Good to Great

New PC’s are in the air for lots of us. This can be an awesome experience or this can be a pain trying to get what you want and setup the way you need. Most users forget some basic steps or they just haven’t been informed of them. We expect new PCs to run good, but how about making a new PC run GREAT, after all you did spend your hard-earned money on it! Here are some simple steps that will improve your new PC before you even start working on it.

1.Remove the extra- Most PC’s purchased from a big-box store comes with all kinds of extra tools,trails, and worthless pieces of software on these machines. This all needs to be removed. If you aren’t going to use it then REMOVE IT. These things are just taking up space and will cause problems on your machine.

2.ANTI- Virus and Malware ASAP- So many people either forget or don’t realize how important this is. Most users only think their pc has been attacked by a virus when the pc totally stops working, but this isn’t the case viruses and malware outbreaks progressively get worse over time. This should be the first thing done after a pc is taken out of the box. As soon as the pc has a network connection it is vulnerable to viruses and malware.  Also make sure you are only using ONE antivirus solution on each machine.

3.Maintenance – This applies to all Windows deployment that you have. Be sure you have disk Cleanup and Defragmenter set up to happen regularly. Do not depend on your end-users to do this because they will forget, after all we are human. When setting up your scheduled maintenance to take place also set up scheduled antivirus and anti-malware scans to take place along with daily definition updates.

4.Disabling Services- Windows machines have services that are not needed. Example You never send or re taxes through your PC. Why not make sure the tax service is not running? Each user will need to go through and find the services that are useless to them and then remove them. Before you disable any services make sure you know what it does before you disable it. The links below can help with that info provided by TechRepublic.

• Windows XP SP3 services that can be disabled
• Windows Vista services that can be disabled
• Boost security by disabling these 10 Windows XP services
• Video: Disable and enable Windows XP services
• Tweak Windows Vista Services the right way

5.Turn off Aero in Vista or Windows 7-  A PC can be slow right out of the box, if this happens it could mean it barely has the resources to run everything necessary. You can give it a boost by turning off the Aero feature in either Vista or Windows 7. This will disable all of the GUI elements of the OS, but give you back some speed. For Vista, right click on the desktop, select Personalize, and then click Window Color and Appearance. Next, click Open Classic Appearance Properties For More Color Options. In the Appearance Settings Dialog box select Windows Vista Basic from the Color Scheme list. For Windows 7 just right click the desktop, select Personalize, and then scroll down until you see Basic Themes, Select a basic theme and Aero will be disabled.

All pretty simple huh? There are many other ways to improve your PC, but these are the most basic and common things that can really help.

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