Tech Tips                                 

Top 3 Reasons your PC is running slow

1) Needs cleaning and/or defragmentation: Depending on usage and how often your on the internet, your PC needs cleaned at a minimum on a weekly basis. Ideally you should utilize the disk clean-up tool daily either upon boot or shutdown. You should run a disk defragmentation ( defrag ) once a week. Both of these tasks you can schedule to run automatically under the "scheduled tasks" tool which you can find in your Control Panel under "Administrative Tasks".

2) More than one anti-virus or malware program running. On atleast 85% of the calls we go on we find more than one anti-virus and/or malware program. It's a common misperception that more protection is better. When it comes to anti-virus programs the opposite is true. These applications to not "play nice together" as my Mom would say. Infact they perceive each other as a threat and have a tendency to attack one another. Meanwhile your computer is running dog-slow because they are constantly running in the background consuming resources. Our recommendation is simple: remove all anti-virus programs. ( in most cases you will need to weed them out of your registry - call a professional don't attempt on your own ) Then install Microsoft Security Essentials. It's free, it does not need upgraded or renewed and who better to protect your Microsoft OS than Microsoft?

3) Your desktop is cluttered. Much like your physical desk space at work if you keep it cluttered with unecessary folders your impeding your productivity. The more apps, folders, and files you keep on your desktop the more RAM you're consuming while trying to process other things. It's better to keep your desktop to a minimum. The amount of time it takes to find a commonly used application in your programs you will save in performance.

Technology Review     

 

How today's Smart Phones Measure Up: By CNET

the CNET Labs, ran four different tests to evaluate the performance of smartphones.


Battery life

For the iPhone, they ran the iPhone version of "Toy Story 3." For Android phones, a 720p version of "Toy Story 3" is run.
On iPhone, they ran the movie through its iPod app; for Android, they used the movie player, mVideoPlayer, as it provides a much-needed repeat video function that not all native Android movie players include.
Site-loading speed
GiantBomb.com was used as Web site of choice; it doesn't use Flash or have many dynamic elements. Each tablet was connected to the same closed network (not its mobile network) with no other devices on it, with the router about 5 feet away.
Boot time
Rebooting your phone can sometimes solve issues you might be having with apps not functioning correctly, so it's good to know how long it take to get back to action.


Analysis

In their tests, the Verizon iPhone 4 had much longer audio battery life than its AT&T counterpart. This likely has a lot to do with the Verizon iPhone 4 having an easier time maintaining a mobile network signal than the At&T version does. It's likely, then, if you live in an area like San Francisco where AT&T coverage isn't the best, you may see longer battery life with a Verizon iPhone 4 than with At&T's.
As for Android phones, the Nexus S has the longest video battery life, but the Atrix is--by a slim margin--the fastest at loading Web sites.
Overall, although iOS 4.3 speeds up the iPhone 4, it's still not quite as fast as the Atrix or Nexus S.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20041273-1.html#ixzz1GQxLO2pZ