In this series, we’ll demonstrate how to clean your PC from top to bottom. We’ll go far beyond the typical tips, like cleaning temporary files or cookies, and take an in-depth look at cleaning the often overlooked areas of Windows and third party tools that most people don’t even know exist. In part one, we’ll do an experiment that demonstrates just how cluttered both old and new PCs can be. In parts two and three, we’ll share our most effective tips for cleaning PCs. So, let’s get started!

The Spring Cleaning Experiment: 16 PCs. 125 Gigabytes of Junk. 103,000 Worthless Files. All Gone.

First, let’s look at just how much junk exists on both new and old PCs. For the spring cleaning experiment, we invited TuneUp Utilities users, friends, colleagues, Twitter followers and Facebook fans from all over the globe to send us screenshots and actual photos of TuneUp Utilities 2012′s cleaning category (“Gain disk space”), which shows the amount of junk on a PC and gives some details about these files. Here’s an example:

We were blown away by the results we got over just about four weeks. Out of the dozens and dozens of screenshots sent in, we selected 16 PCs that represented the whole spectrum, from those that were relatively clean, to PCs that were mildly used and, of course, PCs that were totally bogged-down. Check out photos and descriptions of the files we received:

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Laptop: Windows XP SP3

It was mindboggling how much junk we were able to find (and delete!) on 16 PCs. Here’s the break-down of the average:

•   Out of 126 GBs of total junk, 65% was made up of temporary files, (PC average: 4625 MB)

mostly created by third party programs. For example, iTunes creates temporary files during synchronization when converting photos to iPhone or iPad resolution. Another example is third party installers that copy temporary data during setup. Some of these applications delete these files automatically, but others “forget” this step and create the mess you see here.
Note: TuneUp Utilities 2012 is well-aware of temporary files that are needed. It never deletes files that are in use and only shows them as “junk” if they haven’t been used for three day

• 30,000 MBs (PC average: 1875 MB) were consumed by older Windows restore points and old update backups.

Sounds critical right? Well, in most cases it’s actually not. System restore points are created before the installation of a critical update or after an application is uninstalled. Once the program is installed and everything is working well, there’s almost no reason to keep the restore point anymore (except for the newest one, which TuneUp Utilities never touches). Bear in mind that restore points contain previous file versions of critical Windows files and data – and can grow quite large. The same goes for old update backups. Once Windows, Office, Silverlight and other Microsoft products are done installing updates and everything works fine, there’s no reason to keep them anymore.

• 96 MBs of protocols containing personal and system-critical information or 500,000 written pages of protocols. (PC average: 6 MB)

Windows, drivers and third party programs keep track of thousands and thousands of operations on your system. From the installation of a program (such as DirectX) made by a certain user…

…to extensive logs of driver installations, up to massive logs of all “pending file rename operations” that Windows schedules. If a third party somehow – through a virus or just by copying them from your PC – gets a hold of these log files, they may be able to tell which programs you ran at what time. Granted, it’s not a major security issue, but for peace of mind it’s best to delete them. On 16 PCs, we found almost 100 MBs of log files, or in other words, 500,000 written pages of system protocols (see here for more on that calculation).

• 4,500 or 1500 MBs worth of stored web pages. (PC average: 281 MB)

To put things into perspective, Google reports the average website is 320 KBs in size, with one megabyte containing three web pages.  So, on average, there were no less than about 4,500 websites stored on those 16 PCs. Given, that includes not just websites but also personal usage behavior, but that’s still quite a number.

•    4000 Error Reports generated by Windows. (PC average: 117 reports)

The moment an application or Windows feature crashes, an error report is generated and stored, giving users the option to send these reports to Microsoft. Yet Microsoft estimates the average error report is roughly 50 KBs in size – and contains information on the hardware and software where the problem occurred, including system information (read more on Microsoft’s privacy statement). So, on average that equates to about 4,000 error reports, although some of the PCs we measured had larger reports than others.

• In total: 103000 worthless files on all 16 PCs (PC average: 6437 files)

Why Is There So Much Junk On My PC?

We found it’s not just the age-old XP PCs that are riddled with junk, it’s the brand-new PCs as well. These days, PCs come with tons of preinstalled applications that are in the habit of creating unnecessary data. Third-party vendors like Norton, Microsoft and eBay pay hardware manufacturers to include things like trial software. However, while it takes up space, trial software and ads can actually be a good thing, since they help drastically reduce the price of a machine.

Here is an example of a shiny new PC that’s already riddled with files:

Why Should I Care About Deleting Junk?

Looking at those numbers you might be thinking, “OK, that’s just below 10 GBs of data junk per PC. I’ve got a 500 GBs hard disk so I’m good, thank you!”  Wrong.  First of all, some of the PCs we analyzed had between 20-30 GBs of data junk on them and even some of the moderately “thrashed” computers had at least a few gigabytes on them, which is still problematic. It becomes a bigger deal when you think about the following factors that are often a consequence of clogged-up hard disks:

• Solid State Disks (SSDs) are still quite small. Today’s ultrabooks and upcoming Windows 8 tablets sport SSDs ranging from 64 GBs to 256 GBs, with the average SSD clocking in at 128 GBs. On these systems, having 10-30 GBs of worthless data lying around hurts.

• There’s the privacy issue. As we stated above, temporary files, browser caches and log files may contain personal information. For more on this, check out the section below, “Spring Cleaning Your Digital Life: Wiping Data to Protect Your Privacy.”

• System stability. Application and Windows crashes often occur because of temporary files, both in the user folder and in the Windows folder. It generally happens when applications try to access or overwrite temporary files that are in use or don’t have enough security privileges. Also, if disk space gets low (on your primary partition C drive) because of too much data junk, you can expect all kinds of problems.

Temporary files spell trouble on systems with low drive capacity. They are a danger to overall performance and impair reliability in certain scenarios. For example, if a PC is cluttered with temporary files, some users may experience difficulties logging into Windows 7 (Event ID 1509) or run into problems installing and even running applications.

Spring Cleaning Your Digital Life: Wiping Data to Protect Your Privacy

Privacy issues, key concern for PC users, should be considered as part of any digital spring cleaning. Unfortunately, all versions of Windows, and several third party programs, don’t take the necessary steps to completely cover and wipe temporary files of personal and, possibly identifiable, information. This includes not only history lists (used to save the most recently used files), but also entire error reports that may even store passwords or other sensitive information. Microsoft tackles this issue with the following statement:

By using the “Unnecessary files” cleaning feature of TuneUp Utilities 2012, you don’t just delete these reports but also a ton of unnecessary data clutter and traces. This includes crash reports, Windows error reports, log files and temporary files.

But PCs aren’t just cluttered with unnecessary junk files, they’re riddled with thousands of registry files, long-forgotten files and more. In next week’s article, you’ll learn how to rid your PC of all this data junk and more.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Primary Backup: Local Media

The best way to back up your data is to back it up far away from your machine using a remote location. This is your anchor in case of a fire or a flood. However, you should also consider backing up data on local media, as it is the easiest and fastest way to recover lost data. In the odd event of a hard disk failure (where the PC and its surroundings are still intact), local backup will be very helpful in recovering the data quickly.

Required Equipment:

•    A portable hard drive, preferably double the size of your computer’s hard disk
•    A little bit of patience as first-time backup can take quite a bit of time

So, as soon as you have a portable hard drive, you are all set to make your first backup. Your choice of the drive is also crucial. Try to find one that’s double your PC’s hard disk drive (HDD). I generally recommend this because the amount of data you imagined would fill your HDD is generally overrun in a short time. And as more and more consumable content comes out every day, it’s hard not to fill up your HDD. You can always install a new HDD in your PC, but you can’t increase the size of a portable HDD on the fly. So it’s better to be safe than sorry. A solid state drive is also a perfect choice; however considering the current price point of SSDs, it’s pretty costly to purchase the perfect size SSD for backup purposes. A good review of portable hard drives can be found here and here. So now that you are ready with the portable hard drive, take a deep breath, and let’s begin.

Step 1: Connect the portable hard drive to your computer. Note, that if your hard drive supports and your PC has USB 3.0 ports, connect them. It will definitely increase data copy speed. Generally, USB 3.0 ports are differently colored.

                                                                                                                                                                          Step 2: Press Windows icon. Type Backup, and select the first option, “Backup and Restore”. Then select “Set Up Backup”.

Select the name of your portable HDD, and click “Next”. On the next prompt, select “Let Windows choose”, and click “Next”.

Step 3: At the final prompt, click on “Save settings and run backup”. Note that here you can change the schedule of your backup by clicking “Change schedule”. If everything went correctly, you’ll be greeted with the following window.

Congrats! Your files are being backed up to your portable hard drive. Don’t forget to connect the HDD before the scheduled backup time every week.

Secondary Backup: Cloud Storage

The buzzword of recent years is the key to our second backup option: the cloud! Cloud storage is a very safe way to store data in remote servers spread across the globe. So even if physical catastrophe destroys your personal computer, your data will be safe in some other geographic locations. However, the market is filled with potential cloud storage players, like Mozy, BackBlaze and Carbonite, so making a choice is tough. Each player offers unlimited/limited storage spiced up with feature rich, multi-platform backup software. However, I will focus one very prominent player, CrashPlan.

CrashPlan was my choice of data backup provider because, unlike other players, it does not delete your data from its server even if you delete it from your PC. Also, CrashPlan’s software supports peer-to-peer backup; that is, you can use your friends’ computers to back up your data and vice versa. Let’s get it set up.

Things Required:

•    A broadband Internet connection
•    An investment of $3 per month (or more/less depending upon the backup provider)

Download the latest version of CrashPlan here. Double click the setup, and complete the installation.

After installation has been completed, you will be greeted with the following screen. Enter your details, and click on “Create Account”. From there, you will see the following screen.

Just click on start backup and you are all set.

Your files will be stored on CrashPlan’s cloud storage area called CrashPlan Central, which is a multi-geographic server, thus protecting your data from physical catastrophes, natural disasters, etc. For an added layer of protection, you can also invite your friends to install this app and back up your files on his/her computers, thus giving you yet one more layer of protection.

In the odd event that you need to restore you data, just click “Restore” and select the files you want to restore, and you are all set.

Thus, our small but efficient and cheap backup strategy will help you recover your data anytime, no matter how you lost it! Do you have a custom backup setup? NAS drives, Amazon S3 etc.? Do drop a line, and let me know.

But that’s not what you wanted! In this week’s blog post, we’ll show you how to overcome this challenge and easily pin an actual drive to your Windows 7 taskbar.

Tackling This Tip Step by Step

Before you start, make sure that file extensions are visible. To do that, open up Windows Explorer, go to “Organize/Folder” and search “options”. Switch to the “View” tab and uncheck the “Hide extensions for known file types” entry. Hit “OK” and perform the following instructions.

1.    Right-click on an empty space on your Windows desktop and go to “New/Text Document”. Name the file “MyDriveLetter.exe”, for example. The name isn’t important; only the file extension is!

2.    Hit “Yes” on the window above to confirm the file extension. Next, pin the new file to the taskbar as you usually would—via drag and drop.

3.    Here comes the tricky part. Right-click on the item and then right-click on the name of the file again. Select “Properties”.

Go straight to the “Shortcut” tab and enter the drive name of your choice under the “target” section, such as “D:\”. Repeat the same steps for the “Start in” section. Go to “Change icon” if you want to give it a distinct icon—and that’s it! Once you hit “OK”, the new icon in your taskbar will lead you directly to the drive you specified.

Note: If a click on this icon launches a program, such as Windows Media Player or your default DVD playback software, it’s because the default action for a specific drive has been changed. To change this, open up your Start menu and click on “Default programs”. Go to “Change AutoPlay settings”, and make sure that the specific drive is set to “No action” or “Open folder to view files using Windows Explorer”. Hope you enjoyed this quick tip!

This is not your typical “Microsoft is spying on you” blog post. Instead, we’re here to inform you about what kind of data Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 Consumer Preview is sending to the Internet and how to shut it off, if you prefer. In many cases, the communication is actually needed for a proper Windows experience, but in other instances, it may not be totally irrelevant.

Group Policy Editor is Your Friend (OR the Registry)

You’ll find up to 22 communication features in Windows own Group Policy Editor. To open that, hold down the “WIN”-key and press “R”. Then, type in “gpedit.msc” and hit Enter. You’ll find all of the settings under “Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Internet Communication Management\Internet Communication Settings”.

On the right hand side, you’ll find all of the Windows features that automatically communicate with Microsoft’s web servers or do so upon a specific action. To change the settings of any of these, simply double-click on an item, such as:

Then, select the “Enabled” radio button – in this case, “Enabled” means “Yes, turn off!”

After a restart, the new policy is in effect!

Note to Windows Vista/7 Starter, Home Basic and Home Premium Users

Group Policy Editor is not included in the more consumer-oriented editions of Windows. Don’t fret; there is another route. Microsoft put out a massive Excel-spreadsheet which includes all Group Policies and their accompanying registry values – with this information, you can easily set the settings yourself.

Let’s stick to the example given above. Say, you want to turn off downloading printer drivers over HTTP. In that case, open Excel and all of the settings mentioned can be found below between rows 450 and 477.

Once you scroll all the way to the right, there will be a registry key and value that is responsible for the restriction, like the below example.

Note: If you want to control this setting for all users, go to the “machine” entry. Otherwise, select the “user” entry.

Open up “regedit” (WINKEY+R) and go to the path given above. In this example, I can only get as far as HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT. However, since the path above clearly wants me to set a value in the subkey “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Printers”, I need to recreate it. To do this, right-click on the last entry in the registry hierarchy (“Windows NT” here), select “New\Key” and type in “Printers”. Next, right-click in the right-hand window, select “New\DWORD key” and name it “DisableWebPnPDownload”. Of course, if both the key and value are already there, you don’t need to do anything. Double-click on the value and type in “1″ to apply the setting!

List of Windows Features that Communicate with the Web (or Over Network)

•    Turn off access to all Windows Update features: As the name suggests, this will completely turn off Windows Update – I would never recommend this under any circumstance.
•    Turn off Automatic Root Certificates Update: Windows automatically updates the list of root certificates on your computer to the list that is accepted by Microsoft as part of the Microsoft Root Certificate Program. This enhances security for local files and online.
•    Turn off downloading of print drivers over HTTP: This allows Windows to look for printer drivers over HTTP connections – usually, this only applies to corporate networks.
•    Turn off Event Viewer “Events.asp” Links: Event viewer is capable of connecting to the web, which helps you look up a certain Windows event (error, warning…). If you don’t want this, you can disable it.
•    Turn off Help and Support Center “Did you know?” content and Turn off Help and Support Center Microsoft Knowledge Base search: This allows Help and Support to connect to the web and give you more content.
•    Turn off Internet download for Web publishing and online ordering wizards: This disables all integrated online printing services in Windows.
•    Turn off Internet File Association service: This allows you to look up an unknown file location and find the accompanying program.
•    Turn off printing over HTTP: This turns off corporate printing via HTTP connections.
•    Turn off Registration if URL connection: This is referring to Microsoft.com. It allows Windows to use the Internet Connection Wizard to get a list of possible Internet Service Providers.
•    Turn off handwriting recognition error reporting: If you’re using a tablet, Windows can be set up to send handwriting statistics back to Microsoft.
•    Turn off access to the Store: This disables the Windows Store in Windows 8.
•    Turn off the “Order Prints” picture task: This disables the online photo services in Windows.
•    Turn off the “Publish to Web” task for files and folders: This prevents users from transferring files to any of the supported web services in Windows.
•    Turn off the Windows Messenger Customer Experience Improvement Program: This disables any sort of error reports to Microsoft regarding Windows Messenger.
•    Turn off Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program: This disables the sharing of Windows usage statistics with Microsoft (which should be disabled by default).
•    Turn off Windows Error Reporting: In case Windows crashes, Microsoft receives an error report (if you choose to send it). By turning on this setting, the dialog box will never appear.
•    Turn off Windows Network Connectivity Status Indicator active tests: Once a connection to a router has been established, Windows tests the internet connection by pinging a Microsoft server. If you don’t want this, disable it.
•    Turn off Windows Update device driver searching: This prevents Windows from looking up drivers when finding Windows Updates.

Again, none of these features have been known to spy on users. However, if you want to have full control over all in- and outgoing connections, this guide is the way to go.

Third-Party Applications: Still a Problem

I’ve now been productively working with Windows 8 for a couple of weeks! I have been using this OS day in and day out and have installed all of my applications.

While I was surprised by the system’s initial responsiveness, overall speed reduced after installing about 80 programs, which consisted of Skype, Live Messenger, SnagIt and games and office applications. It didn’t slow things down to a crawl, but it introduced quite a bit of lag and noticeably less performance—so I found myself again having to use tools such as TuneUp Program Deactivator, Autoruns, Startup Manager and Windows’ own service tools to turn off certain applications. This isn’t out of the ordinary though. It’s a fact of life, and I predict Microsoft will likely stay away from this department, despite the fact that the company has introduced quite a nice Task-Manager that shows the impact of start-up applications.

Closed Apps Still Run in the Background

Having worked with Windows 8 on both a desktop and a tablet, in addition to switching between a variety of apps, I noticed a bit of a lag when handling apps. First, switching between apps had a delay of between one second and several seconds. Second, the system slowed down in “classic desktop” mode although no applications were running.

Microsoft promised several times on its Engineering 8 Blog that inactive applications would be frozen and couldn’t consume PC resources. When looking at the multi-tasking switcher on the left, I was proven right. Windows 8 actively held about six apps at a time before apparently closing them. What I found instead, however, was a bit frustrating. The so-called frozen applications remain in the background.

While only the most critical of those apps were active in the background (Mail, Messaging, Music, etc.), all other apps just sat there consuming memory. Overall, I had about 500 MB worth of apps sitting in memory and not doing a whole lot. That’s not as bad as some browsers, but it’s still not quite as effective as it could be.

Why is this happening? The memory is actually consumed by the frozen state of the app. This means that once an app is closed (which is done by a swiping gesture from the top to the bottom of the screen), it can be resumed instantly. Even though this is a good feature, most users likely aren’t aware that this instant resume may have a detrimental effect on performance—and  there are applications that most people only start once, use for 10 minutes and don’t touch again.

Of course, a restart purges the memory of all app states, but many users go a long time without ever shutting down or restarting their PCs. In fact, Microsoft has designed Windows 8 to be more of an “Always On Standby” experience—they hide  the restart and shutdown buttons in the charms menu and encourage users to use their power buttons to go to standby.

Is this really a problem? Well, It all depends on the usage of the user. If you’re just using three or four of your favorite apps, this doesn’t concern you. A hundred MB won’t make a huge difference. If you’re using a wide array of Metro-style apps and switch back to your classic desktop applications, this might affect performance. Having half a gig of apps sitting in memory just waiting for you to start them again is detrimental to performance. I wish apps would actually close if you perform the aforementioned swipe gesture.

Again, it’s very early to talk about these things. Windows 8 is in its Consumer Preview stage, but I am not sure if Microsoft really is considering giving back more control to the user who actually wants it. We’ll keep you up-to-date on this.

As VentureBeat noted, “Windows 8′s secret feature [is] resurrecting old PCs.” Microsoft promised that Windows 8 would run equally well or better on low-powered machines than Windows 7. This is a bold statement, but the real question is, did the company deliver? In this blog post, we’ll explore that with early benchmarks,  showing if and how much Windows 8′s performance compares to Windows 7′s on the very same machines.

Windows 8 has been optimized from the ground up to work great with low-powered mobile devices. But how fast is it really? Our lab tests will give you the answers.

Our Test Beds: A Broad Range
To get comparable results, we put Windows 8 through a variety of tests on several very differently equipped systems. We used:

Two Desktop PCs: We installed the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on both a 2007-era desktop PC (Core 2 Duo, 2.66 GHz) and a recent Alienware gaming rig (Core i7 930, 8 GB RAM).

Two Laptops/Tablets: We also tested a low-powered Core i7 1.8 GHz, 4 GB RAM 13″ laptop, which includes a 256 GB SSD, as well as an Asus EP121 tablet sporting a Core i5 processor, 4 GB of RAM and a 64 GB SSD.

Netbook: We used a very common Samsung NC10 netbook running a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom and 2 GB of RAM.

We didn’t install any tools on those machines except for the applications that we frequently use for benchmarking. As usual, we performed all tests three times to get a good idea of the results. As usual, we put both OSs through the typical rounds of analyzing boot time, raw processing power and application launch speed. However, since this is a Consumer Preview, we just want to give a quick impression rather than perform a full-blown review—we’ll save that for later!

#1 – Boot Time Performance

Windows 8 is widely known for booting up extremely quickly. I used a stopwatch to determine how long it took until the desktop under Windows 7 and the new Metro user interface under Windows 8 was visible. The results will blow you away.

On all machines, Windows 8 was able to surpass its predecessor—right out of the gate, the new OS booted much more quickly. Once the final version hits, we’ll go through our usual paces of running Windows Performance Analyzer to determine if and how much background activity during boot was reduced.

#2 – Processes on a Fresh System

Last September, Microsoft boasted about less processes and reduced RAM consumption. Obviously, the less things that are running in the background, the better performance and longer battery life will be, as idle times are much higher. Right after we clean installed both Windows 7 and Windows 8, we compared the usage.

What we found was not necessarily a big achievement, but an achievement nonetheless. We saw a decrease of five processes as well as a drop in RAM usage by about 100 MB. In your day-to-day routine, this won’t  be of particular help. What is helpful, however, are the drastically reduced idle activities. On Windows 8, Microsoft managed to reduce overall background activity noticeably—both on the software and on the driver side. By default, the bare OS’s processes and services rarely cause any noticeable spikes.

#3 – Application Start-up Times

Application start-up times give us a good indication of the OS’s ability to pre-load data and quickly manage smaller file chunks. To test this, we “trained” Windows’s own SuperFetch feature by loading Outlook 2010 every morning at exactly 9 a.m. and keeping it running on both the Windows 7 SP1 and the Windows 8 OSs all day long. After a couple of days, Windows had adapted. Then, we were able to use the trusty AppTimer, which automatically launches applications and measures start-up times down to the millisecond.

Now, how long does it take? We only performed this test on the Core i7 1.8 GHz laptop.

There was  a difference in so called “cold” and “warm” startups – cold refers to the first startup of the application right after boot, and warm refers to subsequent launches that are all completely loaded from memory and, thus, faster. The differences were hardly noticeable, but there was a clear trend towards Windows 8 loading applications a tad slower; however, this could be attributed to hard disk controller drivers.

#4 – Office Performance

To test day-to-day performance, we used the dependable PCMark 7 benchmark tool that automatically performs tasks such as website rendering, virus scans, photo manipulation and video editing. It should easily prove how well Windows 8 can handle both CPU and hard disk heavy tasks.

We found mixed results. While Windows 8 achieved quite a leap in performance on the faster machines, the lower-end devices, especially the netbook, actually suffered a bit. This ran noticeably slower during the tests, which was also noticeable during day-to-day usage.

#5 – Gaming Performance

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. benchmark is a very well established test program designed to measure frames per second in DirectX games. As usual, we performed all tests three times and averaged the results.

The gaming front seems to profit from Windows 8′s reduced memory usage and  apparent  optimization to DirectX. But, those results should be taken with a grain of salt: Windows 8 installed some more recent beta drivers that were not available for Windows 7 SP1.To compensate for the effect, we downloaded the most recent beta drivers for  nVIDIA and Intel onboard graphics. Overall, the netbook suffered a small amount again, while the faster machines gained quite a bit of performance.

#6 – Overall Verdict: Good Improvements, Some Losses

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview runs well on higher-end devices, but we were surprised to see that it lost some performance on lower-end machines—the very exact devices that it’s supposed to run well on. However, I’ll wait for the release candidate to make a final judgment. We may have an odd combination of unfinished drivers and code and bugs that may affect benchmarks (which is exactly why I only used a handful of my tests to get a general feel for new OS’s performance).

Overall, Windows 8 is going in the right direction. However, judging bare operating systems can only reveal so much.  We’ll find out how it really works when we’re able to test third-party applications and  the Metro-style apps. Do these negatively impact performance over time? We’ll find out in part two of our Windows 8 performance series.

What is DPC?

Deferred Procedure Calls allow programs to queue up actions to be performed extremely quickly by the CPU. Until these DPCs aren’t executed, the computer comes to a halt (for a fraction of a second). Here’s an example of where this is important: Video playback! Obviously, both the audio and video has to show up on your screen almost instantly – the data needs to be read from the disk and each frame needs to be rendered in real-time. The same thing goes for audio and even your mouse cursor. So, some drivers and processes make use of DPC to deliver high-performance and instantly visible results.
However, if your PC is suffering from a high DPC latency, you’ll immediately see laggy, jerky performance, audio dropouts, glitches, stuttering etc. Those issues are mostly caused by drivers, but processes may also be the root of the problem. Fortunately, there’s a tool that checks for high DPC latency and can easily help you solve it.

The DPC Latency Checker

DPC Latency Checker, developed by TheSycon, shows a graphical representation of the current DPC:

As you can see, this system is suffering from a 1ms (1000us) DPC latency and never goes below that value. Plus, it regularly spikes to between 3 and 4ms. On a well-optimized and problem-free PC, this value should never go higher than 500us. If it does, you’re basically wasting precious PC performance. What’s the source of this? There may be several factors that cause an unusually high DPC:

1. Update Bad/old Drivers: In about 90% of all cases, drivers are the root of this problem. I suggest updating all drivers on your system; that includes Wi-Fi adapters, LAN adapters, USB host controllers, Bluetooth receivers, sound chips, graphics and last – but definitely not least – the chipset controllers. As I’ve written in the past, there are several very good sources for the latest and greatest drivers – also, DO try out beta versions of drivers.
2. Disable Devices: To figure out which of your devices may be the cause for these high DPC spikes, I suggest you disable all non-essential devices one by one and keep an eye out for changes in your DPC latency. To do that, go to “Device Manager” (WINKEY + R, enter “devmgmt.msc”). Right-click on a non-essential device, select “Disable” and watch the DPC Latency Checker graph:

Beware: You can’t disable everything, so focus on non-critical entries such as Wi-Fi, sound or Bluetooth and stay away from “System devices”, “Processors” or anything that might render your PC unusable (e.g. don’t disable keyboards/mouse).

3. Turn off 3rd party programs: Some 3rd party tools may be responsible for an unsually high DPC latency. To turn them off easily, just use our very own TuneUp Program Deactivator. Check out this blog post that explains, how Program Deactivator works and how it may help you get rid of DPC issues. Just turn off ALL (!) programs and see if DPC Latency Checker shows any change.
4. Turn off hidden startup programs, explorer plug-ins, browser extensions and more: Now, that you’ve used TuneUp Program Deactivator to get rid of essentially all 3rd party programs, it’s time to turn our attention to hidden startup programs and extensions. Check out this guide to both detect and disable unnecessary background activity.
5. Update your BIOS: Go to your PC makers website and try to find instruction on how to update the BIOS.  If that doesn’t help, nothing will.

Using all of these solutions, we were able to lower the DPC latency significantly. As you can see from the graph above, the baseline (idle) is very low – only during extreme network spikes and hardware activity is DPC Latency Checker showing an increase.

If all of those four solutions, didn’t help: Reinstall Windows! Now, from the start make sure to run DPC Latency Checker. If the issue exists right from the start – without any drivers or applications running – it might be wise to check back with the PC manufacturer or (if you’re savvy enough) physically yank out hardware that you don’t need, such as additional hard disks, Blu-ray drives or a sound card; of course, that’s only an option if you’ve got a good old desktop PC.

In this blog post, we’ll take a quick peek behind the scenes of the latest generation of CPUs, both from Intel and AMD and tell you how they’re still managing to make their hardware faster and more power-efficient than ever before. We’ll also give you quick overview of both CPU platforms.

It’s not about pure performance anymore

Remember the performance race? From the dark ages of computing up until about 2005, CPU competitors Intel and AMD tried to one-up each other (and themselves) by increasing the CPU clock frequency incrementally. The processors were simply getting too hot and consumed way too much power. They reached a point at which CPUs were on the brink of becoming unstable. An example of that is the last generation of Pentium IV processors (right). It consumed 100+ watts and required advanced cooling techniques to work properly. PCs at the time were loud power suckers and mobile PCs with the (lower-voltage) Pentium IV mobile processor lasted for about 1½ hours on the go. But it wasn’t just about raw clock speed, the architecture and instruction sets (remember the MMX hype?) improved quite a bit. But it was always about performance. Also, at one point both competitors hit a brick wall because they were stuck in manufacturing technique/technology since it was physical impossible to get more transistors into the CPU’s die and therefore, it was not possible to refactor/improve its architecture.

To advance performance further and decrease power consumption, both Intel and AMD quickly added more cores at lower CPU frequency. Unfortunately, it took quite a bit of time for software manufacturers to catch up—usually only very demanding applications (games, video rendering suites) of the early days of mutli-core processors were capable of delivering increased speeds. Fortunately, the industry adapter and now most tools that require performance are capable of making use of two or even four cores.
These days, even the most basic consumer PCs and desktops have CPUs with two (Duo) and four (Quad) cores in. The more advanced CPUs by AMD and Intel now have even eight cores (Hexacore); AMDs bulldozer platform scales up to 12 or even 16 cores. Performance increases since the operating system and applications are more or less becoming more capable of balancing the load across all CPUs. Instead of having one core with 3.8 GHz you’ll have more power running a quad-core CPU with 2.6 GHz each—of course, that’s only the case if your software has been thoroughly optimized to run on several cores. Software that hasn’t been optimized for multiple cores will perform better on the 3.6 GHz single core (if the architecture, etc. is comparable between these CPUs).
And with that, the never-ending race between Intel and AMD came to an abrupt end.

An Overview of Today’s CPU World

Sandy Bridge And Beyond

“Sandy Bridge”, Intel’s new CPU architecture, was introduced in 2010 and increased the technological gap between AMD and Intel even further. Intel increased performance thanks to more cores, hyper-threading (the simulation of cores within a core), and an increase in processor cache. You can spot Sandy Bridge processors by looking at their names: A Core i3-530, for example, is a model of the first generation of Intels Core i-Processors while Sandy Bridge sports four-digit names, such as Core i3-2600. Sandy Bridge owes it success mainlyto their very compact form as the CPU, graphics processor, and RAM controller have now been brought together on one chip. This increases performance drastically. Second, an enhanced “Turbo Boost” feature increases clock speed whenever you’re running resource-intense applications such as games or video editing suites. In such cases, Sandy Bridge increases for example, from 2.8 GHz to 3.4 GHz and clocks down automatically to save power. And although the built-in GPU (e.g. the Intel HD 3000) is powerful enough to watch full-HD video, it’s not quite capable of running newer games. That’s why, in many cases, you’ll have both the Intel HD 3000 and a dedicated graphics chip (for example, a NVIDIA GeFore or AMD Radeon) built into your system.

What’s up with AMD?

AMD is still obviously a big player in the CPU business, but their market share and advancements have diminished over the past years. Their recent “Fusion” chipsets, aimed at low-end PCs, integrated CPU and GPU into one core, though the platform never really caught on. Last year, AMD introduced a new generation of processors based on the “Bulldozer” architecture. It sports between 6 and 16 cores and advanced core distribution techniques. The new CPUs are all dubbed “AMD FX” and offer performance that’s almost on par with Core i-processors, yet at a lower price.

Which CPU is the Best?

Right now, there’s no easy way to answer this. But, let me put it another way: Since the early days of Intel’s Core i-platform, processors are way too powerful to be bogged down by “normal” applications. And by that I mean web browsing, e-mail, (light) photo editing, or file management. If you only perform such tasks on your PC, you don’t want to spend much time worrying about your next CPU—they’re all fast enough. Even netbooks processors are capable of handling these basic tasks just fine. If you’re a gamer or depend on heavy virtualization, a mid-range to high-end processor such as a Core i5 2600 or Core i7 2600K and even AMDs FX 8100 chip might be something to think about getting. My advice, tough: Stay away from the “Extreme Editions” of CPUs. They only offer a marginal performance benefit over the regular chip, but cost a whole lot more.
If you really need more performance for high-end scenarios in which a combination of raw CPU power is critical (audio editing, video editing, some games), I suggest you wait for the second generation of Bulldozer processors or “Ivy Bridge” slated for release this year.

Want to revisit these simpler times? It’s not easy running DOS, Windows 3.x, or Windows 9x games on modern machines—the architecture of both hardware and software has changed a lot over the past 15–25 years. In this blog post, we’ll talk about a couple of ways to easily run these old games on Windows 7 PCs.

DOSBox: Play All of Your Favorite DOS Games!

Most games from the 1980s and 1990s ran under DOS, the Disk Operating System which is a command-line operating system by Microsoft that powered most 286-, 386- and 486-era PCs. Even when Windows 3.x and Windows 95 were widely used and came pre-installed on PCs, DOS was the backbone of these systems, and thus, most games required it.

Today, DOS is extinct and not part of Windows anymore. And no, most games won’t run under the command line of Windows 7. Even if they did, classic games were sensitive to CPU clock speeds. What ran fine with 33, 66, or 100 MHz won’t run as great with clock speeds of up to 3800 MHz today. DOSbox gets around this by emulating an old PC and automatically adjusting speeds to the type of DOS application you’re running. Hit up its “Performance” section to see how you can optimize the speeds and see how it works.

DOSBox is easy to set up, but it requires some command-line skills:

1.    Download and install DOSBox from this website. Copy all of your DOS-based games into a folder, for example, “C:\DOSGames”, and launch DOSBox. You’ll find yourself in the “Z:\” folder.

2.    Next, mount one of your local folders to a drive letter on DOSBox. It has no direct access to your drives, such as your hard disk (C:) or your DVD Drive (D:). For example, I put the game Sim City 2000 under “C:\DOSGames”, and IDd like to mount this folder as the DOSBox drive letter “G:”. Also, make sure to shorten all folder names since you’ll need to type them all in by hand and to prevent any struggle with the “tilde”.

Here’s how that works. Simply type in “mount g: c:\DOSGames”. Next, type in the drive letter “G:”, and hit enter. Enter “Dir” to see the contents of this drive. It should reflect the contents of your local folder, “C:\DOSGames”.

To switch to a subfolder, type in “CD game” (replace the game with the name of your game folder). In my example, I switched to the “SIMCITY” folder by typing in “cd simcity”.

Type in “DIR” again to see which of these files runs the game. The file name usually resembles the name of the game and ends with the extension “.exe”, “.com”, or “.bat”.

3.    After you’ve typed in the name of the game executable file, hit ENTER to run it.

If you have problems running any game, just check out DOSBox’s massive compatibility list or hit up its forums to see if others are experiencing the same issues.

ScummVM: Playing LucasArts, Sierra, Activision, and Adventuresoft Classics

A huge part of the 1980s and 1990s was dominated by point & click adventure games. LucasArts dominated this genre with classics such as Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis and Day of the Tentacle.

Since these games were made for computers that were not even a fraction as powerful as the typical smartphone (not to mention a high-end gaming PC) today, they usually don’t work well or won’t even run at all. Thankfully, Eugene Sandulenko and his massive team created ScummVM, a tool that runs LucasArts classics at their respective speeds and scales them up perfectly for today’s screens. Over the years, the team expanded to support point-&-click games from makers like Simon the Sorcerer and Leisure Suit Larry.

Nowadays, ScummVM doesn’t just run on PCs but on basically every platform you can imagine. There are versions for Sega’s 2000-era DreamCast console, Nintendo 64, Bada, and even Nintendo DS. On these more rare or closed platforms, you’d need to do a bit of hacking before you can enjoy your classics. However, on the most popular platforms such as the PC, Android, Linux, or Mac, it only takes seconds. Here’s ScummVM running Indiana Jones IV on my HTC Flyer Android tablet.

So how does this work? Go to the ScummVM download page, and get the right version for your platform. In my example, I’ll go with the regular PC version.

Once ScummVM is installed, you’ll need the original versions of the games. If you don’t have them, they can usually be found online or on eBay. Just copy the contents of the game discs into a folder. Here, I copied and sorted all of my LucasArts adventures, so I can easily access them using ScummVM.

Fire up ScummVM, and click on “Add Game”. Browse to the folder of any game, for example, The Secret of Monkey Island, and hit “Select”. Go through the settings and see if you like any of the graphical enhancements that ScummVM has to offer. Done? Hit “OK”. Once you’re ready, click “Start” to launch the game.

To save a game at any point or exit, hit “F5″ to pull up ScummVM’s main menu.

Running Windows 9x Games

Not all classic games run under DOS; in fact, many of the games developed between 1995 and 2002 require Windows 95, 98, or Millennium Edition. These more modern classics also ran on the early version of DirectX which is still around today. So, if you want to play Windows 9x-era games, just install and run them using compatibility settings.

Right-click on the executable files (e.g. setup.msi) or game files (game.exe), go to “Properties” and select “Compatibility”. Make sure to run them under the Windows 95 or 98 settings, select “Reduced Color Mode”, and check “Run in 640×480 screen resolution”. If the game won’t run, you’ll need to jump through some hoops and install a Windows 95/98 virtual machine using VirtualBox.

However, if the game runs, its color palette might be off. This is due to a DirectX component, DirectDraw, which is severely depreciated in later versions; hence, all of the old games that require it won’t run well or at all. Thankfully, some fans have already gone out and written their own DirectDraw file hacks which will allow you to not just run the games but run them under your  native display resolution of 1920×1200. The most notable of those hacks is DDHack—you can get a very detailed description of how it works here and get the latest version here. Usually, all that’s required is unpacking the ZIP file and copying the “ddraw.dll” and “ddhack.cfg” to the respective folder, such as “C:\Programs\StarCraft”. Using the “ddhack.cfg”, you can make more changes to your games.

All in all, the three solutions I mentioned should allow you to enjoy your retro games.

Are you having any issues with PC gaming? We’ll try to fix them! Just leave us a comment.

Something’s obviously blocking your device—but what if all of your applications are shut down? Unplugging is not a good idea because then you might be looking at data loss or even corruption of the media’s file system. To avoid that, we’ll show you how to use a very advanced Windows Sysinternal tool to find the application, service, or background process that has a hold on your device and explain why.

Process Explorer to the rescue!

We’ve previously mentioned Process Explorer a couple of times—it’s an extremely powerful tool which shows you all currently running processes, their dependencies, their DLLs used, their exact CPU/RAM usage, all disk activity, network traffic, and a lot of other information which only the most advanced Windows kernel hackers will ever need or understand. Process Explorer is also capable of figuring out which processes are constantly using your external devices. Here’s how it works:

1.    Go to “Computer” and figure out which drive letter is assigned to your USB thumb drive, MP3 player, external hard disk, or other external device. In this example, it’s “G:”.

2.    Download Process Explorer from this URL and unpack the “ProcessExplorer.zip” file. Inside, you’ll find “procexp.exe”. Open it.

3.    Now, you’ll see a list of all currently running processes. But which one is keeping your external device busy? Look for the drive letter! Go to “Find” and “Find Handle or DLL” first. Then, type in the drive letter of your device.

4.    The first four entries belong to your file system which is designed to automatically block and unblock a device. Then, Windows-Explorer appears to have a lock on G:, but that disappears once I close the window. So, what is left? A process called “Iedit_.exe” with the Process ID “4336″. A quick look at the process list (or an online search) reveals the culprit: PhotoImpact X3!

5.    Now, as you might have guessed, I staged this file block with a foreground application. To do so, I simply opened a file from G:, but this might very well be a service or a process that you need to kill by closing background apps in the system tray…

…or by forcefully killing them using Process Explorer. But be warned, forcefully killing an application could also lead to some data loss, depending on the type of application. Tough, in general, it’s safer than just yanking out the device.

And voilà! You will finally be able to remove your drive without any issues whatsoever. Of course, this solution also works with files that you can’t delete or remove.

You’ve now experienced the power of Process Explorer and understand how to look deep under Windows’ hood to solve problems easily. If you are having issues with files or external devices, just let us know!