Well, you’ve gotten the operating system down to a certain point, what’s next? Well, figure out where your bottlenecks still are! There’s probably some software on your computer that just kills performance (or 6-7 of them). Don’t blame MS quite yet. Anyway, luckily for you Windows Vista has a simple tool included that can help you identify the problem and remedy it quickly.

* Open the task manager (many ways to get to it, easiest is ctrl+alt+delete then select Start Task Manager)
* Navigate to the Performance tab
* Click on Resource Monitor
* Expand the disk section and sort by either reads or writes column. (more…)

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Every once in a while you notice that your hard drive is working extra hard for what seems like no reason. A background process has taken your hard drive hostage, forcing it to thrash loudly as it struggles to keep up with the high rate of reads and writes. Your computer responds slowly as the process overloads the physical limitations of your drive. What are you to do?

The solution is simple, although a little tricky at times: identify and stop the process that is killing your drive. There are two methods and tools that you can use to identify the process. (more…)

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