10 Quick Ways to Speed Up a Slow Windows PC

Windows PCs don’t have to slow down over time. Whether your PC has gradually become slower or it suddenly ground to a halt a few minutes ago, there could be quite a few reasons for that slowness.

As with all PC issues, don’t be afraid to give your computer a reboot if something’s not working properly. This can fix quite a few problems and is faster than attempting to manually troubleshoot and fix the problem yourself.

Find Resource-Hungry Programs

Your PC is running slow because something is using up those resources. If it’s suddenly running slower, a runaway process might be using 99% of your CPU resources, for example. Or, an application might be experiencing a memory leak and using a large amount of memory, causing your PC to swap to disk. Alternately, an application might be using the disk a lot, causing other applications to slow down when they need to load data from or save it to the disk.

To find out, open the Task Manager. You can right-click your taskbar and select the “Task Manager” option or press Ctrl+Shift+Escape to open it. On Windows 8, 8.1, and 10, the new Task Manager provides an upgraded interface that color-codes applications using a lot of resources. Click the “CPU,” “Memory,” and “Disk” headers to sort the list by the applications using the most resources. If any application is using too much resources, you might want to close it normally — if you can’t, select it here and click “End Task” to force it to close.

Close System Tray Programs

Many applications tend to run in the system tray, or notification area. These applications often launch at startup and stay running in the background but remain hidden behind the up arrow icon at the bottom-right corner of your screen. Click the up arrow icon near the system tray, right-click any applications you don’t need running in the background, and close them to free up resources.

Disable Startup Programs

On Windows 8, 8.1, and 10, there’s now a startup manager in the Task Manager you can use to manage your startup programs. Right-click the taskbar and select “Task Manager” or press Ctrl+Shift+Escape to launch it. Click over to the Startup tab and disable startup applications you don’t need. Windows will helpfully tell you which applications slow down your startup process the most.Better yet, prevent those applications from launching at startup to save memory and CPU cycles, as well as speed up the login process.

Reduce Animations

To disable animations, press Windows Key + X or right-click the Start button and select “System.” Click “Advanced System Settings” on the left and click the “Settings” button under Performance. Choose “Adjust for best performance” under Visual Effects to disable all the animations, or select “Custom” and disable the individual animations you don’t want to see. For example, uncheck “Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing” to disable the minimize and maximize animations.Windows uses quite a few animations, and those animations can make your PC seem a bit slower. For example, Windows can minimize and maximize windows instantly if you disable the associated animations.

Lighten Your Web Browser

Go into your web browser’s Extensions or Add-ons manager and remove add-ons you don’t need. You should also consider enabling click-to-play plug-ins. Preventing Flash and other content from loading will prevent unimportant Flash content from using CPU time.There’s a good chance you use your web browser a lot, so your web browser may just be a bit slow. It’s a good idea to use as few browser extensions, or add-ons, as possible — those slow down your web browser and cause it to use more memory.

Scan for Malware and Adware

To be extra safe, scan your computer with an antivirus program. You should also scan it with Malwarebytes, which catches a lot of “potentially unwanted programs” (PUPs) that most antivirus programs tend to ignore. These programs try to sneak onto your computer when you install other software, and you almost certainly don’t want them.There’s also a chance your computer is slow because malicious software is slowing it down and running in the background. This may not be flat-out malware — it may be software that interferes with your web browsing to track it and add additional advertisements, for example.

Free Up Disk Space

If your hard drive is almost completely full, your computer may run noticeably slower. You want to leave your computer some room to work on your hard drive. Follow our guide to freeing up space on your Windows PC to free up room. You don’t need any third-party software — just running the Disk Cleanup tool included in Windows can help quite a bit.

Defragment Your Hard Disk

You shouldn’t worry about defragmentation most of the time. However, if you do have a mechanical hard drive and you’ve just put a lot of files on the drive — for example, copying a huge database or gigabytes of PC game files — those files might be defragmented because Windows hasn’t gotten around to defragmenting them yet. In this situation, you might want to open the disk defragmenter tool and perform a scan to see if you need to run a manual defrag program.Defragmenting your hard disk actually shouldn’t be necessary on modern versions of Windows. It’ll automatically defragment mechanical hard drives in the background. Solid-state drives don’t really need traditional defragmentation, although modern versions of Windows will “optimize” them — and that’s fine.

Uninstall Programs You Don’t Use

Open the Control Panel, find the list of installed programs, and uninstall programs you don’t use and don’t need from your PC. This can help speed your PC up, as those programs might include background processes, autostart entries, system services, context menu entries, and other things that can slow down your PC. It’ll also save room on your hard drive and improve system security — for example, you definitely shouldn’t have Java installed if you’re not using it.

Reset Your PC / Reinstall Windows

On modern versions of Windows — that is, Windows 8, 8.1, and 10 — it’s easier to get a fresh Windows installation than ever. You don’t have to get Windows installation media and reinstall Windows. Instead, you can simply use the “Reset your PC” feature built into Windows to get a new, fresh Windows system. This is similar to reinstalling Windows and will wipe your installed programs and system settings while keeping your files.If the other tips here didn’t fix your problem, the one timeless solution to fix Windows problems — aside from rebooting your PC, of course — is getting a fresh Windows installation.

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If your PC is still using a mechanical hard drive, upgrading to a solid-state drive — or just ensuring your next PC has an SSD — will offer you a dramatic performance improvement, too. In an age where most people won’t notice faster CPUs and graphics processors, solid-state storage will offer the single biggest boost in overall system performance for most people.

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How to Get the Most Out of Slack to Boost Your Group Productivity

Just as its name implies, Slack is a great tool to pick up any of the “slack” that might be leftover whenever you try to coordinate multiple people on a single project, website, or coding effort.

For anyone who’s out of the loop, Slack is a messaging platform that thousands of companies, websites, and independent agencies can use to create a common space where their employees, engineers, and creatives can come together to collaborate on any project of their choosing.

Slack is is great for anyone might who find themselves struggling to maintain a central meeting portal that their growing list of freelancers, telecommuters, and onsite workers can talk with one another in one place. This is our guide on how you can get the most out of the online tool, along with a few tips and tricks you may not have known the tool is capable of.

Initial Setup and The Chat Window

To start, you’ll need to know how to add members to your chat channel, and email them so they can create their unique logins for the meeting room. To do this, we’ll begin at the home page.

Once you sign up using the above prompt, you’ll have the ability to create a new Slack channel automatically, or join one that already belongs to your employer.

The setup is as easy just naming the chat room and confirming your email, and if all went according to plan you should see a window that looks something like this:

And any employees or project assistants will get an email like this as soon as their names are added to the membership roster.

To start settings things up to best suit your team’s needs, you can manage the names of your channels, or create new ones along with direct messages and private groups via the sidebar. If no one has joined the channel yet, you can use the big “Invite People” button located at the bottom of the sidebar to start populating your meeting space.

Once new people are invited and registered, you create a new conversation with them simply by clicking on the plus sign highlighted next to the type of chat or private messaging session you wish to initiate:

Any users or profiles who have been added to your chats throughout the course of your Slack membership can be managed as a part of the Team Directory, selected from the upper-right menu, shown below:

Once here, you’ll be given a general overview of the people who are a part of the Slack team, as well as a rundown of which users have access to which chats. You can change these according to who you want in each conversation, and anyone who’s been blocked from a specific channel won’t be able to see the room they’re ousted from listed in the sidebar of their primary communication hub.

The Sidebar and Preferences

Like any chat application, Slack comes stocked with plenty of options, settings, and customizations you can sort through to create a program that does exactly what you want it to, and doesn’t get bogged down by any noise on the side.

Whether you’re managing an entire channel yourself or have just been invited to one by your managers, the Preferences menu is where you’ll be able to take care of vital tasks like directing where and how you receive notifications or designating how your search tool handles specific requests.

In the “Profile & Account” tab (located just under Preferences) you can toggle settings such as how much security is attached to your profile via two-factor authentication, as well as more mundane things like the time zone you’re in. Notifications is where you’ll be able to customize exactly how and where you hear about what’s happening in the channels you’re subscribed to, ranging from general chatter in the main chat window to direct messages containing important files.

This is also where you can get an overview of the statistics that your Slack channel is posting on any given week, day, or month, and compare or contrast how active one member is against another based on metrics like posting frequency, storage space used, and overall participation in team collaborations.

If you manage multiple accounts at the same time, any teams you’re already logged into will appear automatically below your name each time you sign in. If you want to create a private chat beyond the reaches of the crowd however, you can do so by creating a “private” group, where only the team members you invite will be able to view any content posted in the excluded room.

Be aware that unless you specify otherwise, Slack will automatically backup and save the entirety of all conversations held within its platform (up to 10,000 messages for Free users, unlimited for those subscribed to the Standard or Plus plans).

On the one hand this can be helpful for team members who need to put in a search for a specific string of code or an idea that’s queued to be taken care of, but on the other it’s also a valid privacy concern that some site owners might want to look into before leaving the option on by default.

In the top-right hand corner is where you’ll find other helpful tools like the Search bar, the information button (displays info and stats about the current channel), and the “Mentions” bar (notated by the “@” sign), which will display a list of all the times your username was flagged in chat in case you missed any important information which was sent your way.

Integrations

With the help of Integrations, Slack becomes something more than just another chat channel where you and your co-workers meet online.

Integrations are essentially Slack’s fancy way of referring to plugins, but given how extensive and plentiful the options are in this department, the company could be forgiven for trying to set themselves apart from the rest of what’s out there right now.

Slack doesn’t just become the place where you talk, it’s the place where you collaborate, where your coordinate creative energies, bounce ideas off each other, and code in tandem on the same project at the same time. Integrations are what elevate the platform, and give it a level of flexibility and customization that no other service like it has before.

You can do everything from testing your new web app in every major browser to planning your next brainstorming session in Trello all via the notification system in Slack. This means fewer notifications clogging up the splash screen on your phone, and more time organizing your team and getting them up to speed on where everything is at.

Tips and Tricks

Regular users of Slack might notice that they’re greeted with a different “welcome” message every time they’re logged into a preferred channel, but did you know you can customize these to fit the style of you and your entire team?

By utilizing the “Customization” panel, anyone in the chat with proper permissions can do everything from creating their own personalized emojis to writing out the prompt that room members are greeted with each time they sign in.

You can customize the loading messages that users see when they log into each room. If you don’t feel like coming up with anything on your own though, the platform already comes equipped with a line of quick, simple, and inspirational messages that can keep your team’s spirits lifted and productivity at an all-time high.

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From a distance, Slack can look like any other of the hundreds of online chat platforms out there. But once you really start digging into the guts of what it has to offer you can discover a tool which gives workers a platform to create, inspires them to collaborate, and pulls the absolute best out of the teams it brings together for each product they produce.

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How to Rip Audio CDs to Your PC or Mac

If you haven’t ripped your music CDs to audio files on your computer yet, it’s not too late. All it takes is a CD drive and a bit of time. When you’re done, your physical music collection will become your digital music collection.

You can then listen to that music on your computer or copy it over to your smartphone. There are even many free services that will let you store that music online and stream it from anywhere.

Get a CD Drive

If you don’t have a CD drive in your computer, that’s also not a problem. You can buy CD drives that connect to a laptop or any other computer over USB. You can buy external CD and DVD drives for as little as $12 on Amazon. Once you have that drive, you can keep it on hand and use it whenever you need to use a CD or DVD on a computer that doesn’t have a CD drive.Many modern laptops — and even desktop PCs — no longer include CD drives. If your computer of choice includes a CD drive, you’re good to go. (DVD drives double as CD drives, of course.)

Choose Your Ripping Software

You’ll now need to choose the ripping software you want to use. Many popular programs you already use have CD-ripping capabilities. iTunes on Macs and PCs has this built in — by default, when you insert a CD while iTunes is running, it will ask to “Import” the CD into iTunes, ripping the music on it into digital files. Encoding settings can be controlled by clicking the “Import Settings” button in the iTunes Preferences window.

Windows Media Player also has this built in and is even still included by default on Windows 10. Launch Windows Media Player and you’ll be able to use the “Rip” button to rip the files on it to your computer. But you’re probably better off using iTunes or one of the more advanced programs below than Windows Media Player. If you do use Windows Media Player, make sure you don’t rip to WMA files and ensure copy protection is disabled so you don’t create DRM’d files that are limited in how you can use them.

Just using iTunes — or even Windows Media Player — will probably be fine for most people. But, if you want more control and advanced options, more advanced tools are also available.

Many audiophiles swear by Exact Audio Copy on Windows, also known as EAC, which incorporates advanced error correction features for near-perfect rips. You’ll also need to download the LAME MP3 encoder separately and provide it to EAC. CDex may not work quite as well as EAC, but may be simpler to use. Mac users should probably try Max, which also incorporates error-reduction features. LAME is the best-in-class MP3 encoder, and EAC, CDex, and Max can all use it.

Pick a Format and Bitrate

You’ll also need to choose a bitrate, or quality level — higher quality levels mean larger files. Some types of audio files are “lossless” and offer the maximum sound quality at the expense of larger file sizes. The open-source FLAC and Apple’s Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) are examples of this.When ripping discs, you’ll need to choose a format and bitrate. Different formats have different compatibility — MP3 is the most compatible with the widest variety of devices, but AAC is more efficient and produces smaller files at the same quality level.

This part of the decision is up to you. People who don’t care about file sizes and just want to archive their music collection at the highest quality level prefer to rip music into lossless FLAC or ALAC files for archival purposes — after all, you can always use an audio conversion tool to make smaller MP3 or AAC files from those, if necessary. But there’s no going from a lossy MP3 or AAC file to a lossless file — you’d have to re-rip the original discs to get those.

If you just want to rip to a collection that sounds good and will play on almost everything, MP3 is probably the best bet. When ripping to MP3s, you’ll probably want to use the LAME encoder and pick 256 kbps VBR as your quality setting — that’s what most people seem to recommend these days.

If you primarily use Apple software and devices, AAC or Apple Lossless is certainly a fine option that will work for you. Even Android smartphones play AAC files — but not every device does.

Tag Your Songs Automatically

The ripping program you’re using should be able to detect the discs you’ve inserted, look them up online, and automatically fill in the appropriate tags for each song — artist name, album name, track title, release year, and so on — for you. iTunes has this built in, and it’s named “Automatically retrieve CD track names from the Internet.”

Depending on the program you use, you may need to tweak your metadata provider settings and confirm that program is automatically tagging your music for you. This will save you a lot of time.

You may also want to modify the folder and file naming schemes. iTunes handles this for you by adding the ripped music into your iTunes library folder, but programs like EAC and CDex give you more control.

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10 Quick Ways to Speed Up a Slow Mac

Macs can perform slowly, too. If your Mac seems to be running slower than it should, the variety of tips here should help you identify and fix the problem. As with a Windows PC, there are many reasons a Mac might be slow.

Stay away from programs that promise to “optimize” your Mac and make it run faster. Some “cleaning” programs — like the Mac version of CCleaner — can remove temporary files and free up space, but they won’t make your Mac perform faster.

Find Resource-Hungry Processes

Click the “% CPU” heading to sort by CPU usage and see the running applications and processes using the most CPU. In some cases, there may be a single runaway application using 99% CPU that you’ll want to end. To force-quit a process, select it by clicking it and click the X button on the toolbar. Be sure you aren’t quitting a process that’s doing something important. You can always try to close a resource-hungry app in the normal way first.Use the Activity Monitor — sort of like the Task Manager on Windows — to view your running processes and find ones devouring too many resources. To launch it, press Command+Space to open Spotlight search, type Activity Monitor, and press Enter.

If this isn’t working, click the “View” menu and select “All Processes” to see all the processes running on your Mac. You can also click over to the Memory section — a process using a large amount of memory could cause your Mac to slow down. Try the “Disk” section, too — a process using the disk heavily could also be causing your Mac to slow down.

Close Applications

Mac OS X likes to leave applications running in the dock. Even clicking the red “X” button on an application window won’t close it — it’ll remain running in the background. In most cases, this isn’t a big problem. However, if your Mac appears to be running slowly, you may wnt to close some of these applications.

Look for the applications marked with a dot on your dock, right-click or Ctrl-click their icons, and select “Quit.”

Prune Startup Programs

To manage startup programs, open the System Preferences window by clicking the Apple menu icon and selecting “System Preferences.” Click the “Users & groups” icon, select your current user account, and click “Login Items.” Uncheck any applications you don’t want starting when you log in.If your Mac is slow after you log in, it may have too many startup programs.

If you ever want to make a program automatically start when you log into your Mac, drag-and-drop it into this list or click the “+” button at the bottom of the list and add it.

Reduce Transparency and Animations

To do this, open the System Preferences window. Click the “Accessibility” icon and check the “Reduce transparency” option to reduce transparencies. On OS X Yosemite, this option can significantly speed up some older Macs.Transparency and animations can tax the graphics hardware on older Macs. Reducing them can help speed things up — it’s worth a shot.

You might also want to click the “Dock” preferences icon and select “Scale effect” rather than “Genie effect,” which could speed up the window-minimizing animation a bit.

Lighten Your Web Browser

Your web browser might just be the application causing your problem. The usual tips apply on a Mac, too — especially considering Google Chrome’s performance is particularly bad on Mac OS X.

Try to minimize the number of browser extensions you use and have fewer tabs open at once to save memory and CPU resources.

You might also want to try the Safari browser included with Mac OS X, which does seem to perform better than Chrome — especially when it comes to battery power. If you can get away with using Safari and aren’t depending on a feature or extension in Chrome, for example, you might want to give it a serious try.

Disable FileVault Disk Encryption

On some Macs, this may cause the Mac to be very slow to boot or sign in. If this is the case, you can head to the System Preferences window, click the “Security & Privacy” icon, click the “FileVault” heading, and turn FileVault disk encryption off.FileVault disk encryption is enabled by default on Mac OS X Yosemite. This helps secure your Mac’s files if it’s ever stolen, preventing unauthorized access to them. It also prevents people from changing the password on your Mac and signing in without your permission.

We recommend leaving FileVault enabled unless your Mac takes a very long time to boot or sign in.

Speed Up the Finder

When you open the Finder window to view your files, it opens to an “All My Files” view by default. If you have a very large number of files on your Mac, this view might be slow to load, slowing FInder down every time you open a new Finder window.

You can prevent this from happening by clicking the “Finder” menu and selecting “Preferences” in Finder. Select your preferred folder under “New Finder Windows Show” — for example, you can have all Finder windows automatically open to your Downloads folder. Finder won’t load the All My Files view anymore.

Free Up Disk Space

If there isn’t a decent chunk of free space, you’ll want to free up space on your Mac’s internal storage.As on any computer, freeing up disk space can also speed things up if you have a very small amount of disk space. To check, click the Apple menu, select “About This Mac,” and look under the “Storage” heading.

Reset Your SMC to Fix All Sorts of Problems

Follow the instructions in this article to reset your Mac’s SMC.This useful tip that can fix a wide variety of system problems on a Mac, although many people — especially experienced Windows users — wouldn’t think to try this. Resetting the System Management Controller — or SMC — can fix everything from slow performance to startup issues and Wi-Fi hardware problems. This won’t actually erase any data — it’s like performing a lower-level reboot of your Mac.

Reinstall Mac OS X

Assuming you have backups of your important stuff, you can reinstall Mac OS X on your Mac. This is much simpler than reinstalling Windows — you don’t have to download any installation media. You can just boot into a special recovery mode, start the installation, and your Mac will download everything it needs from Apple. But you will definitely want backups of your important files before you begin!When all else fails, try reinstalling your operating system. This is a good tip every device — it’s even a good idea if you’re having a problem on an iPhone or iPad.

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If you have a Mac with a mechanical hard drive, you might want to try upgrading it to a solid-state drive. That’s always a surefire way to speed up any computer.

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How To Build A Phone Power Bank Yourself From Damaged Laptop Batteries

Materials Needed/Requirements
==>1. Screw driver
==>2. Nose Pliers (optional for disassembling) 
==>3. Soldering Iron (optional for joining wires) 
==>4. DIY Power bank Case from Aliexpress. Get it here (optional too)
==>5. Spoilt/worn out laptop batteries
==>6. Your Techy brain

Quick Note:
The power bank case you buy, depends on the number and size of the damaged laptop batteries or any other batteries you intend using. The one given above is 18,650mAh lion power bank case. feel free to search and choose the perfect size. Also you can chose to construct one yourself if you'd rather prefer not to import. Though you might need some technical know how to do so. The above is recommended, since it already contains a circuit housing the resistor, transistors, capacitors, etc that is meant to handle the current input and output voltage. A USB port to plug your phones to. So building that yourself could also result to you sacrificing portability.See photo of one a guy built below.

home made power bank case 1

home made power bank case 2

Procedure For Building

==>1. First, disassemble the laptop batteries you've got (see 1st image above). After which you separate the cells inside.

==2. Open the power bank case you bought and arrange the batteries inside accordingly.

==>3. If the laptop battery you have requires joining of wires, join them in a parallel connection (that is positive to positive and negative to negative). Then solder the wires together accordingly with soldering iron.

==>4. Couple and that's it. Charge and flex. But Pls Don't Sell without telling your buyer what's inside LOLs! 

complete power bank

NOTE:
Power bank mAh/Capacity: Here we made use of parallel connection. Meaning the amount of the power bank mAh(milli Amp hour) is gotten by summing up the capacity (mAh) of the individual batteries you have. Thereby maintaining the same voltage. Lets assume in one laptop battery, like the one above: you have 6mini batteries of 4mAh each. Using parallel will give a total of 4+4+4+4+4+4=24mAh

To charge the power bank when low, you can make use of an original Android charger to recharge it 

Finally, if you would rather prefer watching to reading the video below should teach you more. 

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