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How to Speed Up, Clean Up, and Revive Your Home PC

Flowers are blooming and birds are chirping, which means it’s time to start your yearly spring cleaning extravaganza. While you’re emptying your closets, decluttering, and getting rid of the bloat in your life, why not do the same for your computer? Here are some simple, easy to follow tips to give your trusted Windows PC a little spring cleaning of its own.

Clean Up Your Hardware

We’ll start with the outside of your machine, since you probably have all those cleaning products out for your household cleaning anyway. Turn it off and unplug everything. Whether you have a laptop or a desktop, your main priority is probably going to be the keyboard and mouse. Luckily, you can clean them pretty easily with just a few household objects.

You’ll also want to get inside your computer’s case and clean any dust out of the fans to keep everything running cool and quiet. All you need is a little compressed air to do a pretty thorough job. Laptops, unfortunately, usually require a lot more work. You’ll have to refer to your computer’s instruction manual for more information on how to take it apart.

Tame Your Cable Clutter

As you head back to your desk to replace your newly-cleaned computer, take some time to organize your cables first. There are a number of ways to do this, from a simple binder clips on your desk to a a actual cable management part.

Get Up to Date

Alright, so you’ve plugged your machine back in at your pristine workspace, and now it’s time to get down to the good stuff: software. Before you do anything else, head to Windows Update and make sure all your software is up to date—drivers, service packs, security updates, and so on. Simply click the start menu and look for Windows Update. You will be brought to a screen that looks like the picture below. You can now just click on the updates you want to run!

Reclaim Hard Drive Space

If you’re starting to run out of space on your drive, it’s time to take a really good look at what might be causing it. There are better programs that will yield better results but to keep it simple just use the Windows’ built-in Disk Cleanup app. Find your C Drive and right click over it to select Properties. When the properties screen opens you will see the Disk Clean up. Once this is done then start deleting stuff you don’t need and getting some of that disk space back.

Protect your Hard Work

Keep your antivirus program turned on and up to date. We recommend Symantec Endpoint Protection which can be purchased through Cinch IT, but if you are in search of a something free there is always Microsoft Security Essentials: To download go to: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security-essentials-download

Lastly Back Up Your Refreshed PC

Lastly, it’s time to back up your newly cleaned PC. Hopefully, you had a backup system in place before this whole thing, but if not, we recommend setting up a failproof, offsite backup system with Cinch IT. Once we set it up, you never really have to think about it again. Alternatively, you can always just back up to an external drive using the built-in Windows Backup, but we’d still recommend backing up your super important files to something like Dropbox, since this won’t protect you from things like fires, earthquakes, drive failures, or anything else that could destroy your backup.

Nice article Mike Clark!

http://www.wbjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20121015/PRINTEDITION/310129994/0/SPECIALEDITIONS

If you like, you can reference this PDF, which is one of the most recent studies on how using multiple monitors changes productivity. I’ll try to summarize the article and really hit on the main points, supplementing them with my own experience.

There are some basic numbers in the article that really stand out. In one test, going from a single monitor to a dual monitor cut the time it took to perform a task from 19 minutes to 16.5 minutes. This 2.5 minutes easily adds up over the course of a day. If a person averages 3 20 minute tasks per hour, and saves 2.5 minutes per task, they will save 60 minutes over the course of the day. If you stretch this out over the course of a year, you go from roughly 260 days of work to 292. A second monitor is a small investment for an extra 32 days of productivity over the year. While these numbers are of course the ideal scenario, they were experienced in the study. Even if they were cut in half, we’re still looking at a really good increase.

Other than the raw performance increase in productivity, dual monitors are also just easier to work with. Speaking from experience, they help to cut down on feeling rushed or stressed, and make it easier to focus on the task at hand. An employee will spend less time trying to find what s/he was trying to do, and more time doing it. Personally, nothing is more frustrating to me than switching out of a window to find information I needed, only to be interrupted. With dual monitors, this isn’t a big problem, as chances are your previous task is still right there, but if you only have one screen you may find your primary task buried under a bunch of to-dos and that can make it difficult, frustrating, and stressful to try to get your work done. As business owners, you know that once employees become visibly frustrated with the tools they have to work with, it becomes much harder to get them to work productively.

This is a short post today, but there is so little ammunition to fire against the dual-monitor argument. I can’t think of anyone whose productivity would not increase by doubling their available work space. I suppose I should note that I use 3 monitors myself. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Long answer:

Yes. In our experience access to personal email is the primary cause of malicious software entering the workplace. When running your company, the last thing you want to do is spend lots of money and time on securing your network, only to allow users access to personal email and have them compromise it. That nice spam filter you have? Virus blocker? Phishing Blocker? Malware blocker? All of that gets completely bypassed when a user accesses their msn, yahoo, gmail, or aol account.

Of course, to every rule there are exceptions. At some point or another, most of your users will ask you for access to their personal email accounts. You need to take these on a case by case basis. With the popularity of smartphones, most people have access to their personal email right in their pocket. I don’t see a reason why people with smartphones need access to their email on their company email. People without smartphones will plead their case, and you need to use your best judgment.

Normally, these discussions go on for a little bit more, but this is a simpler topic. Despite being simple, it still comes up very often at virtually every workplace. However, the final reasoning is this: It is not work related. It is on your work network. It has a good chance of allowing malicious files into your work network, potentially requiring a person’s computer to be re-installed. So yes, you should block access to personal email on your network.

If you own a business that shares files between computers, chances are you were recommended to make your network gigabit at some point. Its one of the first things that IT consultants will recommend, and rightfully so. Here’s some background info on why every IT professional recommends a gigabit network.

Gigabit (Gb) vs Gigabyte (GB) vs Megabit (Mb) vs Megabyte (MB) :

This comes down to computer basics. There are 8 bits in 1 byte. There are 1000 megabits in 1 gigabit, just like the metric system. Most of what you see is measured in bytes. When you buy a new harddrive, it is advertised as 500 GB or gigabytes. Measured in bits, this would be 4000 Gb or gigabits. Megabits/bytes are just smaller, but follow the same principle. When you download something, you’ll often see internet explorer say that you’re downloading it at 1.5MB/s, or Megabytes per second. This equals 12 megabits per second, or Mbps. This is the same reason that ISPs advertise their Megabit speed (its bigger).

Now, lets discuss how this affects your network. If you have a 100Mb (megabit) network, the maximum throughput on your network is going to be ~12.5MB/s. This means that if you have 12 people sharing documents on the network, they will start to experience slowdown quickly. As an example, I have multiple word documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in my documents folder (which is on a server) that are well over 1MB each. Some of which are over 5MB. If there are 3 people sharing 5MB files, they will being to wait more than a second, or even multiple seconds, to access the files.

Now, extrapolate the above over a full day of work, add 5, 10, or 15 or so people, consider the fact that they are multitasking, sending and receiving emails,and are most likely on the internet for one reason or another. Do you start to see how 100Mb, or 12.5MB, simply won’t cut it? The traffic in your office can get slowed down just as it does on your commute. Using a 100Mbps switch is like that 1 lane state highway that makes you late to work every morning. Wouldn’t you like to use a 10 lane expressway?

That analogy is accurate. A gigabit switch (usually called 10/100/1000)  is exactly ten times faster than a 100 megabit switch (10/100). Instead of 12.5MB/s total bandwith, you have 125MB/s. Downloads, uploads, file transfers, even printing… everything is faster. When things are faster, your employees are happier. They’re more productive. They put in less support tickets. Everything improves. There is zero downside to them. The increased productivity they bring more than pays for the upfront cost of the switch(es).

Traffic is bad enough to and from work. Improve the traffic at work. Being on a gigabit network should be one of your highest priorities at your business.