Mashed Articles

Building a great website is tough, but finishing the code and layout is only half the story. Too many sites have problems after going live because they weren’t tested properly first. Lots of things can and do go wrong, from poorly formatted code that some browsers choke on, to pages that break when opened on other platforms. If you developed your site on a Mac, what guarantee do you have that it’ll look the same on a PC, for example?

Your site is a prism for browser light. Make sure it’s not a flawed one.

Even now, when HTML structures are likely to be served as part of a CMS template system, it’s important that all the basics are in place. You need a soak test: a checklist of crucial areas that you can test are working before the site goes live. That’s exactly what we’ve put together here. Follow our tips and your site will be as problem-free as possible.

Clean up your code

Clean, glitch-free code with no stray tags or unclosed comments looks better, is easier to edit and is less likely to spring surprises on you when your site goes live. WYSIWYG web authoring tools already include features for tidying up your code. Let’s face it – some of us really need them. Dreamweaver will even format and indent your HTML following your configuration guidelines. Go to ‘Commands | Clean Up HTML’ or ‘Clean Up XHTML’.

We prefer to run static code through HTML Tidy, which is available as a stand-alone program from http://tidy.sourceforge.net/#binaries, or as a plug-in for manual code-editing tool NoteTab Light. The software deletes stray tags, adds any missing tag elements and completes open tags for you.

Meet HTML standards

Compliance with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards makes your sites more accessible and usable, and also helps them to perform well on multiple platforms. You can see whether your site is compliant with XHTML and CSS standards by using W3C’s online validation tools. You’ll find the main testing page at http://validator.w3.org. This gives you a full breakdown of all the syntax and code errors in any page submitted. You can then update your code in accordance with the guidelines. Don’t be disheartened if your site fails. Some of the web’s biggest sites have XHTML errors according to the validator, including Google and Microsoft’s homepages.

There are numerous tools online that will validate your site for compliance with the relevant standards.

To use the W3C’s validation tool, go to http://validator.w3.org and enter the URL of the web page you wish to test. You can also upload code from a local machine or paste HTML mark-up into the Direct Input box. The validator can only check one page at a time.

Meet CSS standards

There’s a second service available to help you check and correct CSS scripts. It can be found at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator. Again, you can point the validator to a version of the file you wish to check online, upload the code or paste it directly into a box.

The errors returned come with detailed explanations of how you can fix them. The validator will identify even the smallest of problems, including missing line terminators and brackets.

Enable resizing

Remember the early days of the web, when sites came with front-page disclaimers such as ‘Optimised for Internet Explorer at a resolution of 800 x 600 pixels’? How we groaned. Don’t forget that people are viewing your site on different platforms, with different display settings and monitor resolutions. Enabling your page to resize to any browser means that it will work better on multiple platforms, from desktop machines to handheld devices. The key is to use percentage sizes when creating <div> layers rather than specifying fixed sizes. It’s a tough habit to get into, especially if you’ve become used to creating exactly positioned layouts.

Resizer is essential for testing the flexibility of your site’s design.

First, check that your site looks good on the largest monitor size your setup can muster, then work backwards – down to 800 x 600 pixels. Right-click your Windows desktop and choose ‘Properties’. Click ‘Settings’ and you’ll be able to change your default desktop resolution using a slider. If you use Vista, choose ‘Personalise’ from the contextual menu instead. It’s even easier in Windows 7 – there should be a right-click menu item labelled ‘Screen Resolution’. Some video card control panels let you do this without venturing into Windows’ display settings.

Test on all browsers

It’s important to make sure that pages look the same in the big five browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. Fire up your site in each of these and make a careful comparison. Here’s a quick tip: if you have two browsers open showing the same page, right-click on an empty part of the Windows taskbar and choose ‘Tile windows horizontally’ (or ‘Show windows side by side’ on Windows 7). This makes it easier to spot differences.

Five browsers on one system may seem like overload, but there are ways to cut that down. If you’re a Firefox user, you can install IE Tab, a plug-in that enables you to view pages using Internet Explorer’s rendering engine. There’s also Chrome View, which renders pages in Firefox using Google Chrome. In short, get Firefox.

Test on Macs and PCs

Your pages should look the same on Macs as they do on PCs running Windows, whether you have access to one or not. The best method is to borrow a Mac to test your site. If you’re developing for a professional audience, you can employ the services of Browsercam instead.

The Litmus test. Run your site through actual browsers on actual operating systems. For a price…

Litmus uses a bank of testing machines running multiple browsers on all the main OSes. For a subscription fee of $49 (£30) a month, it lets you test an unlimited number of web pages. You enter your site’s URL and receive screenshots as it appears on Macs and Windows systems running any of 24 web browsers. Most of the important ones are included, with different iterations of Firefox, IE and Chrome on Windows, and Safari and Camino on the Mac. The only current important omission we can spot is the Mac version of Chrome. $39 (£24) buys you a 14-day ‘project pass’, which is a good choice if you only have a single site to test.

Testing for free

These are trying financial times for most of us, so here are a couple of free solutions. The runaway leader is Adobe Lab’s Flash- and Flex-based BrowserLab. It’s similar to Litmus in that it gives you a side-by-side view of a given URL in a set of chosen browsers. The tool is currently in limited beta and you’ll need an Adobe user account to use the service. Once in, you enter a URL, pick a browser and platform (or choose from the default browser set), then pick your view. As well as side-by-side comparisons, there’s an ‘Onion Skin’ mode that helpfully enables you to see the output of one browser laid over that of another. BrowserLab renders pages using the main browsers on Mac and Windows.

If you’re unable to access BrowserLab, BrowserShots was once a favourite of ours and is still good for checking multiple versions of Internet Explorer on Windows. Support for Macs has waned, but there are Linux- and Windows-based WebKit browsers included. WebKit is the rendering engine used in Apple Safari, and Google Chrome uses a tweaked version.

Check your gamma

A perennial brain-ache for designers working on Macs and PCs is that, until recently, Mac displays had different default gamma settings to PC monitors. These settings determine the relative brightness of the screen. PCs have a gamma setting of 2.2, whereas Macs had a gamma setting of 1.8. We say ‘had’, because that changed with the release of OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), which sets display gamma to 2.2 – the same as PCs and TVs. Even so, many people still use older Macs, and there’s a disproportionate number of Mac-based designers. The result? Images produced on pre-Snow Leopard Macs can look muddy on PCs, while PC-created pics can seem washed out on older Macs. The solution is to check images at both gamma settings to make sure they look OK either way.

You can never be entirely sure of the look of your site, but it does pay to test varying gamma settings.

Adobe Photoshop has a built-in Mac (or PC) gamma preview feature. Select ‘2 Up’ in the Save for Web dialog, then set an image to render using the setting ‘Macintosh (no colour management)’. It’s arguably more important that Mac-based designers get it right than PC users – and if you’re a Mac owner, you can switch your display to PC gamma in the Display section of the System Preferences panel. Click ‘Colour’, choose the current profile and click ‘Calibrate’. Work your way through the Display Calibration Assistant and choose ‘2.2 Television Gamma’.

Buy a Mac

If you have a lot of sites to test, it might be worth investing in one of Apple’s diminutive Mac Minis. They start at £510 (or even less on the second-hand market), are small, stylish and make excellent media centre PCs. Load yours up with Google Chrome, Camino and Firefox and you’ll be ready to test as many sites as you need to. You don’t even need to leave your PC to do so – you can use free remote desktop software TeamViewer to access and control any application on a TeamViewer-equipped Mac from a PC, or vice versa. The machines don’t even have to be on the same LAN, because connectivity is routed over the internet.

DDA accessibility

Your site needs to be accessible to all users – that’s the law. The Disability Discrimination Act is the main legislation covering this area, and the guidelines you need to match have been laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium. Full details are at www.w3.org/WAI.

Accessibility testing will help make your site available to all potential visitors.

There are fewer online accessibility testing services available in 2010 than there were in 2000 because many of them have become commercial. For example, you can use Adobe Dreamweaver to produce an accessibility report. Go to ‘Site | Reports’, then go through the Accessibility section to select elements to test.

Fujitsu offers a free tool that does a similar job, letting you test your site locally on Windows or Mac OS X. Download the Web Accessibility Inspector from www.bit.ly/aDgNZD. There’s also the Fangs screen reader emulator (www.bit.ly/bDhCfQ). It’s an add-on for Firefox that shows you how your pages will be seen by readers, enabling you to tweak the textual content.

Speed

The need for speed never went away – you should still optimise images and link to multimedia rather than embedding it directly. This is particularly pertinent in the light of Google’s recent admission that page speed is a component of its labyrinthine page rank algorithm.

OctaGate SiteTimer is a free service that not only tells you how speedy your pages are to download, but also pinpoints exactly where any bottlenecks may occur. As pages download, SiteTimer saves data on every element, recording how long each takes to download. More recently, Google came up with Page Speed, a Firefox add-on that you can use to generate a report on your code and your web server’s efficiency in delivering it. If there’s a bottleneck, Page Speed will find it.

User experience testing

Big web companies pay lots of cash to have their sites tested by specialist usability testing agencies. They’re looking for problems with the navigation system, embedded media and the site’s overall flow. However, you can cobble together your own tests with very few resources. All you really need is a group of people, some computers, a site to test and the right set of questions. Your first task is to gather a test group together. The group doesn’t have to be large, but its makeup should correspond roughly to your site’s target demographic.

Present your subjects with variations on your site or page design. Are you unsure where the shopping cart works best, or whether that dark, hi-tech colour scheme works better than a lighter, cleaner presentation? Try the different layouts out on your group of test subjects.

Put together a list of questions to ask your test group. You could ask them to rate site navigation, look and feel and whether they could easily find what they wanted. You could also ask them specifically what they liked and disliked about each aspect of the site.

The internet has become a fundamental part of our daily lives – a rich source of facts, discussion, fun and community that’s home to an infinite number of ways to share thoughts and kill boredom. There are, of course, many opportunities to achieve this in the open world too – but that’s not quite so easy for a lot of folk. For many disabled and special-needs people, the internet has proven to be truly life-changing. “It’s opened up a world that would otherwise not exist,” says Jay Cohen, founder and manager of www.disabledonline.com, a global online community comprising forums, blogs, links, resources and a store of assistive technology.

DisabledOnline is a window to a new world for many users.

Cohen suffers from muscular dystrophy, rendering him unable to use a keyboard. Nonetheless, he’s been running this busy site since launching it as a message board in 2004. “To have an opportunity to communicate with others, research information and find entertainment, all from the comfort of your home, makes the internet a true blessing for those with physical limitations,” he explains.

A real boost

Alex Barker runs and works on the Advice and Information Line for AbilityNet (www.abilitynet.org.uk), a charity that provides technological help and assistance to any of the UK’s 9.8 million disabled citizens who want it. “People with disabilities have found the internet a real boost because it helps to make life easier by providing online access to services such as banking and food shopping, and also gives them the ability to network with other people who are in the same situation as themselves,” he says. “Isolation can be an issue, but the advent of support groups means people can join an online community from the comfort of their own home.”

AbilityNet is funded by grants and donations, and by charging for some services in order to generate the money necessary to provide advice and assistance for free. It also has links with some of the tech industry’s biggest names. “Both Microsoft and IBM support us in terms of giving us office space and so on,” explains Barker. In fact, the charity was born out of IBM in the 1980s, when the company noticed a small group of its employees providing assistance to disabled users and elected to provide start-up funding for a dedicated organisation in that vein. In 2008, AbilityNet was able to directly assist 43,724 people in overcoming their accessibility issues with computers – largely through its free phone and email support lines. Particularly successful lately is the charity’s new wiki, which is known as AbilityNet GATE (Global Assistive Technology Encyclopaedia) and can be found at http://abilitynet.wetpaint.com. AbilityNet GATE can be added to and updated by anyone with anything to share about accessible computer use.

AbilityNet hosts a database of assistive tools for disabled computer users.

AbilityNet’s work with the IT world itself is just as important as the many ways it goes about providing information to its users. “I think AbilityNet as an organisation has tried to make people more aware of what is good practice in terms of the provision of IT, and hopefully we’ve managed to change the perceptions that people have of disability,” says Barker. “A computer makes it so easy for someone with a disability to work at the same speed as their peers. I work on the Advice and Information Line and it’s so rewarding helping someone change their settings on their computer to make it easier for them to work effectively.” That change in perception is key – the internet is a great leveller, providing the same potential to absolutely everyone. “The internet has made accessing information so much easier, so even if you don’t have the physical ability to go and find the information, you can probably find it online.”

As well as information, the internet gives users the option to remain anonymous. Does the fact that other internet users don’t immediately know they’re chatting to someone with a disability mean they act in a way they otherwise wouldn’t? “It may play a factor in certain situations,” thinks Cohen. “I suppose it all depends on the circumstance. I have been on social networks and chatrooms where I didn’t disclose my disability – only because I felt there wasn’t a need. Sometimes I would share this, other times I wouldn’t. The usual reaction is indifference, although there has been the occasional surprise and curiosity reaction. You really have to take it all in your stride [and remember that] most of the time you are dealing with a complete stranger.”
While there are a great many services and communities dedicated specifically to disabled and special-needs internet users, it’s a mistake to think such folk are behaving differently to anyone else online. “We mostly try to keep an open discussion,” says Jay in regard to DisabledOnline’s forums. “We want our members to have the ability to voice whatever is on their minds, as long as it’s respectful to others. We aren’t looking for any specific agendas in our chatrooms: it’s an open forum and we plan on keeping it that way.”

Neither is there a huge centralised online community available for disabled people, explains Cohen: “I think it’s just like any other segment of the population. Sometimes they get bored at one spot, so they visit another. Then they come back after a while. The community is growing, so with that more options arise.” And the web also offers the opportunity for easy and fluent discussion across international borders, something that can otherwise be very tricky for people with limited mobility. “I believe it’s helped unite the community by bringing together voices from all over the world. We have members not only from the US and UK, but from India, New Zealand, South Africa and other countries. We are truly a worldwide community.”

Vital assistance

It would be very tricky for many disabled people to enjoy the benefits of the web without the help of assistive technology – a catch-all term for anything that enables disabled people to achieve things that would be trickier without hardware or software assistance. The term encompasses everything, from ramps and dropped pavements to Braille printers and brain-computer interfaces. Also included are built-in operating systems and browser functions that make computers much easier to operate. Examples include getting the computer to emit a certain tone when the Caps Lock is activated, and the ClickLock utility, which enables highlighting and dragging of on-screen items without having to keep the left mouse button pressed.

Cohen had a definitive answer when we asked what type of assistive technology has proven most useful to him: “I have pretty severe physical limitations. So for me personally, voice recognition software has had a huge impact on my life. It allowed me the freedom to pursue my vision of creating DisabledOnline. I highly recommend it for those who have the inability of operating a standard keyboard and mouse.”

Although he helps with a broad range of different needs, AbilityNet’s Barker agrees: “I would say that one of the main developments is within voice recognition software. Quite a large number of our clients are interested in using this technology and now it’s becoming easier to access as it comes bundled with Windows Vista and Windows 7.” While third-party titles such as Dragon Naturally Speaking provide far more features, the fact that they can cost up to £200 presents a major obstacle to a lot of people who might otherwise benefit from them. Whatever else you want to say about Vista, it was a big leap forward in terms of universally available speech recognition – both for replacing mouse and keyboard dependency with voice commands, and for dictating documents and emails in almost any application. While speech software remains a long way off replacing all manual interactions with our PCs, it really comes into its own in continual usage by those who need it. It’s worth noting that we interviewed Cohen via email, and had no idea it was all done thanks to voice recognition software until he mentioned it.

The Optilech EasyLink 12 is a portable Braille reader / input device for mobile phones.

In general, though, are the major operating system and browser providers doing all that they can? “I think that it’s getting easier now for people to make small tweaks to their systems,” offers Barker. “For example, a client with Parkinson’s may benefit a lot from just turning Filter Keys on. It’s free and this just shows that adaptive technology doesn’t have to cost anything.” More standardisation online has helped too: “I have seen significant improvements with accessibility online,” says Cohen. “There are still some sites that need to improve their layouts, but in general I do see the World Wide Web Consortium Accessibility Guidelines being followed.”

The director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is original father-of-
the-internet Tim Berners-Lee, and the organisation’s Accessibility Guidelines lay out key best-practice rules that every website should follow. Major ones include providing text-based alternatives for any image, video or audio content, ensuring that everything is accessible via keyboard alone, providing easy means of navigation and orientation across busy sites and ensuring legibility. Find out more about these best-practice rules and how to implement them at www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref.

And yet website and software creators are still routinely guilty of even the most basic oversights. The issue of colour-blindness, for instance, is regularly overlooked. Only a pitiful handful of games provide alternate colour schemes for people who struggle to differentiate between green and red, and far too many design-led websites don’t seem to notice or care that their fancy Flash menus are completely inaccessible to anyone who lacks the dexterity to use a mouse.

Yet matters are gradually and continually improving. The internet succeeds in knocking down all barriers – whether they be down to age, gender, ethnicity or physical capabilities – and, as the already multifarious means of accessing it continue to increase, so too will the traditional barriers of communication and entertainment further erode.

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.