PC hack

So you’ve decided you want to use your USB flash drive for ReadyBoost after reading our post here: Get an unexpected boost - Windows ReadyBoost

It is very simple to start taking advantage of readyboost, all that is needed to start set-up is your flash drive and your Windows Vista PC or laptop. As soon as you plug in your flash drive the pop-up should appear with a number of options with what you wish to do with your USB drive, if it is a suitable drive there should be an option of “Speed Up my System with Windows ReadyBoost”. This will then start the readyboost wizard which will check if your drive is up to scratch and if not it will refuse it.

The wizard then calculates the best amount of space for readyboost and all you are required to do is press OK, your system will now be ready to use readyboost and all you need to do is make sure the memory stick is inserted into your PC before you start boot-up each time. Hopefully this will help speed up your boot-ups and make your PC experience better.

Anyone using Windows Vista can now take advantage of a brand new, mostly unknown program.

Windows ReadyBoost can use any ordinary USB Flash drive bigger than 256mb and use to to vastly improve your boot up times. BY taking up to 4Gb of the drives memory windows uses this instead of your own memory inside your PC to speed up the times, in some cases upto 80-100 times quicker. Windows uses the drive to cache your data instead of using the most slower hard-drive. This is mainly better for laptops as most laptops use more expensive slower, 4200 to 5400rpm, hard-drives than desktop PCs. This can also mean the laptops battery life increases as hard-drive access can become less therefore it uses less power from the battery.

ReadyBoost can be used on any drives with a capacity of over 256Mb and any drives with over 4Gb of space will only allocate 4Gb to ReadyBoost, the device should also have access time of below 1ms and be capable of 2.5MB/s read speeds and 1.75MB/s write speeds. Windows recommend that the capacity of the ReadyBoost drive is three times the amount of physical memory (RAM) you have in your system. For more information about RAM please see our other post.

As promised I am going to start writing a guide on how to build your very own custom PC. The guide is going to be split up into four parts as follows:

1. Preparation
2. The Hardware
3. Turning it on for the first time
4. The Software

Also once the entire guide has been published a “Build a PC” page will be made. Here you can find the links to each part of the guide and also some recommended components to buy (These will be updated monthly).

Anyway the preparation…

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Does your PC or laptop seem slow when you have lots of applications running? Is it working to it’s absolute possible potential?

You may not know but your computer has two different types of memory, the hard drive memory (where your data is saved) and physical memory (the memory your computer uses to run). A simple check to see if your computer is using all it’s physical memory is to use task manager. Most users can load this by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del in unison. Task manger has many tabs but to see your memory usage you need to use the performance tab. Under the Physical Memory (MB) section there are three fields. If the free one is hovering near zero this could mean you could need some more RAM.

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January is over and February has started, that means that PC hack has been online for a month! January hasn’t seen many posts on PC hack, but this was due to my exams and lack of time to update, but now that they are over expect some regualr updates!

Read on to find out about our 1st months stats and what we plan to do in the future….
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This nasty little worm could be sitting on your computer right now waiting to be activated. You can read more about it here:

PCadvisor.co.uk

And this is a block list that can be used to make sure your computer or network isnt affected by downloading additional payloads.

F-Secure.com

if you have it and want to remove it then you can used Free Avira to do so
This is a detailed breakdown on the threat:

Avira.com

Make sure you havent got it already as experts say that the worm is about to deliver its payload.

A BIG thanks to HaggisUK99 for this!

You may not realize it, but your computer and your car have something in common: they both need regular maintenance. No, you don’t need to change your computer’s oil. But you should be updating your software, keeping your antivirus subscription up to date, and checking for spyware. Read on to learn what you can do to help improve your computer’s security.
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It’s time to release PC hack’s first handy batch file! Well to be honest it’s not that ‘handy’ but it is still pretty neat. It’s the CMD (Command Prompt) Colour Tester, what it does is it lets you choose a colour for your command prompt instead of the boring white text. The change is not permenant but instructions are given at the end on how to make the change permenant.  And there are 8 colours to choose from!

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We are going to introduce a new feature here at PC hack, we are going to release bacth files (.bat) to you readers of the blog! These batch files will help improve your computer and some may even tidy things up for you!
If there is a tutorial which can be done by simply running a batch file we will attach it to the tutorial, that way you can either actually follow the tutorial, or be lazy and download the batch file and let that do all the work for you!

Click on more to have a sneak preview of our batch files! More »

Ever come across one of the stubborn files that just refuse to be deleted? If you have just follow this simple guide and you can get rid of that annoying file!

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