Tuning
What is involved in Tuning?
Computer tuning, as compared to database tuning, is getting your desktop or server to operate at peak levels. For most people that will mean fast running programs with fast access times on the hard drives. For user of the Windows Operating Systems, this allows us a lot of room to 'tweak' things. There are literally thousands of settings within the Windows operating system that can be turned either on, off, or partway on-off. A very simple example is the screen saver that you use. You have your choice of the few that Microsoft threw in with the original installation and then there are the hundreds that exist out there created by enthusiasts of every calling. Do you like horses? Got'em! Dogs? That too! Albin pot-bellied pigs? Probably! What's interesting to note is that the prettier ones, the ones that include animation and motion or slide shows also take up CPU resources. So if you have a program, like a database, running in the background, while the screen saver is in operation, it is taking away precious CPU resources that your database could be potentially using.
Or how about, on XP for right now, all those cute sliding effects and window shade tricks that happen when you open up a new Windows Explorer window. Someone has to power those little effects. And if you happen to be running on an older computer that doesn't feature CPU numbers over 500 MHz, these can really slow down your performance.
How about the kind of partition that you have on your hard drives? There are many to choose from now, FAT, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, Raw. The first ones are the oldest ones and hearken back to the days of DOS (Disk Operating System) and they all stand for File Allocation Table and the number to the bit-size of the operating system it could handle, 16-bit or 32-bit performance. Then came Windows NT (New Technology) and with it came a new operating system, NTFS (New Technology File System). If you haven't already upgraded to this partition format, you should. Instead of having your disk laid out in 8K, 16K or even 32K blocks of data, NTFS does them in 2K sections. The advantage to this is that if you have a program that is 36K in length and a data size of 32K on your disk, the program might be only 36K in size, but it is going to take up 2 data blocks which is 64K and since no other program can use the rest of the second data block, it will remain unused forever. So you actually save space with the NTFS system. Unfortunately, you will also have to be on one of the following operating systems as they are the only ones that support it: NT/2000/XP. Windows 98/Me do not.
There are tricks to improve the login process that you use. If you are at home and security is not a big issue for you, rather than having to log in with a name and password, it is possible to make your computer automatically start up with your desktop.
You can make it so that others have their own desktop on the same computer so that what your children look at is not what you end up looking at (whew!). They want games, you want, well, not their games.
If you're curious to see just what some of the options available to you are, check out the following link:
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