Windows 7 was officially released to the public on October 22, 2009. I’ve been fortunate to have been running it since its beta release back in February. Since then I have formed a personal and professional opinion about the new OS from Microsoft and I have to say that they seem to have finally gotten this one right. This is the OS to finally upgrade to.

If you are currently running Windows XP and have been afraid to upgrade to Vista, fear no more because this upgrade will be worth it. It is faster, runs smoother, boots up faster and shutsdown quicker as well. Its loaded with tons of great features that provide a really nice user experience.

I have been recommending Windows 7 to my friends, family, co-workers, peers and my clients. Even if you have older hardware, Windows 7 just may be the ticket to breathing new life into that old PC. Send us an email or give us a call if you would like to discuss Windows 7 for your computer.

The power requirements of the modern desktop PC have jumped to astronomical levels. Rigs sporting multiple processing cores and graphics cards and multiple hard drives require more juice than previous generations of hardware did. Some high-end power supply units are now rated in excess of 1,200 watts. A modern computer enthusiast’s gaming rig, including monitor, might pull as much as 400 watts just idling. Leaving a computer on all the time can translate into a pretty hefty power bill at the end of the month. An “always on” 400 watts at a $0.12-per-kilowatt-hour rate would cost you $34.56 a month! When talking these kinds of figures, it’s easy to see how taking the time to configure a proper power-saving state for your PC could save you some serious cabbage. Click here to download the PDF to Maximum PCs article excerpt: pc2sleep.pdf

For those of us who want to squeeze out a little more from our Windows XP startup:

To speed up your boot process slightly, disable the Windows XP loading screen. This can be accomplished easily by opening the MSCONFIG utility (‘start\run and type msconfig’), selecting the ‘boot.ini’ tab and checking the /NOGUIBOOT option.

When you boot your system, you will see a black screen in between POST and the welcome screen from now on.

Another memory tweak…

For Users with 256 MB RAM or more this tweak will boost their Windows- and Game-Performance.

What it does: It tells Windows not to use any Swap File until there is really no more free RAM left.

Open the System Configuration Utility by typing msconfig.exe in the RUN command. There in your System.ini you have to add “ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1″ under the 386enh section.

Restart your Windows and enjoy better Game performance

I work on a lot of PCs at work and during my copious freetime for friends and families. I have come across a few tweaks that I have noticed that make a pretty good difference without investing much other than a few minutes of your time. Try them out and let me know what you think.

These Settings will fine tune your systems memory management –at least 256MB of ram recommended

go to start\run\regedit -and then to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

DisablePagingExecutive -double click it and in the decimal put a 1 – this allows XP to keep data in memory now instead of paging sections of ram to hard drive yields faster performance.

LargeSystemCache- double click it and change the decimal to 1 -this allows XP Kernal to Run in memory improves system performance a lot.

Create a new dword and name it IOPageLockLimit – double click it and set the value in hex – 4000 if you have 128MB of ram or set it to 10000 if you have 256MB set it to 40000 if you have more than 512MB of ram -this tweak will speed up your disc cache

Reboot and watch your system fly!