Computer Customizing Guide Blog

One problem I see from a lot of people is that their computer is working fine, and then it just shuts off. This can be extremely frustrating since nothing seems wrong with your Operating System, so what could it be? Well most likely it is because your computer is overheating.

Built into just about every computer that exists in the world, is a digital thermometer that monitor’s the internal temperature of the power supply and the CPU. If that temperature gets to a dangerous level, your computer will the just shut off right away, without asking you as a safety precaution so fires don’t start.

Obviously they are just trying to protect consumers, but it can get annoying when the temperature in your home or business rises because of the season, and starts making your computer turn off. To stop this though, or at least stop it the best that you can, is to help your computer breathe better.

One way to do this is to move your computer farther away from the wall and other objects around it, so air can circulate easily. Another way is to clean out the dust in your computer regularly, because if it builds up it too prevents air circulation and makes it hotter inside.

Of course if none of that works and it just will not stop overheating, you can always buy and install much more powerful fans on the CPU, or a better power supply with a more powerful fan. The Power Supply and the CPU are really the only two things that get hot inside of your computer, so those are the 2 main parts you need to worry about.

Also, just an interesting piece of information, you can have your computer setup to have liquid nitrogen running through tubes, throughout the entire computer. This is an extremely efficient way to cool your computer, but can be expensive and very tedious to maintain.

I get countless numbers of emails from people who just can’t get the Windows Desktop to show up on their monitor. I hear complaints of “it comes on at first, then the screen just goes black” all the way to “my desktop is only showing the color gray for everything.”

The fact of the matter is, these are common problems and most video/graphic display problems can be fixed if the user just knew a little extra important information.

The first thing every computer user should know about their computers display properties is that most computers have a video card built into it’s main circuit board. This means any additional video/graphic cards you install, or that came with it, are the secondary display device.

This causes a problem because the computer tends to want to display the default display device at first, leaving you with a black screen because your monitor is plugged into the other display device port. This can be changed one of two ways, through Windows or your computers BIOS setup screen, or by physically moving a jumper on your computers motherboard.

Your computers motherboard is the big main circuit board inside your computer, and a jumper is a little tab like piece of plastic that connects two pins together. If this is the way your computer makes you enable the video/graphics card, then the jumper will be located somewhere on your motherboard. Somewhere might be a broad term, but motherboards come in many different shapes, sizes, brands and varieties, so I can not be certain where your’s would be located.

Note: If you cannot find it with your eyes, read your motherboard or computers manual to see where it is.

The next piece of important information, and really the last piece you need to know, is how to adjust your display properties. From Windows 95 and up Microsoft has always made it easy to adjust these properties by just right clicking anywhere on your desktop, and then click “Properties”.

The Properties box will open, and you will see several sections that allow you to adjust various things, like the appearance, resolution, monitor set up, color scheme, wallpaper, screen saver and much more.

Knowledge of these two factors will greatly help you in diagnosing and fixing about 90% of the display problems you have, and the other 10% of problems are usually caused because your video/graphics card has gone bad and you just need a new one.

A simple way to speed up the loading time of your applications, games, etc, is to run a disk defragmenter program. What this does is organize your data together because it gets spread out on your hard drive over time.

By grouping it back together, your hard drive doesn’t have much further to reach when it is loading the data, plus it has to work less so it increases your hard drives life span.

So, to defragment in Windows XP, just click your “Start” button on the task bar, go to “Programs”, then “Accessories” and then finally “System Tools”. In the System Tools folder there is a program called “Disk Defragmenter”. Just open the program and run it over night, because it tends to take a long time. The next morning just reboot and you will immediately notice the speed difference.

If you are using Windows Vista, I read that you can schedule disk defragmentation’s monthly with the scheduler so it will do it automatically overnight, once a month for you.

When it comes to getting rid of spam, there are really only two options that will work wonders, and the rest just slightly stop spam from coming in. The first option, and best in my opinion, is to use Gmail, Google’s free email service.

When Google made GMAIL, they purchased the best spam filtering software available, and let me tell you that it worked. Unfortunately the software they purchased is only viable for large companies, but Google made it so everyone could have it through their service. So what makes it so special? Well I don’t really know the inner workings, but let me say that I never receive any spam in my GMAIL account. This of course doesn’t mean that one won’t occasionaly slip through, but still, that is pretty good for me who receives more then a thousand spam emails a day.

The next option is to use the Thunderbird email program, which is similar to Outlook, but much easier to use in my opinion. The reason though that this is a great second option, is becasue of it adaptive spam filter built in, that over time reads all of the emails that you mark as junk, and over time you will receive less and less of it.

Out of the two options though, GMAIL is your best bet, but of course you can’t always use a Google email address so sometimes you need a great program like Thunderbird. It all depends on your situation.

Temporary files and folders build up over time and eat up a lot of memory. This is something that can easily be cleaned up on Windows, without having to find and delete each and every file.

First, just go to “My Computer” on your desktop and double click to open it. Once that window is open, just Right click on your hard drive, whether it be labeled Drive C, D, E or whatever hard drive you want to clean up.

Once you right click, a drop down menu appears and at the bottom it says “Properties”. Click properties to open the properties box. Once in there, just click “Disk Cleanup”, and it will began deleting unused files and folders that just take up space.

Note: This works on all version of Windows XP, and I believe all the Windows versions that existed before that. Windows Vista might be a little different though, but is also probably easier.