Most people automatically assume that it’s time to have an expert or technician take a look at the machine. Such a choice involves not only output of cash but also a loss of valuable time without our computer. In reality one can do a few things to pre-check our system for malfunctions. Built right into your computer is a choice of diagnostic tools easily accessible and simple to perform. Most are self explanatory and uncomplicated to use.

These tools can be found in the Accessories folder by left clicking “All Programs”

Once this is done a “drop down” menu will appear with many choices. Scroll down to “Accessories” and left click.  Now you look for “System Tools” towards the bottom. Again left click this choice and it will open numerous choices you can use to solve some of your problems. I’ll go through some of the important ones you will use. Although not in the order you will see them in, these are some of the essentials.

Disk Cleanup.

Just as it states, this program will analyze the drive you select for unnecessary, unused and clutter you no longer need.  It actually frees up space on the drive you choose.  The first window will ask you to chose a drive. Normally it will be your main drive or C:\.  You will then choose “OK”.  Now the program takes over and will show you a “progress bar” to inform you of the work being done. Be patient, the progress will seem slow but you have to remember it is checking an entire hard disk and all sub-directories to find problems. When it stops, you will see a list of suggested files to delete and the total amount of disk space you can recover.  It is a good idea is to view the choice of “folders to delete” offered and check off any folders you would like to include in the cleanup. It also gives you an opportunity to view the files and gives an explanation of what these files are. Take a look at the “More Options” tab for more space saving choices.

Disk Defragmenter

Another improvement tool is also listed in the “System Tools” list is “Disk Defragmenter” This program will reconstruct your hard disk for optimum performance.  Here is a quick explanation of why it is so important. When you save information to your computer it goes on your hard drive in the order you send it. So if you just entered a recipe for soup it is applied to your disk. Now say you add an address of a person you just met and then a photo of your dog. These are taken in by your hard drive in almost the same as a laundry list. Line by line. You can see that information stored in this manner is like a desk plastered with stick notes. You would spend hours looking for the right one. Defragmentaion puts, or lines up all these “notes” in a logical order which enables the computer to access file much quicker.

These are just two programs available on your computer to increase speed. There are many more commercial programs to fine tune your machine to your liking.

Darren writes on many topics including technology, free people search, social media and social networks.

Beyond doubt Windows 7 will run faster when compared to the slow-coach Vista. I must say there is still enough room for more improvement. Speed is one of the main virtues of Windows 7 Operating Systems when compared to its predecessor, Windows Vista. But most guys running on Windows 7 have never experienced a ‘fast’ 15 second boot that Microsoft engineers were shooting for. We can always hope that the upcoming Windows 7 SP1 will definitely bundle few performance tweaks. Still you can do lot on your Windows 7, to speed it up. But I have never covered to turn off the visual effects, like turning off the Aero. We can leave the visual side for good, let your Windows 7 stay beautiful but we will cut other corners.

Un-install bloatware

To start with, you can un-install blotware that came up with your computer or laptop. Also you can un-install any un-used program or the ones you no longer want in your computer. Now, launch your Control Panel, then Programs, Programs and Features and then select the program you want to uninstall and then click Uninstall. Many programs load its processes at boot time and this will take up valuable RAM and CPU cycles. While you’re in here, you can also click Turn Windows Features On or Off and scan the list to see if there’s anything you don’t use.
Limit startup processes

More number of process at startup means more time to start up, so its always good to go with a few number of programs. Cut off the not required ones and just stay with the ones you really need on startup. To remove programs from your startup, you can type in msconfig by the Search tab and hit enter. Now by the window that opens, you can click on the Startup tab. You’ll likely see a slew of apps, mostly for system support, but you’ll be able to identify some that clearly aren’t necessary. Un-check the ones you don’t need at start up and save the settings with a restart.

Add more RAM

This gets you an edge. If you are an upgradee from a previous version of Windows, then you need to be sure that you considered the Minimum requirements. Windows 7 needs at least 1 GB of RAM. Its always good you add a piece of memory just matching (Same size and speed) the existing memory you have. This will help you speed up your device considerably.

Turn off search indexing

The Search Indexing facility in Windows 7 will index files to be found fast. This is useful only for frequent searchers, if you are never a frequent searcher, you don’t need this facility much. So its good that you turn this off and boot performance. To do this simply right click your Computer and select Manage, now here you can select the Services and Applications given by the Computer Management window. Next click Services, find Windows Search. After that you can right click the Windows Search and choose Properties. A new Window will open, and from the Startup type, click on the drop down menu and chose Disabled. After that press Apply and then Ok.

Defragment your hard drive

Whenever you have disk space, your hard disk stores data as chunks. De-fragging your hard disk tides your hard disk and will help your device perform fast. Simply type in defrag by the Windows Search box to launch the Disk Defragmenter. Follow the Wizard to complete the process.

Clean up Your Disk.

Cleaning up your disk space will only bring in a noticeable effect if your hard disk is getting close to its full. Click Start then choose All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and Disk Cleanup. This will help you clean off all unwanted junk and files including your temporary, offline Web pages, and installer files on your PC.

Change Power Settings

Adjust Your power settings to give you optimum performance and of course it isn’t a good choice if you are looking to save electricity. But adjusting the your power settings could really boost your PC. Launch Control Panel, select System and Security now Power Options. From here, you can click on the left panel choice Create a power option and chose to set High Performance.

Keep your computer malware free

There is not a need to talk more on the fact that a clean computer gives the best performance. So better be sure to keep your PC clean of malwares. Install a good antivirus program, that never takes much system resources, update it regularly and keep malwares off.

Make use of Performance Troubleshooter

This could help you find and fix root cause of your system slow down. Launch your Control Panel, by the Search box, type in troubleshooting and under the System and Security, you can see the choice Check for performance, click on it to run the trouble shooter.

Turn off Gadgets

This will let you speed your computer to a good extent. Turn off the gadgets by simply searching for gadgets by the Search box and then chose the View the list of running gadgets. Now from here, you can select each one on turn and click Remove. To find which all gadgets you can shut down is no trouble, simply remove the ones you think you can live without.

When you want to run Windows based applications or programs on your Mac, the easiest solution is to dual boot your Mac by making use of the Apple’s boot camp option. But, if you are looking for an everyday purpose, the installation of an OS X virtualisation host like Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion is ideal. As it helps you to run multiple Operating Systems concurrently. Now, both these programs brings you the facility to hide the Windows desktop and run Mac and Windows applications side by side.

The Parallels Desktop, the good rival to VM Ware(both provides similar OS X virtualisation support), came up with Parallels Desktop 6, providing new and advanced features, outclassing VMware. The big one feature on this new release is a mobile application for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, which allows one to connect to virtual machines over the Internet. As a part of our test, we ran it for iPad, and found to have no problem accessing our Windows installation through a firewall. And as we got the hang of touch controls, the Operating System was responsive and usable. With this, you can even remotely turn on virtual machines via the mobile app, as long as the host Mac is turned on.

Apart from these, the new launch brings you some additional features. Gets you Spotlight support for Windows files and a perfect 5.1 surround sound for one to watch movies or play games on a virtual PC with a DirectX 9 support. The OS X parental controls are applied automatic to Windows all applications, also the keyboard shortcuts can be synchronized between Operating Systems. This helps reduce confusion, every time you switch between platforms. Now the real selling point for Parallels Desktop version 6, though, is speed. Performance has always been an issue with virtualisation. Thanks to the overheads of running two Operating Systems concurrent. But this case, Parallels claims version 6 to provide the smoothest Windows-on-OS X experience available.

Now to put the whole thing to a test, we took a mid-range hardware. 20in iMac packed with a 2GB RAM running on a Core 2 Duo T7300 processor with Windows 7 natively in Boot Camp. This hardware attained an overall score of 0.93 in our benchmarks. Also we are happy telling that, Parallels version 6 was able to load Windows from our existing Boot Camp partition easily. Although you can also install to a virtual disk file. When you are making a switch from a PC, you can even use the supplied Windows tool to dump the OS and applications to a virtual disk file in just few clicks to migrate them painlessly to Parallels. We also tried a fairly clean Windows 7 installation occupying 30GB on disk, and found it take about an hour.

Download

You can download the Parallels 6 directly from the Parallels website. Additionally, you have a free download of trial version, that gets you 14 days to try on the product. After that you can purchase the full product to get the Serial keys. Enter in the serial key of your Parallels 6 to activate the product as full version. You may also make use of third party download websites, to download the product.

The Evolution of Mac OS X as an Operating System
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–The Early Versions

Even version 10.0, known as Cheetah and released in 2001, was ready for use as a web hosting server. As the operating system progressed through its legendary feline iterations, more features that added to its ease of use as a web hosting server were added. In fact, the first major advance as far as hosting was concerned came as early as 2003, when the 10.2 or Jaguar version, which followed the 10.1 Puma server version, added Samba. Samba is a software package that allows file, print and domain integration with Windows clients and servers, so that theoretically a Mac OS X server could run on the same network as a Windows hosting server and allow for open source and ASP.NET on the same account.

The subsequent (2005) 10.4 Tiger version of Mac OS X Server added Spam Assassin to its growing list of features. This meant that it could be used to root out spam at the E-mail hosting level, as it complemented the mail servers that had been added as early as the Jaguar version. And it was with the 10.5 Leopard version in 2007 that Mac OS X truly became a full featured option for a hosting server that could be used by even a company that strove to become the best host in its class.

–Leopard and Snow Leopard

Specific improvements that catapulted the Leopard version of Mac OS X into the ranks of full featured server systems included Wiki server, iCal server, and Spotlight Server, all features that made Mac OS X useful in particular for corporate intranet hosting, or for domains where information was to be shared among individuals responsible for the site or application who remained in separate, remote locations. As could be expected, each successive version of Mac OS X was compatible with the most up-to-date versions of PHP and MySQL, so that Leopard was compatible with PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.0.

At present, the current version of Mac OS X is called Snow Leopard, and it is the most commonly used version of the operating system as far as hosting is concerned. It has been available since 2009, and in 2010, it was adopted by a major hosting company that began to aggressively promote their Mac hosting capabilities. 1.3 times faster than its predecessor, Mac OS X Snow Leopard includes features that are specifically geared to the modern web hosting server operator. Compatible with the very latest versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP, the newest version of OS X Server allows for virtual hosting of multiple websites, with each one having its own control panel and IP address. SSL integration allows for the security that many websites and applications now demand, and WebDAV is included for collaborative Web content publishing. CGI support and full dynamic content hosting including Perl, Ruby on Rails, Tomcat, and Python is integrated into Snow Leopard as well.

Finally, Snow Leopard, which is rightfully promoted by Apple as an ideal server for Web 2.0 hosting, also boasts a 64-bit Java virtual machine. This makes Mac OS X Server compatible with enterprise-class applications that run on the latest Intel-based servers. Its legendary user-friendly interface has been improved as well, allowing for fast and easy setup of the system and rapid deployment.

In short, Mac OS X has evolved from a bare-bones operating system for open source web applications to one of the most powerful, stable, easy to use and full-featured options for PHP and similar hosting.

Advantages and Disadvantages
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The main advantages of using Mac OS X Server in hosting applications is security. Apple has hired top hackers to attempt to penetrate its operating systems, and so far all have failed. Because a hacker could not possibly access the tree structure that actually enables access to crucial files, Macintosh has been selected by the U.S. Army to replace Windows. In addition, it is easier and faster to operate, so that less time is needed to set up new accounts and virtual hosting. Finally, its Intranet features make cloud or virtual Mac OS X based accounts ideal for corporations who will use the included features for internal communication and collaborative content or application development.

The major disadvantage of Mac OS X Server is cost. Like all Apple products, both the operating system itself and the hardware needed to run it are more expensive, especially when compared to Linux.

Conclusion
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A hosting guide that wants to be known as the best comparison web host available should have clients offering Mac OS X Server hosting based on Snow Leopard to its clients. Such hosting can be offered as either cloud or shared hosting, and its availability should be mentioned on Hosting Observer in order that customers can make the right decision. Nevertheless, it occupies a small niche compared to Linux or Windows hosting server systems.

The Operating System comes preloaded with Firefox and Open office. More than hundred programs are available for installation. Visit www.ubuntu.com for downloading your  free copy. Burn the image and well follow the simple procedures as instructed  to install your copy of Ubuntu. The interface is clean and the experience is similar to Windows. Well its free and open source alternative to Windows and Mac.

Pinning is the new feature which replaces the Quicklaunch . Now they are sided along with the open applications . All such applications pinned get a spot on the taskbar thus allowing easy access. All the running appplications has a glossy sheen over it and the rest remain dull . Adding of more than folder puts them under the Windoes explore icon and adding a file makes it associated with the application . So we actually have to use the jump list to select it.

1. The notifier allows us to see a preview of all the unread mails in the inbox. A button at the center allows access to the mail in the Gmail.

2. The jump list provides access to unread mail and clicking them will open them in Gmail.

3. Gmail secured RSS feed is used to retrieve mail and therefore it failry safe. Machine’s dependent encryption is used to save the credentials.