Does Defragmenting Really Help?

November 10, 2011
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So today I was working on a Gateway laptop for a client and I had this conference call today that was going to last at least an hour so I decieded to defragment the laptop.  I have always wondered if this really does work and if it would speed up the laptop or boot up time.  So before I ran this I made sure to delete and temp files.

After that was done I turned off the laptop and took out my stopwatch.  I turned the laptop on and started the laptop. Once it was fully booted up (I used MSN messenger as my stopping point) I would stop the timer.  It came back with 1 mintues and 39 seconds to boot up.  So now with my baseline I then started the deframentation. 

It took about an hour and 20 minutes to run but once that was done I shutdown the laptop and did the stopwatch test again.  To my surprise it took only 1 minute and 24 seconds to boot up to MSN messenger.  A whole 15 seconds faster!! 🙂  After playing the laptop a little bit it seemed to open up programs and access files a little quicker so I can say that it does work and worth doing. 

Got to go now as I’m off to defragment my laptops and computers. 🙂  Give it a try and let me know if you notice any difference as I would love to hear about it.

RG

Internet Explorer (IE) is Slow To Load

October 31, 2011
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Just thought I would share with you a tip I found as my IE was starting to take a long time to load up the first page. After making sure my internet connection was fine and tyring out firefox (which had no issues loading up) I knew it had to be something else in IE. Many times there are add-ons that are installed that can cause IE to load up slowly. So here is a quick way to find out which add-ons you have and how long it takes for them to load. In Internet Explorer click on Tools then go to Managae Add-Ons. Now on the window that pops up right click on one of the columns and then go to columns and choose load time (if there is already a checkmark next to it you don’t need to do anything).

 

Now you may need to scroll over to the right but you should have a column called load time and you will now be able to see how long these add-ons are taking to load. Now you can disable the ones that are taking the longest to load or unistall the ones you don’t need.  I would suggest you do this one at a time to narrow down which one was causing IE to load slowly.  Once you narrow it down then you can either uinstall it or maybe reinstall or find an update for it.  For me it was a DVR plugin that was causing my issues and once i disabled it IE was loading much faster.

RG

Vista Has Missing Desktop Icons and Documents

September 21, 2011
2 Comments

I came across this issue yesterday and wanted to let you know what I found and how you can go about fixing this.  The computer I saw this on was running Windows Vista but I imagine it could also happen on windows 7 or XP.  Anyways, I found that the laptop had a virus and this virus had hidden all the desktop, documents, and other files and folders to make it look like you had lost everything on your computer.  The first thing you need to do is make sure your anti virus program is up to date and run a full scan.  After that you should also go to http://malwarebytes.org/ and downloand and run a full scan of this also.  Once you know for sure you have gotten rid of the virus and or malware you can now download unhide.exe from http://download.bleepingcomputer.com/grinler/unhide.exe . Download this program and run it.  It may take sometime to run but once it’s done you should hopefully be able to see your files on the desktop and under the Documents folder.  **NOW GO BUY A BACKUP DRIVE AND BACKUP YOUR DATA!**.  You will have hopefully learned a lesson here and realize that you got lucky but next time it could be worse.  So please go buy a backup drive or use a service such as Mozy and backup your data today.

I hope this helps you as it can be a really scary to turn on your computer and think you have just lost everything. 

RG

itunes cannot run because some of its required files are missing

September 11, 2011
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I recently came across this problem and thought it would be an easy fix if I just reinstalled or repaired the itunes application, but I was wrong.  If you ever come across the message “Itunes cannot run because some of its required files are missing” here is what you need to do. 

1) Uninstall itunes and quicktime player. (don’t worry your music and videos will be fine as they are stored in a different folder than the itunes program and you will not lose your music.)

2) Uninstall quicktime player. Then restart your comptuer.

3) Now go to www.itunes.com and download the latest version of itunes and install this. It will install itunes and quicktime player. Once this is installed you will now be able to open up the itunes application and everything should be back to normal working condition.

I’m not sure why this error message comes up and wasn’t able to find out how or what causes this but doing a repair or reinstall will not fix this problem. Anyways, I hope this helps some of you and some of the fustration on this odd error.

Freecell Columns Messed Up

August 1, 2011
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I came across this problem a few days ago and thought I would do a quikc post on how to fix this problem.  The problem is that in freecell the columns get all screwed up and the cards no longer line up in their correct columns. This can get worse as you play the game and then it gets to the point where you get even see other cards. So here is how to fix this.

1) Close out the freecell game then go to my computer and then click on the c drive and then double click on the users folder and then go to your folder.

2) Now go to saved games folder and click on microsoft games and you will see a folder called freecell. Double click on the freecell folder and then delete everything under there.

Example of folder path would be

example c:\users\owner\savedgames\microsoftgames\freecell

3) Now go back and open up freecell and it should look normal again.

I hope this helps someone as this took me some searching on the internet to figure this out. Please post any comments if you have questions or problems.