Check Your Computer Frequently

If your PC’s not powering up, don’t immediately panic and run around the room while you’re shouting and tearing your hair out (obviously I’ve done this before). Here are some basic tips on how to seal with this problem before you call your local (and expensive) PC repair man.Check if your PC’s plugged in. Yes, boys and girls, there’s been a lot of situation where the the computer gets unplugged when your electric-bill-crazy-mom would pull it out while you’re away from keyboard to save on the utility charges. Or you forgot that you pulled it out last night.Have this ever happened to you? You go to the office on a Saturday morning to email a document to your boss (who just absolutely need to have it that same morning: on a SATURDAY) and you power on your computer. It goes through the same routine and then you wait….and wait…and wait until all the Windows program end loading. By the time it stops loading the morning is over and your boss is pissed. If this never happened to you, you’re lucky—it happened to me. Anyway, enough about me, let’s see what we can do for you.

It’s not only start-up that you’d like to speed up; you can also make sure that your system shuts down faster. If shutting down XP takes what seems to be an inordinate amount of time, here are a couple of steps you can take to speed up the shutdown process:Don’t have XP clear your paging file at shutdown. For security reasons, you can have XP clear your paging file (pagefile.sys) of its contents whenever you shut down. Your paging file is used to store temporary files and data, but when your system shuts down, information stays in the file. Some people prefer to have the paging file cleared at shutdown because sensitive information such as unencrypted passwords sometimes ends up in the file. However, clearing the paging file can slow shutdown times significantly, so if extreme security isn’t a high priority, you might not want to clear it.