Tag Archives: computer
Speed Up Your Computer with Auslogics Disk Defrag
Remember how fast your computer was out of the box? Your Windows loaded within seconds, files opened with a snap, and browsing the Web was a great experience. Unfortunately, computers slow down with time no matter how fast they are at first. This happens for a number of reasons, but the main cause of slow computer performance is disk fragmentation. Auslogics Disk Defrag can fix that.
File fragmentation occurs because Windows tries to save new files in the most space-efficient manner. It attempts to fill every available bit of space. To do that, it needs to split files, e.g. the files become fragmented. When you need to open a fragmented file, your hard drive’s read arm needs to perform a lot more operations than when you are opening a non-fragmented file. As a result, fragmented files take longer to open. But the worst bit is that this is true for every single piece of data stored on your computer – Windows system files, files needed by your software, your browser and so on. That’s why fragmentation reduces overall computer performance. Worse still, severe fragmentation can even lead to computer freeze-ups and crashes. The answer is to defragment your hard drive on a regular basis.
Windows has its own built-in disk defrag tool. However, it’s very slow and doesn’t do the job properly. It also lacks some important disk optimization features that guarantee flawless disk performance. Luckily, there are a lot of free alternatives. One of them is Auslogics Disk Defrag – a really well-known disk defrag and optimization utility. It’s a lot faster than the Windows defragmentation utility, can perform advanced disk optimization, and has a very intuitive interface.
Let’s have a look at some of its features:
Free Space Consolidation
Conventional defragmentation only defrags files, but does nothing to defragment free disk space. This means that free space remains fragmented. As bits of fragmented free space get filled with new files, the files become fragmented as well. As a result, fragmentation starts building up right after you defrag your files. Auslogics Disk Defrag can defragment the free space, which prevents new files from becoming fragmented.
Hard Drive Optimization
Windows system files are the most important and most used files on your PC. They are accessed no matter what you do and are essential for computer boot. Often Windows system files get placed on slower tracks of your hard drive and take longer to load. This slows down your whole operating system. Auslogics Disk Defrag defragments system files and moves them to the fast tracks of your disk. This keeps your system running fast and smooth.
Interactive Fragmentation Map
Auslogics Disk Defrag generates an interactive disk map that shows all files on your disk. The map is divided into blocks. You can see which files are in each block and whether they are fragmented or not by simply clicking on them. You can also personalize Disk Defrag by selecting the fragmentation map style and color theme that you like best.
Auslogics Disk Defrag is really easy to use. Novice users will have no problems figuring it out. As for more advanced users, they will appreciate Disk Defrag’s advanced options and command line tools.
Antivirus Malware and Software (Page 1 of 2)
Warning: most antivirus programs will not protect you against all forms of malignant software (often called “malware”) on their own. Find out how to protect yourself.
Sure, your antivirus software will protect you against viruses. It will probably even do a good job against worms. But what Trojans, exploits, backdoors, spyware and the dozen other nasty software parasites?
Malware and Antivirus Software: a History
The war on computer viruses has led to an arms race between the designers of antivirus software and the designers of viruses (you didn’t think viruses just created themselves did you?). Some years ago, virus designers responded to ever more successful antivirus software by creating the descendents of viruses, worms, which did not infect files but rather installed themselves directly on the hard drive, making them harder to detect.
The arms race has since led to a total of at least eleven distinct types of what is now called malware, a neologism meaning bad (as in malignant rather than shoddy) software. According to Wikipedia, these eleven types of malware are:
1. Virus 2. Worm 3. Wabbit 4. Trojan 5. Backdoor 6. Spyware 7. Exploit 8. Rootkit 9. Key Logger 10. Dialer 11. URL injection
There’s a twelfth kind of malware: adware, which Wikipedia considers simply to be a subset of spyware.
Why Antivirus Software Isn’t Enough for Malware
As you can see, makers of antivirus software have their work cut out for them if they’re going to keep every instance of malware off your system. As a result, antivirus software makers have often had to pick their battles. Adware, whose makers often claim they are doing nothing illegal or even questionable, often gets treated more lightly.
Even when antivirus software makers do come out with a product that fights all twelve or so kinds of malware, responding to each new instance of malware to come on the market isn’t easy. First the malware has to be identified, which means someone’s computer, and probably tens of thousands of computers, will be infected first. Then, the malware has to be dissected. Then a removal program and a filter must both be written. Then the removal program and filter must be tested to make sure they work, and that they don’t interfere with any other functions of the antivirus software or the computer itself. When a fix for the virus is out, it then has to be loaded into an antivirus software update and transmitted to every single computer worldwide that has the antivirus software installed.
The speed with which antivirus software makers are able to deliver updates for newly discovered malware would impress even Santa Claus. Yet there’s still a crucial window of one to a few days between when the new malware has reached a critical mass of thousands of computers, and when the update is released. If your antivirus software is not set to check for updates automatically every hour or so, that window opens even wider.