Chapter 12: PC Performance: Diagnosing, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting

Overview

Almost as reliably as your new car depreciates in value the instant you drive it off the dealer’s lot, so too does your PC performance begin to slide the moment you take it out of the box and turn it on.

Some of this degradation is to be expected. After all, the first time you turn it on, everything is fresh and new. The only installed applications are the ones that came with the system; you haven’t yet had a chance to upset the operating system by adding incompatible hardware or programs that were written back in 1986. Your hard drive hasn’t had a year or two of files tossed at it and the random PC crashes that make the hard drive scramble to write work before data is lost. In addition, it will take several more months before dust begins to clog your internal PC fans.

Fast-forward a year, and you’ve got a much different picture. Everything inside your PC may have a thin patina of dust and grime. That 20GB hard drive you were sure would last a long time is almost full, and your power supply is out of available connectors to install another drive. Even if you have an available connector, your drive bays are full, too. Your sound card sputters, your video adapter is woefully out of date, causing you problems viewing web pages and playing video games, and Windows seems to take forever to load. When it finally loads, it quibbles about the low amount of free disk space and, to make matters worse, your Startup list for Windows is so large that you only have 50 percent of your available desktop resources on startup.

This, my friends, is another type of disaster. It’s less dramatic than your power supply catching fire or lightning zapping your printer, but it’s a functional disaster nonetheless because it badly affects the proper operation of your system. Your PC is supposed to be a tool, after all; it’s not supposed to contribute to your misery.

This chapter zeroes in on PC performance: for hardware, for your applications, and for Windows.



PC Disaster and Recovery
PC Disaster and Recovery
ISBN: 078214182X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 140
Authors: Kate J. Chase

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