For a few easy ways to make your computer faster we should start and see what exactly your computer is currently running. One of the top factors of computer speed is having enough available resources. Obviously if your computer is busy doing other things it isn't going to have enough resources to do what you want it to do.

Determine what your computer is currently using.

     Do you need all the programs that are running? If you are running Windows XP simply click on 'Start' then 'Run' then type 'msconfig', by then clicking on the Startup tab you can all the startup programs for this computer. Most of these are generally not needed and take up valuable resources. It is outside this scope to determine what exactly you need and do not need. Un checking un-needed programs and then restarting will result in your computer doing less things you don't and more things you want.

     You will notice in above image the startup item qttask is highlighted. This is a perfect example of a un-needed startup program. This is put there by the Quicktime application, an application that allows your PC to play MOV files. Now when you want to play a MOV file you either access it via a website or you double click on the file. You do not need this task constantly running. Now how many other applications have a un-needed constantly running program. All that adds up rather quickly and soon your PC is running slower for no reason.

Let's look at some other un-needed startup programs from the above image.

• QTTASK
  Used by Quicktime, not needed - remove it!
• CTFMON
  Used by Microsoft Office, totally optionally - remove it.
• REALSCHED
  Used by Real Player, ugh the worst company ever, their applications are filled with so much junk and they add annoying shortcut programs, definitily remove it!

Make sure you have enough free space.

     This is not as a big issue as most people make it out to be. A common misconception is that storing too many photos or games on a computer will slow it down. If you have a 80 GB hard drive and you are using 40GB on your photo and game collection that will actually have little impact on your computers performance. Again the main factors are having available resources, aka Memory. Hard drive space is different than your computers Memory or RAM. That being said it is still in good practice to be should your computer drive is not more than 90% full and de fragmenting your hard drive is always a quick way to speed up performance. For more information on disk de fragmenting including a full tutorial, please click here.

Check your systems for Spyware / Virus infections

     Many computers currently are infected with Spyware or Virus programs and do not know it. Run a full virus scan and check for Spyware. This is outside the scope of this document but we also offer tutorials for both of these.

Hardware upgrade

     If you do everything you can so far to be sure your computer isn't allowing rogue programs to hog up resources you may want to consider purchasing additional Memory for your computer. 

Thanks for providing the smitRem tool, it was great at getting rid of the installed program and pop-up.  After running it though, my display still stays with the basic blue background.  If I try to change the wallpaper in display settings, I cannot select any of the patterns and the scrollbar does not move.  I think that the "desktop" tab of the display settings has been faked somehow.  The various files like 'aquarium, ascent' aren't actually .bmp's in the Windows directory.  This is the same problem that I noticed before I ran smitRem.  I have used webshots for wallpaper and while that runs fine, it does not change the wallpaper image either.  Is there something else that I still have to remove?

Here is a shot of the desktop settings that I am talking about.

Answer:

http://www.freecomputeradvice .net/downloads/fixreg.zip

Will that solve that, just download and run those to items. You may have to restart. 

If you are having issues with your hard drive or have corrupted files, its a good idea to boot into the Recovery Console and run a hard drive scan. The advantages are this does not require you to boot into Windows. So if your computer is unable to boot into Windows; don't worry.

If you have the Recovery Console installed

If your PC has the Recovery Console already installed whether you did it yourself or it came from the manufacturer that way. When your computer first turns on hit the F8 key every second. When the menu comes up; look for 'Boot using Recovery Console'. If you see it great, click on it and lets get going.

If you do NOT have the Recovery Console installed.

Ok no big deal. Insert your Windows XP Home or Professional CD in and restart your PC you should see 'Press any key to boot from CD...' click any key, any one will do. At the first menu hit 'R' for Repair. It may ask what version of Windows to boot into you probably want to choose the one that says C:\WINNT. It will ask you for the administrative password, you will need to know that.

Once you are in type

chkdsk /r

It will run and hopefully find and repair your hard drive errors. If it says 'Your hard drive contains one or more unrecoverable errors' you may have to replace your hard drive. 

Many times to troubleshoot a computer problem it can be much easier if the technician can see the exact error message that you are seeing. Luckily for us Windows XP comes with a way to do just that. If your computer can send email with Outlook or Outlook Express then you can very easily send a screen shot.

When you see the error message click the 'Prnt Scrn' button your keyboard, then create a new email message, address it to the person you want to see the error. Now in the message body text, just click your cursor there and hit CTRL+V to paste the picture.

That's it! The screen shot that was captured when you hit PrntScrn is now pasted in the message, you can now send. Hopefully the technician can help. 

Talk about frustration! You found the virus files using HiJack This, you remove them. Yet when you restart they reappear. When you try and manually delete the file you get an 'Access is denied' or something simliar. So what gives? Today we'll be going over some tactics on how to remove files that are in use and are  hard to delete.

Move It!

The first and easier way to remove hard to delete files is to use a program called OTMoveIt! This thing is great, you type in the file name and then most of the time it deletes the file. Another great program is killbox. A great thing about both these programs that is if the program cannot be deleted, it will try and remove it on the next reboot. Something very useful for those hard to delete files.

• Download - OTMoveIt
• Download - KillBox

Just to be safe

Sometimes even those great programs won't cut it. For extreme cases you may have to add an extra step or two. Fortunately its really easy - boot into safe mode. Yep when you are in safe mode Windows disables almost all functionality so hopefully that means these virus programs too.

Boot into Safe Mode by:

1. Restarting your PC
2. Press F8 until a menu comes up asking you to make a selection
3. Choose Safe Mode and press enter

You're in. Now try the same process as above using the removal tools and good luck. If you still have problems leave us a note in our Ask A Question section.

Today was a nightmare. I had a customer that was unable to access secure web sites. They were using Internet Explorer 7 and this happened after a very bad virus. I cleaned up the virus using HiJack This, OTMoveit, and a few other programs. (See a quick guide on how to remove spyware programs). Rebooted and everything was gone. Fantastic. However now they were unable to access secure web sites. So I did what I always do - Googled it. I found a lot of great solutions unforatunately for me none of them worked. I'm happy to say that after a few hours I did figure out what happened and I have the answer here!

I notice that in Internet Explorer I clicked on Help then About and saw the Cypher Strength was "0 Bit". This is bad and should 128 bit. This certainly explains why the secure web sites did not work. I've had this happen to me before and the fix is normally pretty easy. You just re-register a few DLL files. How? Just copy the below text.

regsvr32 Shdocvw.dll
regsvr32 Shell32.dll
regsvr32 Oleaut32.dll
regsvr32 Actxprxy.dll
regsvr32 Mshtml.dll
regsvr32 Urlmon.dll
regsvr32 softpub.dll
regsvr32 softpub.dll
regsvr32 wintrust.dll
regsvr32 initpki.dll
regsvr32 dssenh.dll
regsvr32 rsaenh.dll
regsvr32 gpkcsp.dll
regsvr32 sccbase.dll
regsvr32 slbcsp.dll
regsvr32 cryptdlg.dll

This is all the files (and some extra) that have anything to do with Internet Explorer and your encryption. Once you copied the above list just get to a command prompt window (click Start then Run then CMD then enter).

Once you have your command prompt window just right click and hit Paste. You will see series of windows coming up and hopefully your only response is OK and the box said successful. However in my case on two of the files I got an error. So what I had to do is copy two files (dssenh.dll and mshtml.dll) from my personal computer to the clients c:\windows\system32 directory. Then re-register the files as below.

regsvr32 dssenh.dll
regsvr32 mshtm.dll

That's it! Now Internet Explorer says 128 bit Encryption and the client is happy!

If you recently have been infected with a virus you may now be unable to change your desktop background. Typically the virus will replace your background with a big ugly. 'You are infected!' background. Of course it'll ask you to buy their 'cure' that will solve all of your problems. This is bad and we want to back to our World of Warcraft background. Here's how to do it.

I recently received this question.

"Thanks for providing the smitRem tool, it was great at getting rid of the installed program and pop-up.  After running it though, my display still stays with the basic blue background.  If I try to change the wallpaper in display settings, I cannot select any of the patterns and the scrollbar does not move.  I think that the "desktop" tab of the display settings has been faked somehow.  The various files like 'aquarium, ascent' aren't actually .bmp's in the Windows directory.  This is the same problem that I noticed before I ran smitRem.  I have used webshots for wallpaper and while that runs fine, it does not change the wallpaper image either.  Is there something else that I still have to remove?"

You can see in the above screen shot this user is unable to change their background. Fortunately for us this is actually pretty easy to fix and can be done with a simple registry edit. I have both of the registry files available for download here so here they are.

• Download 'Can't change background' fix

I've had this warning pop up on my laptop for about 4 days now. I hate it. I'm telling the world now I hate Window's automatic updates. The whole thing sounds so nice, your computer will be kept up to date automatically. Unfortunately its a major pain in the ass. Microsoft will update your computer automatically but then this stupid message will pop up over and over again. Worst than that the Window takes focus over everything you are doing. So you could be typing then lookup and see everything you just typed didn't make it to the screen. You could have even accidentally clicked yes on this message and begun a reboot you didn't want.

I just hate stuff like this, its annoying. I'm still running Vista so you may wonder if the problem still exist on Vista. Yep. It does and its even more annoying. Note to Microsoft - please make it so if you have automatic updates on it doesn't beg you to restart your pc. Just have it install the next time the PC is restarted.

'Updating your computer is almost complete. You must restart your computer for the updates to take effect. Do you want to restart your computer now?'