For most software that you install, there will be the ideal PC requirements provided so you can be assured of optimum performance for programs and games you will install on your PC. At times, varied differences as far as video specifications, memory and processor capacity will be stated. But while many would see the usual minimal requirements, you have to consider the fact on whether these will be sufficient to satisfy the level of performance you are expecting once these software programs are installed.

Based on experience, it would never hurt to be a step ahead. This entails making sure that you are installing the software on hardware that is a bit advanced. For example, if video card requirements are at least 128 MB, why not install a 256 MB video card if the difference is just a couple of bucks? Or perhaps if memory requires at least 256 RAM, why not go double like 512?

Some may call it overkill but they are really some form of making sure that you get best performance from these programs. Remember that if you go for minimal requirements, you will eventually find yourself wanting better performance and hence upgrading these concerned hardware peripherals

Let’s say your computer started acting funny and you have no idea what’s going wrong. Maybe it slowed down, or a program or device isn’t working like it should.

Windows Vista can run a diagnostic report to find any obvious problems and save you the time and aggravation of hunting the problem down yourself, especially if you’re not an IT pro. (more…)

Windows Vista has an all-in-one window for monitoring the health of your system and tweaking its performance but what if you use XP, not Vista?

With just a couple of downloads and a few drags and drops, you can add a Vista-like performance center to Windows XP.

Vista has a one-stop tune-up tool

Who doesn’t want a faster, healthier computer? Using diagnostic and maintenance tools can keep your system revved for maximum performance, but in many cases these tools are spread out all over your Start menu or hidden entirely. (more…)

In Windows Vista, users can have an extensive System Health Report generated for them in helping troubleshoot performance and reliability issues on their PC or to see how healthy their PC is in general. For the average user, this probably won’t mean anything. But for me, I’m the type of user that really likes having the ability to create reports that tell me about my PC so I was really excited to find this ability in Windows Vista.

This evening I decided to generate a report on my main desktop PC for the first time and see what it says. To have a System Health Report generated:

1. Open Start Menu.
2. Right-click on “Computer” and click “Properties”.
3. In the System Properties window, click on your Windows Experience Index rating.
4. In the Performance Information and Tools window, under “Tasks” in the left-hand options pane click “Advanced Tools”.
5. Under Advanced Tools window choose “Generate a system health report” at the bottom.

The report generates after about 60 seconds of testing. Here is my System Health Report I generated this evening:

As you can see, any sort of errors or warnings for your system are displayed

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Measuring the performance of an operating system is a tricky thing.  At the same time, it’s the right and necessary thing to do, because performance is one of many criteria important to customers.  Part of the trick of measuring performance is to time testing execution with the product cycle such that the results are as meaningful as possible for customers; this helps them make a better decision by making use of the full array of available information.  As one example, about a year ago we commissioned a firm called Principled Technologies to conduct a study comparing Windows XP SP2 to Windows Vista RTM.  That study found the performance measures of the two operating systems were within the same range for many tasks that home and business users frequently perform under real-world conditions.

My point is that we waited to conduct these benchmarking tests until Windows Vista had reached the RTM milestone in the product cycle, as this allowed us to provide our customers the most meaningful data available at the time — the data most likely to directly affect their decision to upgrade to Windows Vista.  We do a whole range of

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If you’re a regular reader, you probably know by now that we just love performance and can’t get enough of server performance-improving software/code… Especially when it comes to WordPress.

Donncha has recently released a great plugin for WordPress, called "WordPress Super Cache." It builds on the original WP-Cache plugin by Ricardo Granada - except that it fixes all the bugs in the original implementation and has been written in enough pure PHP that it’ll also run on Windows servers - both IIS and Apache for that matter! <cue applause>

At the moment (as of version 0.3.1) it needs a bit of work to make it run, but not much. So here goes - 10 easy steps to get cached content on your IIS or Apache server under Windows:

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