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Driver Tip: Having Problems After Upgrading Hardware If you are experiencing weird issues after upgrading your hardware, or you've just upgraded to the latest hardware device and aren't seeing the performance you'd like? You may want to remove the old drivers, which are still installed for the old hardware, even though you can't readily see them in device manager. What you have to do is set a less-known flag to allow you to see non-present devices, and then launch device manager. You'll then see the old devices in the list, and can uninstall the drivers for them. In Windows 7 or Vista, the first thing you'll need to do is open a command prompt in administrator mode. Type cmd into the start menu search box, and then use Ctrl+Shift+Enter to open in administrator mode. (You can also right-click on the command prompt and choose Run as Administrator) Paste in the following line: SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1 Open Device Manager. Once you are in Device Manager, go to the View menu and choose Show Hidden Devices, which will show all the device drivers including things that aren't currently installed in your computer. You can right-click on the driver and then choose Uninstall from the menu to remove the drivers for that old hardware. We've found that this can resolve a lot of weird issues, and even increase performance on some machines where you've upgraded a bunch of times. This isn't necessarily going to increase performance, but it's nice to have a tidy computer nonetheless. This works the same in Windows 7, Vista, and XP. ![]() BIOS Tip: Improve Your Boot Up Speed By Upgrading Your BIOS Does your system take a little too long to boot up? You can cut considerable time off of your boot time by tweaking the BIOS settings a bit. One of the ways is to adjust the QUICK POWER ON SELF TEST setting. This may also be called FAST BOOT, or QUICK BOOT. Do you really want your system to test the RAM each time you boot up? Let me tell you that if you have more than 265MB, then no, you don't, because the process can take minutes. Also, the RAM test won't catch anything but the most catastrophic of RAM issues so it's next to useless. So, to save time, leave the setting enabled. Another way of improving your boot time is by simply updating the BIOS. Upgrading your BIOS can improve not only the boot up speed, but also significantly improve the overall performance of your computer as well. » Perform a BIOS scan now! ![]() PC Performance Tip: Remove Programs From The OPEN WITH Menu in Explorer Would you like to clean up the Open with menu in Windows Explorer? Here's how you can remove program entries you don't want in this menu on any version of Windows. Have you ever accidently opened an mp3 with Notepad, or a zip file with Word? If so, you're also likely irritated that these programs now show up in the Open with menu in Windows Explorer every time you select one of those files. Whenever you open a file type with a particular program, Windows will add an entry for it to the Open with menu. Usually this is helpful, but it can also clutter up the menu with wrong entries. For example, if you have tried to open a PDF file with Word and Notepad, neither which can actually view the PDF itself. You can remove these entries. To do this, we need to remove the registry entries for these programs. Enter regedit in your Start menu search or in the Run command to open the Registry editor. Now, browse to the following key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software \Microsoft \Windows \CurrentVersion \ Explorer \FileExts\ Here you'll see a list of all the file extensions that are registered on your computer. Browse to the file extension you wish to edit, click the white triangle beside it to see the subfolders, and select OpenWithList. In our test, we want to change the programs associated with PDF files, so we select the OpenWithList folder under .pdf. Notice the names of the programs under the Data column on the right. Right-click the value for the program you don't want to see in the Open With menu and select Delete. Click Yes at the prompt to confirm that you want to delete this value. Repeat these steps with all the programs you want to remove from this file type's Open with menu. You can go ahead and remove entries from other file types as well if you wish. Once you've removed the entries you didn't want to see, check out the Open with menu in Explorer again. Now it will be much more streamlined and will only show the programs you want to see. » Perform a registry scan now! ![]() ![]()
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