Are you optimized? It’s a strange, yet important, question
for anyone using Windows because Windows is notorious for eating memory
like candy and hard drive space like a well-deserved meal. Fortunately,
you have control. You can make Windows behave and it doesn’t require
a lot of work. All you need it a little information and some idea
of how you want your computing environment optimized. Therefore, the
question, “Are you optimized?” is more along the lines of whether
you have control over Windows, or does Windows control you. This site
is a doorway to knowledge — a key that unlocks the control that you
need and want over Windows.
Many people confuse optimization and speed. Yes, speed is a part of
optimization, but so are reliability, usability, stability, resource
usage, and security. Optimization can encompass a variety of goals
and needs. You might decide that your system is going to be the most
secure system anywhere. Sure, performance and usability are going
to suffer, but you’ve Speed Up your computer to meet the challenges
presented by an increasingly hostile computer environment. No matter
what your optimization goal, this book can help you achieve it. Whenever
possible, you’ll find not only a problem and one or more solutions,
but also the trade-offs you’ll make by implementing a particular
solution. Boost is more a balancing act than an ultimate destination
where you achieve specific results.
It’s also easy to think that optimization is a process
where you beat your machine into submission using a gargantuan hammer.
While this book does discuss a few extreme Speed Up techniques,
many of the techniques are more subtle. Using subtle approaches to
optimization ensures that you can adjust your machine a little at
a time to maintain that balance between optimized and unworkable.
For example, giving the user a great Windows experience is a fine
productivity enhancer, but not when it comes at the cost of speed—a
machine that’s too slow to perform the required tasks isn’t much use
to anyone. The subtle approaches provided in many sections of this
book help you improve the user experience without affecting system
speed to the point that the user can’t get anything done.
Speed Up isn’t a fad — it’s something that you’ll
continue to do even after the current threats to your system cease
to exist. The biggest threat that concerns most people is the invasion
of viruses, adware, and spyware. Although this site does spend time
discussing these issues and what you can do to solve them, it looks
at invasions of all kinds and provides general advice on how to track
your system’s health. A healthy system can fend off many kinds of
invasion and warn you about the intrusion of others. This book helps
you become aware of the cues that your system provides when its health
is in jeopardy—no matter what the source might be.
Speaking of system health, this book does discuss a
number of maintenance issues, but from a new and interesting perspective.
Instead of viewing maintenance as a boring task that you perform
for some reason that might never occur (such as a system failure),
this book views maintenance as part of the optimization process.
By using maintenance as an optimization tool, you not only preserve
data and reduce risk, you also assess how various components of the
system work— whether you need to think about updates and repairs in
the near future.
You’ll find descriptions of, and instructions for using,
many of the command line utilities that Windows stores in various
locations, but doesn’t really describe in any detail. In fact, this
book is one of the best sources of information for many of the undocumented
utilities that Windows provides. All of those utilities can help you
perform system speed up tasks. You might be interested to know
that some of those utilities do their job better and faster than the
graphical counterparts that you’ve used to date. Whether command line
utilities are better suited for your needs is something you’ll need
to judge for yourself. One special use for command line utilities
is to automate many optimization tasks so you get the benefit of optimization
with less work. This textbook shows you a number of automation tricks
and techniques.