In last week’s post on keeping your PC in good working order, we showed you how to Empty the Recycle Bin on your PC’s desktop, and how to empty the Deleted Items folder in Microsoft Outlook. This week we’re taking a look at ‘defraging’ the hard disk on your computer, another good way to speed things up if your computer’s grindingly slow.
3. Defrag the disk every three months
The ‘disk’ is where documents and files are stored on your computer. When your PC begins to ‘write’ a file to the disk, it has no idea how big the file is and it puts in anywhere on the disk it can find space.
And if the space that it chooses isn’t big enough, it goes and finds another one, and carries on writing. The file stays in one piece, but it can be spread or ‘fragmented’ around the disk. Over time, this slows things down as the PC has to collect fragments of files whenever you want to use them.
‘Defraging’ the disk cleans things up, brings files together again, and generally speeds your PC up.
Here’s how to defrag your disk:
This brings up a panel with a number of options on it. Defragging your
disk can take a little while so it may be best to do it whilst you’re away
from your desk. Some versions of Windows allow you to schedule a defrag,
so you could, for example schedule it to run at night.
Coming up next time: clearing your browser history in Internet Explorer
First Line’s customers often ask our engineers for simple advice on how to keep their computers and other systems running smoothly. We thought this would make a helpful blog post but it turned into such a monster, we’ve divided it out into a series of posts.
Here are the first two of five things you can do to keep your PC in good working order:
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Reading the headlines and listening to the news can make you very depressed. You can just feel like battening down the hatches when you get into work and be afraid of continuing to invest in order to grow.
Yet I keep wondering whether thing are really that bad. Yes we are seeing large companies coming into our market trying to pinch our customers by offering silly headline prices and then whacking them with extra costs once signed up to a 12 month contract. Yes we are seeing customers trying to squeeze the lowest possible price out ouf us.
Despite all that we are are still winning new business and our existing customers are buying new kit and investing in their business. So I’ve decided we have to press ahead and to that end we have just taken on an apprentice. Yes I have increased my cost in uncertain times, but I hope I will have a well trained and motivated employee reday to go when things really do pick up.
Most importantly there is one less 16 year old looking for work.
Over the Christmas and New Year period our opening hours will be as follows:
Friday 23rd December
Monday 26th December
- public holiday – office closed
Tuesday 27th December
- public holiday – office closed
Wednesday 28th December
- office closed, duty engineer available 09:00 to 5:00pm
- emergencies only, please call 01865 260 220 or email us
Thursday 29th December
- office closed, duty engineer available
- emergencies only, please call 01865 260 220 or email us
Friday 30th December
- office closed, duty engineer available
- emergencies only, please call 01865 260 220 or email us
Monday 2nd January
- public holiday, office closed
Tuesday 3rd January
- business as usual, office opens at 8am
A leased line is a fast, reliable private internet connection. They used to be something only large corporates could afford. But like all technology, as more and more people use them, prices are tumbling really fast.
A 10Mb connection provides enough bandwidth for up to a couple of hundred employees. Two years ago it would have cost £2,000 per month. We’re currently offering the same connection at around £500 to £600 per month and I suspect prices will continue to fall. This makes Bonded ADSL solutions, – where you join together more than one broadband line, look expensive for what you get in comparison.
This price drop makes leased lines affordable for companies with 20 to 50 employees and makes putting your servers in a data centre a more viable solution.
Yes, you did read that correctly. I’ve just put a device in my house which turns a mains power socket into a computer network socket.
The devices come in pairs: you plug one into your router and into a mains socket nearby, and you plug the other into a mains socket anywhere in the house where you want to access the internet.
Then it’s just a matter of plugging your computer into the device using a normal network cable, and away you go.
It’s great if you’ve got a house like mine over three stories, or with thick stone walls, or with corners that are hard-to-get-to for a wireless signal. It’s also much better (ie much faster) than wireless if you want to stream music or video over the internet.
Depending on the brand, they cost between about £50 and £70 a pair and the devices are interchangeable: getting two pairs gives you three output points. Search google for ‘ethernet over power‘, or drop me a line and we’ll get them for you.
Following on from my last blog I am pleased to tell you that Jim Richardson joins us this month. Jim is a senior engineer with many years experience of running IT support teams. Jim will be taking on the role of Helpdesk Manager so that as we grow and take on more customers we will continue to improve our services.
Our main reason for hiring Jim is to ensure that all our engineers communicate well with our customers despite the increasing workload as well as fixing problems quickly and well.
Our recent recruitment campaign has proved to be very successful. David Swinburne joined at the beginning of last month and we hope to have another new member of the team in July.
That takes us up to a strength of 9 in the team now reflecting our rapid growth over the last 12 months.
Currently we do not have any other vacancies but do keep an eye on this site in the future.
Yes, we’re hiring again. If you’re an experienced IT support engineer and you fancy a new challenge, check out the job description here.
If you’re not experienced and you fancy getting trained up in a busy, growing IT support company, check out the job description here.
For more information, call to speak to Barrie on 01865 260 220, or email your CV to jobs@firstline-it.com
If you’re a recruitment company please don’t get in touch, we’ve got this covered.
One of the problems John Crozier and I have been wrestling with over the last couple of years is how to get a good internet connection while on holiday, so we can keep in touch with the business.
Also, because I spend much of my time away from work in France, the cost of my data usage has been escalating in the last year or two.
Well I’m delighted to say it looks like we’ve solved these problems with an unlocked 3G dongle made by Huawei. It’s currently available from Amazon for about £75.
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