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Articles
In this section we are going to talk about all sorts of stuff concerning computers. Below is the list of all of the articles that we have. We will continue to update this with more articles and questions and answers that you have that we feel will help others. You can also find many of our articles on our page on Facebook and Article Directory
If you have any questions or stories about computers and working with them just send us an email at [email protected] and we will be glad to put them up here to share with others.
(We run a clean site for the whole family so please do not email us anything discriminating, racially vulgar, or hurtful to any person. We will only submit writings that benefit the community and our lives.)
Caring for Your Computer
We are frequently asked what a person can do to speed up an old computer. I have to admit that this question can simply be answered best with one word, maintenance. The type of maintenance that we are talking about is not physically cleaning your computer, though that is something to do every 6 months or so, but rather the maintenance and cleaning of files, programs, and the regular organizing that needs to be done.
Let's use an analogy to help make this more clear. Let's say that you have a desk that you work at. At this desk you have your computer, telephone, file cabinet, trash, and everything else you would likely see at a desk. Now if all you do is throw all of your papers on the top of the desk and you never file them or discard them in the trash the top of your desk will become a mess really fast and you will not be able to find anything, you will become inefficient. When you organize your work area you become faster and more efficient. Your computer works the same way. If you don't file documents and delete unused documents and programs your computer becomes inefficient. Now let take a look at how to organize and clean up your computer.
First lets take a look at your documents. You should find all of these in the My Documents folder either on your desktop or in the Start Menu. If you have documents in many different folders then get them all into the My Documents folder. This will help you and the computer find them faster. Now I highly suggest that you go through all of your documents and start organizing them into groups. It doesn't matter how you group them as long as you will know exactly where to find them, I like to organize my files by subject. Once you have figured out how you what to organize them just make a folder and title it. Place all of your files that relate to that folder in there and you are done. Now this simple little organizing process can be used everywhere on your computer. If you use the same type of organization structure for everything you will be able to find everything right away. Use this to organize pictures in the My Pictures folder or music and videos in My Music and My Videos folders.
Now these next steps are a little more complicated but are still easy enough for anyone to do. We are going to run a disk cleanup, disk defragment, and a registry cleaner. First I want to explain what they do for your computer. A disk cleanup removes temporary files that were needed only once or twice by the computer, it will empty the trash, error files, and generally unwanted and unused files that are taking up space. To do this just do to the Start Menu, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Cleanup. Just click open the Application and click Ok and it will collect all of the data. A new window will open up and ask what you want to delete, just check all of the boxes and hit Ok, another little window will pop up and click Delete Flies. The application will run and close automatically.
Next we will a disk defragmentation. What this does is organize the physical location of files on the hard drive. Just like you would organize where everything goes in a file cabinet you need to better organize where files are on the hard drive. Now if you have Windows Vista or 7 you will not have to run this but rather make sure the scheduler is still on and working. Vista and 7 are setup to have this application run automatically once a week when Windows is installed. Go to the Start Menu/ All Programs/ Accessories/ System Tools/ Disk Defragmenter. Click on Defragment Now and a new window will open. Now you just sit and wait, this process could take as little as a few minutes or hours depending on how "messy" your hard drive is. If your computer is a few years old and you have not ran this I would advise you not to run a disk defragment. This is because if you haven't run it then there is a lot for it to organize and I have seen this take days, Yes Days. This is not good for the computer and you might damage your files. The only option is messy and requires a professional. One other thing to do is go to Control Panel/ Programs and Features and uninstall old and unused programs. This will help make space on your hard drive. If your hard drive is in the red or over 75% full your computer will run slow and the failure rate of your hard drive is highly increased. If you have this problem you should consider removing some programs and files from your computer.
Now for the registry cleaner. Windows doesn't have a program that does this for itself so we have to get one that will do this for us. We have found that CCleaner works really well and is free. Download CCleaner and install the program. Once you have installed the program open it and run the Cleaner and the Registry. This will clean Windows Registry of old and unused program information which slows your computer down.
Now that you have organized your files and cleaned up old and used stuff your computer will be faster and perform better.
Streaming TV Episodes
Today you can find everything you want on the internet. If you can dream about something there is someone already talking about it online. Well we have been dreaming of watching our favorite episodes online for a long time and now almost all television networks have your favorite episodes available to watch anytime of the day for free. There are also some sites like hulu.com and Fancast.com that have many episodes and seasons from many different networks and shows that have been canceled.
There are some benefits to watching TV shows online. One is that you could quite possibly cancel your cable or satellite television service and just watch your shows online. If you want to watch the news many of your local news channels are also online now and even have podcasts. If you have an HD tv with a built in tuner then you can probably already get your news and popular news networks for free over the air. Another benefit to streaming episodes online is that you can choose when to watch them. No longer do you have to worry about missing your favorite show or staying up late so you don't miss an episode, just watch it when your ready.
One thing that you are going to need in order to stream television is a fast internet connection. To stream high definition television without having to wait for it to download you will want to have at least 256 kbps download speed. Internet charges for this speed of a connection vary throughout the country but the average cost is around $40 a month. Most people already have an internet connection as fast or faster than this. Contact your ISP (Internet Service Provider) to find out what packages are available for you and visit www.speedtest.net to find out approximately what speed of internet connection you currently have.
BLACKBOXX Computers have a complete line of Home Theater Computers (HTPC's) designed specifically for streaming High Definition television and watching movies. If you have any LCD, Plasma, LED, or Projection television. Our Home Theater Computers are designed to connect directly to your TV as easy as plugging it in. Click here to see our full line of HTPC's. When we look at the cost savings of streaming episodes anyone can afford a HTPC. According to The Benton Foundation the average cable bill in America is about $71 a month, that is $852 a year for television. Cancel your cable and upgrade to a BLACKBOXX HTPC and enjoy a reliable, super fast computer with streaming television for free.
Physically Cleaning Your Computer
Above we talked about cleaning your files and the Operating System (OS) of your computer. Here we want to talk about the physical cleaning of the inside and outside of your computer.
There are many benefits to keeping your computer clean and keeping the area around it clean. One of the most common reasons for computer and hardware failure is because of food and water. The most common reason for keyboard and mouse failure is because of liquid spilled on them and also from little crumbs of food that fall between the keys. The best way to solve this is to just not eat while you are using your computer.
Water is another major problem for your computer. Water gets spilled on computers by flooding, leaky roofs, and by plants. Plants might seem uncommon but they actually cause many problems in computers. Many times water from plant pots spills on computers but the most common and destructive is the moisture they let out into the air. Your computer is always taking in and exhausting air to cool the parts inside. If you have a plant that is located within a few feet of your computer the humidity that is let off by the plant is sucked into the computer and starts corroding the integral parts of your computer.
Dust, dander, and hair are problems that attack every computer. Your computer is designed to continually take in and exhaust air to cool the parts inside. All of the electrical parts attract dust and the inside becomes covered. This can make the temperature of your CPU, hard drives, RAM, video cards, and power supply rise drastically. If these temperatures get to high it will cause the computer to stop working and even cause parts to fail. Another reason Dust can be harmful to the internal components is due to the fact dust can conduct electricity. The inside of you computer has hundreds of small pathways for electricity to travel. Dust that attaches to your computers internal parts may create new pathways for electricity to travel which in turn slow processing power and creates more heat.
It is important to have the inside of your computer cleaned at least once a year. You should have this done by a trained professional, there are many wires and sensitive parts installed that if done incorrectly could damage the hardware. We offer this service for a small fee. While we are physically cleaning your computer we can also clean the OS like we talked about above. If you would like to talk to a service professional contact [email protected] for further assistance.
How Big of a Hard Drive do I Need?
Today we are going to talk about how much hard drive storage space your need. We talk to a lot of people shopping for a computer and we try to find the right options for what they need. One of the biggest unknowns that people have about computers is storage space and how much or how little they actually need.
First lets define storage. Storage space is the amount of space that you have on your computer's hard drive. This storage space is permanent and you can access and save your information here. This storage is different from your memory or RAM that your computer has. RAM is a place where files are temporarily stored until you close the file, turn your computer off, or delete it. We will talk more about RAM later but you can read more about RAM here on our Technical Information page.
Now how much storage space do you need on your Hard Drive? Well, we need to look at what you are going to be doing with your computer and what and how much of it you will be storing on your computer. There are all sorts of different things you can save on your computer from simple word and spreadsheet documents, music, videos, movies, pictures, and much more.
Word and spreadsheet documents take up very little space on your hard drive, you can save more than 20,000 documents on just 1GB of space.
Music when it is saved in MP3 format can be very small also with about 200 songs in 1GB of hard drive storage. This may seem like a lot of songs to some people but there are many people who have 10,000 or more songs on their computer which can take up to 50GB of space.
Pictures can be relatively small in size but with the ability to take hundreds of pictures with your digital camera they start to add up fast. You can fit about 1000 pictures in 1GB of storage space.
Videos and movies can be very large and eat up a lot of storage space. Many movies in compressed formats like .avi, .mov, or .mp4 can take around 1GB of space per movie. With lots of movies on your computer you need lots of storage space available.
Programs are another thing that can take storage space that you forget about. Today many programs are getting bigger and bigger. Size for programs range greatly but there are some that take a few GBs of space.
When you add all of these things together you start to run out of storage space really fast. In today's world if all you are doing is surfing the web and doing some minor documents than a 160GB hard drive will be big enough for all of your needs. But if you are thinking of having some photos, music, and a few movies or videos then you had better have at least a 320GB hard drive. If you are going to have lots of pictures, music, movies, and other stuff then you will need a 500GB hard drive minimum.
We highly recommend that you purchase a computer with at least a 320GB hard drive. With the amount of information and media that is being stored on computers you will always need more space in the future. HTPCs are designed for entertainment media like movies and music so getting a large 750GB hard drive will be a very smart move. For Gaming computers it is wise to get a medium to large size hard drive because many games can take up a lot of storage space. If you have any more questions about hard drives take a look at our Technical Information page or contact us at [email protected]
