Archive for December, 2009
Speed Up your PC
Dec 30th
After using your PC for a long amount of time, it can become very sluggish, but this does not necessarily mean that you need a new PC. In this issue of tech tips I’ll show you a few tricks to speed up your PC!
The first thing you can do is clear up disk space by deleting files that you probably didn’t even know you had. There is a utility built into windows called “Disk Cleanup” that can identify some files that are safe to delete and delete them for you. To run this program, click the Start button in the lower left, click All Programs, go to Accessories, then System Tools, and then choose disk cleanup. Wait for disk cleanup to find all the files (that make take a few minutes). Once it has found the files, a new window will come up (shown below) and you will be able to select the files you want to delete. I recommend just deleting all of them. I was able to free up 3.3 GB of space on my own computer this way.
You can also free up some space by uninstalling programs that you don’t use anymore. Click the Start button, go to your Control Panel and find Add or Remove Programs (Programs and Features on Windows Vista). A list of all your programs will come up. Just go to each program that you don’t want anymore, click uninstall and then follow the on screen instruction, it’s that simple.
Another thing that you can do to speed up your computer’s performance is defragment the hard drive(s). The defragment feature is also built into windows. It is in the same area that you found the Disk Cleanup utility. Just go to Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and click Disk Defragmenter. Run the defragmenter on all your Hard Drives. The defragmenter will look different depending on whether you are using Windows XP or Windows Vista. First I will explain for XP. In Windows XP, select the drive(s) that you want to defragment and then click the analyze button. Once analyzing is done, it will let you know if you should defragment the analyzed drive(s). Select the drives that it said you should defragment and click the defragment button. 
The defragmentation process on Windows Vista is much simpler. All you need to do is click the button that says “Defragment Now” and wait for it to finish. Be aware on both XP and vista, defragmentation will most likely take hours to complete. Also note, it is recommended that you have at least 15% free space before defragmenting, that is the total size of your drive multiplied by 0.15.
Now you know how to defragment your drive, but what does that mean? Every time you access a file on your hard drive, you computer has to figure out where on the hard drive that file is. As you add and delete files and programs, everything gets spread out all of the hard drive and there are spacing between files making files much harder to find, making it take longer and seem like your computer is slower. Defragmenting moves all the files back near each other again, making your computer faster.
So far I’ve shown you how to free up disk space and defragment your hard drive. Up next let’s look at how we can repair disk errors. Bad Sectors often arise after using your hard drive for an extended period of time. Disk Check can help! To run disk check, go to Start, My Computer (called Computer on Windows Vista). Right click on the drive you wish to check for bad sectors and choose properties from the right click menu. The drive properties will appear in a new window. Go to the tools tab and click the Check Now button. The Check Disk utility will open. Make sure both check boxes are selected and press Start. Follow the on screen instructions and be aware you may be asked to restart your computer during some point of the process.
Next, you should find and get rid of any spyware or viruses on your computer. If you already have virus/spyware software running, just do a full scan of your machine and let it delete the viruses for you. If you do not have any software protecting your computer, try doing a free security and virus scan from Symantec (makers of Norton) at http://security.symantec.com/. Make sure you run these scans using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 5, 6 or 7 (because Symantec hasn’t yet figured out that Mozilla’s Firefox browser is far superior). There are also quality windows security programs available for free! For anti-virus security, there is a program available called AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition. You can download that at www.download.com. For spyware security, I highly recommend a program called Ad-Aware that can also be downloaded at www.download.com.
Another thing to do is clean out the windows registry. The windows registry contains info about programs you’ve installed and a lot other info about the way windows runs. Your registry can get pretty cluttered up, if you install and uninstall things frequently, but no worries, a free program called CCleaner is here to help. CCleaner will scan your registry and find uneeded entries and delete them for you. You can download CCleaner from www.download.com.
Now this last tip is only for people who are using Windows Vista. This is called ReadyBoost. If you have a flash drive lying around with some extra space on it, you can put that space to good use as additional RAM (Random Access Memory) for your computer. Random Access Memory is used to hold processes/programs that are currently being used. If you open a program, and you have to wait a few seconds for it to load, this is because your computer is loading the program into the RAM. If you have more RAM, you can have more processes and programs running without as much slowdown of your computer. To use ReadyBoost, just plug in your flash drive and click Start and then click Computer. When the computer window comes up, find the drive you just plugged in. Right click and choose properties to open the properties window. Go to the tab called ReadyBoost and choose to Use this device. Then, choose how much space you want to allocate to ReadyBoost and press OK.
Now your computer should be performing a lot faster, but if you are still unhappy with the speed of your computer and you know it still used to be faster there is one last thing you can do, that is reinstall the Operating System (also called a full system restore). Be aware, this will delete EVERYTHING on your computer, every document, every program, and every everything. Consult your computer’s user’s manual for information on the details of how to do this for your specific computer.
If you have done everything I’ve said here and the performance of your computer is still sluggish it may be time for a new PC.
Advanced CSS – Part #5
Dec 29th
Pseudo-classes are little snippets of code that will add additional effects to some selectors.
Pseudo-classes
The syntax for Pseudo-classes is very much like the syntax for css:
selector {property:value;} /*CSS Syntax*/ selector:pseudo-class { /*Pseudo-class Syntax*/ property:value; property:value; }
:link, :visited, :active, :hover
A very widely used example of Pseudo-classes is adding styles to links. Consider the following:
a:link, a:visited { text-decoration:underline; color:#ff9300; } a:hover { text-decoration:none; color:#ff9300; }
These are called “global link styles”, these are styles that will apply to any and all links on a page where this code is. We have our pseudo-classes a:link, a:visited, a:hover and each is doing something different.
1. a:link
a:link sets the styles for an unvisited link:
a:link { color:red; font-weight:bold; }
2. a:visited
a:visited sets the styles for a visited link:
a:visited { color:blue; font-weight:bold; }
3. a:hover
a:hover sets the styles for links that you mouse over:
a:hover { color:aqua; font-weight:bold; text-decoration:unerline; }
4. a:active
This sets the styles for a link that is currently active:
a:active { color:coral; font-weight:bold; text-decoration:unerline; }
Order
Order is key when using these particular pseudo-classes. When you write these styles you must follow the correct order to make it all work.
a:link { /*This must be first*/ color:red; font-weight:bold; } a:visited { /*This must be second*/ color:coral; font-weight:bold; } a:hover { /*This must be third*/ text-decoration:unerline; color:blue; font-weight:bold; } a:active { /*This must be last*/ color:green; font-weight:bold; }
We can also group the pseudo-classes together like this:
a:link, a:visited { text-decoraton:none; color:#ff9300; } a:hover, a:active { text-decoration:unerline; color:coral; }
Like other CSS selectors, we can add a class selector to the Pseudo-classes, this would enable us to apply these styles any where on our web page if we desired it to be so.
selector.class:pseudo-class { property:value; property:value; } a.fancy:link, a.fancy:visited { text-decoration:underline; color:#ff9300; }
This class fancy will make a link and you visit that link that we create, it will be underlined and be that atomicpages orange color.
:first-child
The first-child pseudo-class is as it sounds. This will apply any styles that you define to the first-child element of a parent element. Consider the following code:
body { margin:auto; width:1000px; background-color:#4c4c4c; font:normal 11px Verdana, "Times New Roman", sans serif; color:#fff; } p:first-child { color:blue; text-decoration:underline; font-weight:700; }
We can use the first-child pseudo-class in some very helpful ways too! If, for instance, you wanted to apply a style that would make the first paragraph unique, we could use the first-child pseudo-class to achieve this goal. Consider the following:
.fancy p:first-child { color:red; font-style:italic; }
This would set the first paragraph of the class “fancy” to be red and italic and all subsequent paragraphs to be whatever we set the styles to.
If you want to see pseudo classes in action feel free to click on the green download button below to see these examples in action!
pseudo-classes.zip
Size: 1.88 KB
Hacking Firefox
Dec 29th
Mozilla’s Firefox browser is already in most cases faster than its main competitor, Internet Explorer, but in this issue of tech tips I will show you how you can hack Firefox to make it even faster.
Begin by opening up your Firefox browser and make sure you have the latest version installed by selecting “check for updates” in the help menu. If there are available updates, install them before continuing.
Now that you have the latest version, start by typing about:config into the address bar at the top and press enter. A new interface that might look a bit advanced or overwhelming will come up but don’t worry I’ll explain everything. Across the top, you will see the filter bar. Under the filter bar, you should see a huge table filled with data. Each row of the table represents a specific preference or option within Firefox. The column called values stores what the specific option is currently set to. For example, there is a preference called browser.tabs.tabMinWidth (you can easily find this preference by typing the name of it, in the filter bar) that determines how small the tabs in Firefox will get before they start scrolling off the side. The default value for this tab is 100, which means once the tabs are 100 pixels wide they will start scrolling off the screen, instead of getting even smaller. You can double click on this line and change this value to any amount of pixels that you like. This is a just a simple example, but now let’s go on to changing the preferences that will actually affect the speed of the browser.
First let’s look at the line called network.http.pipelining. If the value of this line is set to false, like it is by default, Firefox will not send pipelining requests to the server on which the page resides. If the value is set to true, then it will send pipelining requests. Now I know you are probably thinking this is getting to complicated, but don’t worry, I will explain what all this means. Each time you load a page into your browser, your browser sends a page request to the server for that page. When the server receives the request, it will send the page back to the browser. Pipelining occurs when the browser sends multiple page requests before the browser receives the page from the server. This reduces the page loading times; therefore if we set this value to true it will speed up our browser.
Next, let’s look at the setting called network.http.pipelining.maxrequests. As you can probably tell from the title of this setting, it is very closely related to the one we looked at previously. This value determines the max amount of pipeline requests that the browser will send. This line can be changed to any number between 1 and 8. The more requests the faster it will be, so change the value to 8.
Up next, let’s look at network.http.proxy.pipelining. As you would guess, this is also very closely related. Earlier I explained that pipelining speeds up your browsing, but what I didn’t mention was that some servers do not support pipelining and if these browsers receive pipeline requests, they may behave strangely. That is where this preference comes in, if this preference is set to true, it will check to make sure the server supports pipelining before it sends any pipelining messages.
Now let’s get into a not-as-closely-related-but-still-somewhat-related-preference called network.dns.disableIPv6. Basically, every computer that has internet access has its own unique IP address. An IP address is a set of 1, 2, or 3 digit numbers separated by periods. The first widely known type of IP address is IPv4, it uses 32-bit addressing, meaning there are 2^32 (4,294,967,296) possible IP addresses. All these addresses are being used up by the huge amount of internet connected computers that we have in the world today and there is now a new IP protocol called IPv6. This is a 128-bit system which means it allows for 2^128 (340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) possible IP addresses. There are still problems with the new IPv6 and it can cause substantial delays because not all servers support it yet, therefore it is faster to disable IPv6, by setting this option to true.
