) all got this treatment. (Don’t choose anything security-related, though: vital services relating to firewalls or antivirus tools must be allowed to start as quickly as possible.)

These changes worked well, cutting our raw boot time from 26 to 24 seconds, while the ‘IE-usable’ time plummeted from 107 to 81 seconds: a significant improvement. But there was more to come.

Startup simplifications

Filling up a PC with numerous start-up programs will really slow it down, yet software authors continue to do this by default, so it’s a good idea to prune your start-up tasks on a regular basis.

Start by quickly browsing your ‘Start | All Programs’ menu. Is there anything you no longer need? Uninstall it now.

Next, we launched msconfig on our test PC, clicked the Startup tab and found 29 programs listed, many of them unnecessary. QuickTime, iTunes, Adobe Reader, Adobe Acrobat, Orbit Downloader, PowerDVD and RealPlayer are all very useful tools, but we didn’t want any of them to launch at boot time.

Other applications install some components that may or may not be useful to you. GoogleToolbarNotifier protects your Google toolbar search settings from unauthorised changes, for instance: that might be handy in some cases, but you may already have antivirus software that does something similar. Magix Movie Editor had added an application called Trayserver that appeared to be unnecessary, and our Cyberlink software had installed a host of tools that seemed less than essential, including ‘cyberlink brs’ (something to do with Blu-ray, apparently), Cyberlink MediaLibrary Service, the Language Application, the StartMen Application and the MUI StartMenu Application.

There may be a few redundant start-up programs that have been there since your PC arrived. Ours included LightScribe, a disc-labelling tool that we weren’t using, and CTXfiHlp, a Creative tool that apparently assists with providing Help functionality, but as we’ve yet to need that, the program felt like something we could do without. Another we found was LG Firmware Update, which checks online for new DVD drive firmware. That’s handy, but we don’t need to run it every boot. However, if you turn this off, make sure that you run it manually regularly.

A program to check for DVD firmware updates is useful, but you don’t need to run it at every boot. Disable this to save some time.

The precise results of all this tweaking will depend on how your PC is configured, but we saw immediate benefits. There was less disk thrashing at boot time, IE was now usable in only 71 seconds, and we’d freed up more than 100MB of RAM for the rest of our system.

Optimise your apps

We’ve concentrated on cleaning up Windows clutter, but your apps can also collect pointless add-ons.

Take Internet Explorer, for instance. While installing software, we accepted every offer of a shiny new IE add-on, with the result being that we now had four extra toolbars. Clicking ‘Tools | Manage Add-ons’ and disabling these freed up a surprisingly high 28 to 36MB of RAM, cut four seconds off the time it took for IE to load and then shaved half a second off every subsequent relaunch.

Typical Microsoft inefficiency? Apparently not. We had also accumulated eight Firefox extensions – AdBlock Plus, DownloadThemAll and so on – and uninstalling those halved the browser’s relaunch time and saved us around 26MB of RAM. So by all means keep the extensions you use, but remember that they come at a price – get rid of any that are surplus to requirements.

It’s a similar story with Microsoft Office. Outlook 2007, for instance, comes with many unnecessary add-ons, and programs like iTunes will install more (without even asking). Disabling all but the key search add-on saved 19MB of RAM on our test system (see the ‘Optimising Outlook’ box for the details), and while the initial launch appeared little different, subsequent launches now required only around 0.4 seconds. Clear unwanted emails out of your inbox for a further speed boost, then check Word, Excel and other Office components for further unnecessary add-ons (though don’t remove anything unless you’re sure you don’t need it).

Clean up your system

Congratulations, you’ve done the hard work – it’s time to clean up. Click Start, type cleanmgr and press [Enter] to launch Disk Cleanup. Follow the instructions and clean up as much of the junk that it finds as you can.

You can get more thorough clean-up help from a tool like CCleaner. It’s not a magic solution – we tried it, and cleaning our Registry made no difference at all to any benchmarks – but it does give you a central place to clean up your browser’s temporary files. That really did help, cutting another five seconds off the time it took IE to load and become usable.

After one further defrag to take advantage of our additional free hard drive space, that was it. So what had our efforts achieved?

Boot time, originally 22 seconds, had initially risen to 30, but we’d brought it back down to 24. The time it took IE to load and display Google, first 28 and at its height a horrible 140 seconds, was now 35.

Initial launch times for Outlook and Firefox were 25 per cent faster. Task Manager showed that system activity had fallen by 30 per cent. We had 300MB more RAM available, and our applications had been tuned to require less than they previously did.

Our work had got us close to the goal of brand-new PC performance. Now it was time to take the next step and make our system go faster than it had ever gone before.

All laptop users have something in common: we want our device’s batteries to last longer. Whether it’s for the daily commute or the flight home for Christmas, an extra 30 minutes of power means an extra 30 minutes of entertainment. If you’re running a Linux-based distribution on your netbook, there’s a lot you can do to squeeze every last negatively charged ion from your power source. Here we’re going to cover the best techniques that we’ve discovered. Don’t worry if you’re not a netbook user, as much of this information can be used on Linux laptops too. However, we’ve specifically tailored our advice for netbooks as these seldom include full-blown distros (and hence any easy way of compiling and installing new software). We’re going to focus on Intel’s Moblin and Canonical’s UNR (Ubuntu Netbook Remix), two of the most popular Linux distributions for netbooks, but there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t use a full-fat distribution on your device and make the same changes to its power management.

You deserve to be able to drag every last tiny drop of power out of your laptop’s battery. It’s only fair.

Netbook Linux is still in its infancy. This means that there’s still a great deal that can be done to make these devices more power efficient, and each release of distributions like Moblin or UNR gets better at it. But it also means that hardware compatibility and power saving is experimental for each distribution, especially when you’ve installed it yourself. Until netbook distributions are built for specific netbooks, though, there’s always something you can change in a generic installation to make it work better on your own machine. We’re not talking about massive improvements, but each incremental change may stretch your battery life by around five per cent. Even if just one or two of them work out, you’ll see some extra life from your machine. Like most things to do with Linux, it just takes a little trial and error.

The easy targets

Sometimes it’s the most predictable power saving options that can reap the biggest benefits. Wireless and Bluetooth are our first targets. Even when you’re not using these connections, the radio device tucked away within your machine is still expending energy, either keeping a connection in contention or looking for new networks and devices for you to connect to. Both Moblin and UNR allow you to disable these devices from the desktop, but these options won’t necessarily completely disable the radio. The best option is to use a hotkey combination that’s dedicated to your devices. These are usually labelled in blue across the laptop’s keyboard, and typically involve you having to press the [Fn] key in conjunction with a number. The number key will normally feature a somewhat ambiguous icon that you’ll need to decode in order to figure out which number is the correct one. If you’re lucky, you’ll also see an on-screen message updating you on any progress once you’ve pressed the key.

However, some netbooks don’t have function keys to disable the wireless or Bluetooth radios, and you can’t take any chances with the software disable function. Samsung’s popular NC10 is one example of a machine that doesn’t have a keypress option. In these cases, your only course of action is to change a setting in your netbook’s BIOS – a setting that will stay fixed until you restart your machine and manually undo the change.

It might sound obvious, but switching off your laptop’s internal radios can give a significant boost to battery life.

Like many desktop machines, you can normally enter your netbook’s BIOS by quickly pressing [F2], although like the hotkeys, this is dependent on your manufacturer (as is what you can and can’t turn off within the BIOS). With the NC10, for instance, you can switch your wireless devices to ‘Always Off’ from the Boot menu within the BIOS. While you’re there, you might also want to disable the ‘Internal LAN’ setting in the Advanced menu, as the Ethernet port can steal power even while not being used. You should also make sure that any power saving modes for your device are enabled.

Screen brightness

Dimming the screen is a great way of saving some power, but this can sometimes be problematic with certain netbooks running a Linux distribution. This is because the hotkey combination may not work from the desktop, and the software isn’t always capable of changing brightness either. The Linux kernel needs to have support for your specific device. If it does, the distribution you use also needs to use the correct version of the kernel and provide a means of changing the brightness. If this isn’t the case, you might still be able to adjust the brightness of your screen from the command line.

The trick is to use a special kind of file that accesses your display hardware. As with most devices, this can be found by typing ls /sys/class/backlight/. If you’ve not encountered the ‘/sys’ series of directories before, it contains dozens of folders and files that refer to each of the devices on your system. Rather than representing the files and folders on a storage device, this structure is a portal for configuring any plug-and-play hardware discovered on your system, and that includes devices like your netbook’s screen, CPU and drive.

To change values in the /sys tree, you will need to switch to the administrator’s account on your machine. Ubuntu users won’t be able to use sudo in the way they might be used to because the command to change values is really two commands, one piping output to another. The sudo privileges will only apply to the first and won’t stretch to allow you to change the parameter in the second. You can get around this by launching a new bash session using sudo, which will start a pseudo-administrator mode where every subsequent command is executed with root privileges. Moblin users just need to type su followed by their root password to get the same thing.

The contents of ‘/sys/class/backlight/’ should look something like ‘acpi_video0’, but this is dependent on the kernel driver for your hardware. Beneath this directory, you’ll find a special type of file called ‘brightness’. If you probe the value of this file by typing cat acpi_video0/brightness, for instance, you’ll see the current brightness setting for your screen. This is usually within the range of 0 to 100, and may jump up in steps that are defined by your hardware’s capabilities. The converse of this probe operation is to pass a value to this special file, hopefully changing your screen brightness in the process. Typing echo 100 > acpi_video0/brightness, for example, will configure maximum brightness, while a value in the region of 15 should be close to your screen’s minimum.

CPU optimisation

We’re going to stick within the /sys subsystem to make a few changes to how the CPU is handled. This can be a rather experimental area to play around with, which may explain why many distributions choose not to enable some of the more optimal modes, but it can be worth the trial and error. It’s also dependent on the features embedded within your CPU. Recent models built around Intel’s newer Atom processors shouldn’t have any problems, but older models may not be so flexible. You should also make sure you’ve got a backup of any critical data on your netbook’s drive before trying things out.

The most important parameter can be discovered by typing cat /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode. If your machine returns a value of 0, then Laptop mode is currently disabled. You can enable it by typing echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode. When Laptop mode is enabled, the kernel takes special care only to shuttle data to your storage device when it needs to, saving your battery in the process. You can disable this by swapping the 1 for a 0 in the previous command.

You can get even deeper into how the processor handles tasks by changing how the scheduler works. This is only going to be beneficial if you’ve got a multicore machine, and it changes the way processes are loaded onto each core. Check the contents of the ‘/sys/devices/system/cpu/sched_mc_power_savings’ location. If this is set to 0, your netbook is configured for optimal CPU performance – which is useful for mathematically intensive apps, but not so great if you’re only planning to read a couple of emails. Changing this value to 1 will ask the scheduler to use the threads and processes more efficiently before more are created, effectively saving your other CPU cores from being used and saving energy in the process.

Process pruning

The best thing about a netbook distro is that it is already pruned down to the bare minimum of applications and running processes. There should be very little you can do to improve things here, but there’s never any harm in taking a look. The quickest and easiest way of checking what processes are running is to run the ‘top’ command from the command line. It may look a little perfunctory, but it tells you everything you need to know. It’s called top because it shows you a list of the processes sorted by CPU time, with the highest at the top. This list changes dynamically, and the processes at the top usually include top itself, the Xorg X-Server (which is rendering the graphics on the screen) and maybe the gnome terminal (if this is how you’re running top). You can also remove processes and change their priority, but you need to be careful about this as you could seriously affect the performance of your netbook (and even lose some of your data). The safest option is to look for tasks that are running under your user account: you should be able to see your name in the second column for any tasks falling into that category.

On Moblin 2.0, for instance, we’ve noticed that the Nautilus file manager is used to manage external storage such as USB sticks. Occasionally, especially when you remove a USB stick without first unmounting it, Nautilus is left running, taking up precious CPU cycles. You’ll even be able to see that it’s the process connected to the USB device because this path follows the name of the process. You can remove tasks by pressing [K] to enter Kill mode and then entering the process number. This is listed in the top output below the top line. If you’re running a standard Linux installation, then there are a great number of processes you might want to consider removing. These could include indexing routines, compositing managers, background servers and log file generation. Further information can be found by looking at how the ‘initd’ process works and working out how to disable these services at bootup.

Monitor process power consumption

One of the best tools for monitoring and tweaking your system’s power efficiency is called PowerTop. It’s the electrical power consumption equivalent to the ‘top’ command we used to measure CPU usage, and it should be available through your distribution’s package manager. Moblin users can find it by searching for ‘Power consumption monitor’ in the Add/Remove Software panel. It needs to be run from the command line with system administrator privileges, which means typing sudo powertop for Ubuntu users or su followed by powertop for Moblin.

PowerTop can give you a very accurate indication of how long your netbook will last with its current power usage.

It will take five seconds for the tool to initially monitor your current system, after which it will list the various offending tasks running on your system sorted according to the amount of power they consume. The top section of the tool displays the percentage of time your CPU spends running at a specific speed. More CPU-intensive tasks will switch to a faster power state, which will in turn take more electricity. Ideally, you should expect to spend most of your time in the C4 state (the slowest), with occasional bursts of activity in the fastest state, C1.

PowerTop was originally designed to show which tasks were preventing laptops from entering a sleep state, and it’s still useful for this kind of bug fixing (though hopefully your distro builder has already solved the most serious offenders). This is why you still see the processes listed as ‘Top causes for wakeup’, as these are the events that are interrupting the system.

Unlike nearly every other tool we can think of, PowerTop also displays some useful information that can help you stretch out your netbook’s battery life. If it detects anything that it knows will help, a suggestion will pop up at the bottom of the window. Your adjustment will last for the duration of the current session only, but the tips that PowerTop displays often include instructions on how to make each change more permanent.

Proper sleep function

Suspending your machine by closing the lid and then opening it again seldom has the desired effect with Linux. It’s often easier to just turn the machine off and on again. Things are a lot better than they were, but hibernation is one area of the kernel that remains problematic. The difficulty is that each piece of hardware within your system needs to respond predictably to the sleep call, and this requires well-behaved drivers that have a good understanding of their hardware capabilities.

Unfortunately, this can’t be said for many Linux device drivers – in particular those for graphics cards. The only exception is hardware developed by Intel. Intel has made a big investment in Linux, and it continues to make massive improvements to the drivers for its own hardware. The Moblin distribution is the pinnacle of this work, and you should find that sleep works well with most Atom-based machines, as well as those that use other kinds of Intel processors. If you need to cater for hardware from other manufacturers, the best piece of advice we can give you is to make sure that your kernel is as up to date as possible. Things are changing all the time in the Linux world, and you may find that any problems have already been fixed with a kernel update.

Writen by Max Bellamy

Samsung laser toner is just as popular as its Hewlett-Packard and Brother counterparts. Samsung is a group of products and services that began in Korea in 1938. Today Samsung operate five different business areas: Telecommunications, Digital and Home Appliances, Digital Media, LCD, and Semiconductors. They started their Electronics section in 1969. Today they are one of the top 100 brands in the world, and their printers and cartridges continue to gain a loyal following.

You can buy Samsung laser toner from their official website. There you will find a complete list of all their products. Enter “laser toner cartridge” in the website’s search field and start comparing prices. You are guaranteed to get a quality from this site. Their website offers full specifications, so that you can find the right cartridge for your printer.

Another option is to go to the PCWorld website. Look for “printers” in the drop-down menu. They have a database of websites selling quality third-party laser toner. You can search for “Samsung” via a menu bar on the left. One color ink cartridge is available for under $30, for example. Be careful when you buy third-party laser toner products. Some of these will be sold as “compatible” or “remanufactured” but aren’t up to specifications with the manufacturer’s original standards. One good review website is Epinions, which allows users to rate all kinds of products, including laser printers and accessories, so that you can get a non-marketing perspective on products you are looking to buy.

You can find a list of authorized retailers of Samsung products on their website. That way, you won’t accidentally end up buying a counterfeit Samsung laser toner cartridge.

Laser Toner Info provides detailed information about later toner cartridges and refills, as well as reviews of laser toner products. Laser Toner Info is the sister site of Brochure Printing Web.