System Speed

How Can I Clean My Laptop Screen?

2011-04-14T03:54:00.000-07:00

Ever previously hear the fan in your notebook computer making funny sounds? Is your laptop beginning to work sluggishly? Does the bottom part of device feel warmer than when the laptop was new? Does the monitor need to be cleaned? If so, follow these guidelines to keep the inside and outside of your laptop computer nice and clean and running better and smoother.

Cleaning your screen

The LCD display on a laptop computer needs to be cleaned every now and then. Dust and anything else that floats in the air will be attracted to the exterior of the screen. Ensure that the electric power to the unit is off. Use a clean normal water dampened lint-free cloth to softly wipe any kind of light trash from the surface. Do not use any kind of chemical cleaners. If needed, you can get a LED display screen cleaning kit with a quite gentle cleaner and material. This will work on flat screen rear projection Televisions also.

Cleaning the laptop keys

While the electrical power is still off on the laptop, utilize a clean lint-free fabric with a delicate window cleaning agent. Do not use bleach or other potent professional cleanser. Spray the cleaner on the material, not the actual keys. Lightly clean each and every key until spotless. Allow the keys dry out for about twenty or so minutes prior to switching the mobile computer back on.

When you can see dust and hairs in or on the vents at the bottom and side of the case, you can be sure that there's more within the mobile computer. The best way to get it all out is to open up the case. Do not attempt to blow it out from the outside. This will only clog it up the inside of the notebook case. All laptop cases will come apart rather easily. There are a number of small screws that keep such cases together. There will probably be tiny rubber or plastic caps covering screws that hold the monitor on. Almost all notebooks will be disassembled from the bottom. Make sure that the power cord and battery are detached before starting. take out the hard disk drive and put it in a secure location out of the way. Avoid the use of cordless equipment or magnetic screwdrivers. If the case is entirely open, you will notice the 'dust bunnies' sitting nearby the case cooling fan and central processing unit cooling heat sink. Remove large dust balls using a pair of tweezers. Pressurized air in a can works perfectly to blow out the dirt on and around the system board and the keys. Be sure to hold the laptop case upright when using air in a can. If the compressed air is tilted downward when used, the gas within can be a liquid. This will ruin the components in the notebook. When reassembling the notebook computer, be sure to utilize the correct screws in the right places. Some screws are usually a bit longer than the others, and need to be connected where they were originally. Pay particular attention to any ribbon cabling and their particular connections. The mouse pad and keyboard uses this. Be sure that the wedge or compression connectors are snug before continuing to the next step. You won't want to need to open the case again until it's time to clean it again. When you're finished, your notebook computer will likely be practically completely new.

If you enjoyed How can I clean my laptop screen? you might also like to read laptop backpack review 2011 and best mini laptop 2011.

Privacy Policy | System Speed

2010-02-15T12:24:00.001-08:00

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RAM Speed

2008-09-21T06:58:00.000-07:00

The speed of your RAM(Random Access Memory) is a very important part of your overall system speed. RAM is easy and cheap to upgrade. You just buy a RAM card and plug it into your motherboard.

Whenever you run a program, that program is loaded from your hard drive to your RAM memory. Because you RAM is faster, than your hard drive, that makes the program data faster to access for other parts of your PC, like your CPU. When you turn your PC off everything on the RAM is wiped clean.

How much RAM do you need?

If you are running a large program or many programs you might not have enough memory. In that case your PC has to swap parts of the data to and from the hard drive as they are needed(swapping). This slows down your computer system greatly. Currently I would recommend 1-2 GB RAM, depending on your needs. If you have less you might look into upgrading.

My computer system is running slow, is it the RAM?

You can easily test for this. Run the programs that you usually do until your PC starts responding sluggishly.

XP:
press ctrl+alt+del
Click on the performance tab.
Look for "physical memory".
Then underneath that, "available".
If the number is less than 10,000 the problem is lack of memory.

Vista:
Vista uses memory differently, so you can't check for this in Vista. With Vista you should have at least 1 GB of RAM.

What type of RAM does my PC use?

There are several types of RAM(DDR1,DDR2,DDR3...). Your motherboard will only support some of these. You can find out which ones are supported in your motherboard book.

This is a picture of a DDR2 RAM DIMM

The picture shows 3 RAM DIMMs on a motherboard.

DDR3 is fairly new, your PC probably uses DDR1 or DDR2.

RAM speed is measured in MHz. The higher the number the faster the RAM.

Hard drive speed

2008-09-20T11:26:00.000-07:00

Your hard drive is one of the core components of your system. The other two being your memory and your CPU. When you run an application the application's data is loaded from your hard drive to your memory. Then data is moved from your memory to your chip, where it is processed. With larger applications quite a bit of data might have to be moved between your memory and your hard drive. If you have a slow hard drive, it can become a bottleneck bringing down the speed of you whole system.

Parts of a hard drive

You usually don't see the inside of a hard drive, they are closed up pretty good. But if you did open one you would be able to spot 3 parts. The rotating disks, on which the data is electromagnetically stored, the disk head that reads and writes data from the disks and the buffer. Data is read into the buffer before it is moved from and too the memory.

The very cool movie below shows you just what a operating hard drive looks like, on the inside.

Speed factors

The speed of a hard drive is generally measured in RPM (revolutions per minute). That is how many times the fixed disks, mentioned above, rotate in a minute. Generally the more the better. A standard drive would have a RPM of 5,400 a high end drive would have 7,200 and a gamer drive would have 10,000. It is generally not advisable to go faster than that, because it brings the maximum storage capacity of the drive down significantly.

Another factor is the buffer size of the drive. The larger the buffer the faster the drive retrieves data.

Drive breakage

As you will have noticed hard drives have moving parts. This makes them prone to breaking down. It is therefor advisable to backup the data on those drives. You might want to read best external backup drive and backup software to find out more about backing up your data.

Trusted hard drive brands

It is just not worth buying a hard drive from a unknown company, I strongly recommend you stick to the following brands:

Seagate
Buffalo
Western Digital
Maxtor

A word about SATA

SATA or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment is the newest development in hard drive technology. It is a new connection or bus between a hard drive and a motherboard. The technology has borrowed from Firewire and USB and has been successful in decreasing hard drive response times by quite a bit.

You can find more information on SATA on Wikipedia.

Testing your drive
If you are interested in knowing how your drive stacks up, why not use this free hard drive speed test software.

System speed test

2008-09-11T05:38:00.000-07:00

In order to increase the speed of your system you must first know how fast it is. You can break system speed test into 2 categories: testing your internet connection and testing your hardware.

Testing your internet connection

Testing your internet connection it is done between your home PC system and a nearby server. You will be measuring your bandwith(kb/s) and your ping (ms). Your bandwith is how much data you can move over your line in kilobits per second. Your upload and download load bandwith will probably be different, with the dowload one being higher. Most people only need about 500 kb/s a higher end user might want 1,000 kb/s. Your bandwith is important when downloading large files, such as movies.

The other factor is your ping. This is the time it takes for a packet of data to travel to the server and back. You want your ping to be 10-100 ms with lower being better. Your ping is important when you play online games.

You can test your internet connection speed for free at SpeedTest.net

Testing your PC speed

There are several pieces of hardware which affects your system's speed and performance:

CPU
Hard Drives
CD-Rom
DVD player
Sound card
Graphics card
RAM

There are software programs available to test each of these. The software can then compare them to bench marks in their class. Which will tell you whether something needs to be replaced.

The software that does this for free is not as good as the ones that you pay for, but here are some options:

Fresh Diagnostics

Test my hardware