• How long your XP system running
  
• Converting to NTFS
  
• Turned off unneeded windows xp service
  
• New PC or New Motherboard?
  
• About your PC

Here's how you verify system uptime:

1. Click Start | Run and type cmd to open a command prompt.
2. At the prompt, type systeminfo
3. Scroll down the list of information to the line that says System Up Time.

This will tell you in days, hours, minutes and seconds how long the system has been up.

Note that this command only works in XP Pro, not in XP Home. You can, however, type net statistics workstation at the prompt in Home. The first line will tell you the day and time that the system came online.

Your hard drive must be formatted with a file system such as FAT, FAT32 or NTFS so that Windows can be installed on to it. This system determines how files are named, organized and stored on the drive. If you're not using it already, NTFS (New Technology File System) is recommended for Windows XP because of the additional functionality it offers. If your PC came with Windows XP pre-installed then there's a chance that you're already using NTFS. If you've upgraded from Windows 98 or Windows Me you may still be using FAT or FAT 32. The option to change over to NTFS would have been available during the upgrade process. Don't worry if you skipped this as it's possible to convert at any time from within Windows XP without losing any data.

The recommended option

There are a number of features in Windows XP that will only work if the NTFS file system is present, which is why it's suggested you make use of it. File and folder permissions, encryption and privacy options are just some of those you'll be able to access. In particular, those of you who have set up user accounts will find NTFS invaluable. For instance, if you continue to use FAT or FAT32 anyone with physical access to the drive will be able to access the files and folders that are stored there. However, with NTFS you'll be able to use a level of encryption (Professional Edition only) that will enable you to protect your data.

You'll also find NTFS more reliable in that it's more able to recover from disk errors than its FAT or FAT32 counterparts. A log of all disk activity is kept so should a crash occur, Windows XP can use this information to repair the file system when your PC boots up again. To find out what file system you're using, open My Computer, right-click your main hard drive and choose Properties. Take a look at the General tab to see confirmation of the file system that's in use.

Convert now

You can use the convert tool in Windows XP to change the file system on your hard disk from FAT or FAT32 to NTFS. The whole process is safe and your existing data won't be destroyed. To begin, click Start -> Run, type cmd and press [Return]. At the command prompt type convert c: /fs:ntfs and press [Return] (where 'c' is the letter of the drive you're converting). When you try and run the convert utility, it's likely that Windows XP will be using your paging file so the process won't be completed immediately. Therefore, you'll see a brief message on screen informing you that the conversion will take place instead the next time Windows starts up. Having restarted, the Check Disk utility will run, the conversion will be performed automatically and you may find that your PC will reboot twice more.

The benefits

With your drive now running NTFS, it's time to take advantage of the new options that are available. Having created a number of different user accounts you can now control the level of access that's granted to individual users. For example, there are going to be certain files and folders that you'll want some users to be able to access but not others. If you have Windows XP Professional Edition you can do this immediately.

Right-click any file or folder, choose Properties and select the Security tab. A dialog will be displayed showing the names of all your users. Alongside will be two columns which enable you to select levels of access for each of them, the permissions include Full Control, Modify, Read and Write. You can then check the appropriate box to determine whether or not to Allow or Deny a particular permission. For Windows XP Home Edition users, the Security tab won't be immediately available. To access this option you'll need to restart your PC, pressing [F8] until a menu appears. Next select Safe Mode and wait for Windows XP to start up. You can then set your options in the same way.

Another feature is NTFS compression. It's quick and seamless as your file or folder is decompressed automatically when you access it. (Don't confuse this with a Zip compression utility where the files need to be extracted before they can be accessed.) Although you may have used NTFS compression on a file or folder, there's no way of telling just by looking at it. To remedy this, open My Computer, click Tools -> Folder Options and select the View tab. Under Advanced settings, scroll down and check the option 'Show encrypted or compressed NTFS files in color', then click Apply and OK. Take a look at your compressed items in My Computer and you'll see the text label has changed from black to blue. Something else that's exclusive to Professional Edition users is the Encrypting File System (EFS). You can use this to protect your important data so that no one else can read it. Your encrypted files and folders will only be accessible when you have logged into your user account successfully.

Here is a list of services that can be turned off this will speed up your pc a bit

1. Right click my computer
2. Manage
3. Services and applications
4. Services
Set these to disabled you will need to reboot for them to take effect if you have a problem with any just reenable them again, ie: if you have a smart card and you disable it wont work

1. Alerter
2. Application layer gateway service
3. Application managemen        
4. ATI hotkey poller
5. Automatic updates
6. Background intelligent transfer service
7. Clipbook
8. Com+ event system
9. Com+ system application
10.Distributed transaction coordinator
11.Error reporting service
12.Fast user switching compatibility
13.Help and support
14.Human interface device access
15.Imapi cd burning com service
16.Indexing service
17.Internet connection firewall(icf)
18.Internet connecton sharing(ics)
19.Ipsec services
20.Logical disk manager
21.Logical disk manager administrative service
22.Messenger
23.MS software shadow copy provider
24.Net logon
25.Netmeeting remote desktop sharing
26.Network dde
27.Network dde dsdm
28.NT lm securtiy support provider
29.Performance logs and alerts
30.Portable media serial number service
31.Qos rsvp
32.Remote desktop help sesson manager
33.Remote registry
34.Removable storage
35.Secondary logon
36.Security accounts manager
37.Server
38.Smart card
39.Smart card helper
40.Ssdp discovery service
41.System restore service
42.Task scheduler
43.Tcp/ip netbios helper
44.Telnet
45.Terminal services
46.Uninterruptible power supply
47.Universal plug and play device host
48.Upload manager
49.Video proes
50.Volume shadow copy
51.Webclient
52.Windows time
53.Wireless zone configuration
54.Wmi performance adapter
55.Workstation

If you don't want to spend big bucks on a new PC, consider upgrading your old system's motherboard and CPU. This can boost the machine's performance and give you access to the latest technologies. It can also save you hundreds of dollars.

What you won't get is a new hard drive, optical drive, or operating system, though the new motherboard gives you the option of upgrading these components later. When you do it yourself, you choose the make, model, and cost that serve you best, rather than settling for what's preloaded in an off-the-shelf machine.

For as little as $200 to $350, you can purchase a motherboard with a new Pentium 4 or Athlon processor and 512MB of RAM. (Visit this link to check the latest motherboard prices.) That's hundreds of dollars less than the retail cost of a midrange PC that supports AGP 8X graphics cards, Serial ATA drives, and the other advanced features that your new motherboard is likely to offer.

Motherboard Buyers Guide

Size matters: Most desktop PCs sold in the last few years conform to the ATX form factor (as do most motherboards), but not all do. Many small or ultrabudget systems are based on other designs, and some PCs from HP/Compaq, IBM, and other big-name vendors aren't ATX-compatible. Refer to your computer's documentation to see if the new motherboard will fit inside its case.

Find the right CPU: The optimal combination of CPU price and performance may lead you to early versions of Athlon XP and Pentium 4 processors: Retail boxed versions of 1- to 2-GHz AMD Athlon XP processors cost less than $100, while Pentium 4 processors running at comparable speeds are less than $130. OEM versions of both (that's minus the fancy box, the cooling fan, and sometimes a warranty) may be priced considerably lower. Avoid older Pentium 4 processors with 256KB of L2 cache. CPUs with 512KB cache are faster and well worth the small added expense.

Be picky: Steer clear of no-name vendors and buy from established manufacturers only.

Pay for power: Your old PC's power supply may not have enough wattage or may lack the 12-volt amperage needed to run some Pentium 4 and Athlon motherboards. Check the new motherboard's requirements against the specs on your power supply. If in doubt, buy a power supply that generates 300 watts or more,

Faster is better: A motherboard's frontside bus speed is the rate at which data moves between the CPU and RAM. FSB speed can have a greater effect on overall system performance than listed CPU speed, which is a multiple of the FSB speed. The faster the FSB, the better.

Get it all: Your new motherboard needs PCI slots and USB ports, two UltraATA/100 connectors, parallel and serial ports (if you use these), and at least two DIMM slots for RAM (DDR RAM is best). For a little extra money, you can get Serial ATA, ethernet, RAID, FireWire, Wi-Fi, and other advanced features.

Sight and sound off: Some low-cost motherboards have sound and graphics functions built in. The quality of these integrated functions is often marginal. Make sure that any built-in sound and graphics can be disabled, and that separate audio and graphics boards can be added.

Minimize Your Mousing

For people in a hurry, every unnecessary mouse movement is an aggravation. Windows 2000, Me, and XP let you set the pointer to automatically move to commonly used buttons in dialog boxes. Click Start, Settings, Control Panel (or Start, Control Panel in XP), and click or double-click Mouse (choose "Printers and Other Hardware" first if you're in XP's Categories view, or "View all Control Panel options" if you're in Me's "commonly used" view). Now select Pointer Options, check the box labeled "Automatically move pointer to the default button in a dialog box" (the option's wording varies slightly in Windows 2000), and click OK.

COMPUTER CASES

There are three major cases in a computer which you might want to know about. One is called an AT case which means that the standard for the AT case has a two plug supply to the motherboard, a keyboard, and peripheral slots all in standard locations. The second type case is an ATX case which has one plug supply to the motherboard, keyboard, com ports, printer ports, and usb ports all in standard locations. The third type is a PROPRIETARY case which means there is no standard for what's on it and where they attach. There are four major styles of cases. The first one is a TOWER and it stands upright and is what most computers are made in now. Their's also DESKTOP, SLIMLINE, and PROPRIETARY too, but mostly just towers.

MOTHER BOARD

A motherboard is what everything plugs into, and without one you can't do much with your computer. It is what I would call the most important part of your computer.

There are three major types of motherboards. They are AT, ATX, and PROPRIETARY. You will only mostly deal with at and ATX. There are four main buses on the motherboard. They are power bus, address bus, data bus, and a control bus. A bus is a bundle of wires that send info through them.

MICROPROCESSORS

Microprocessors are what we would call brains. They think for the computer and most info except for DMA (direct memory access) goes from application etc.. to CPU and then to memory. Most modern CPU chips have 8 registers on them. They are data, address, accumulator, program counter, instructions, flag, alu, and a fpu. Registers are storage places for data, numbers etc… the program counter stores the addresses of the next instructions to be done. The instruction register holds the current instruction. The address register contains memory addresses of the current instruction. The address register contains memory address of the next read or write. The accumulator holds one of the mathematical data to be used or the answer to the previous operation. Data registers hold the second part of the mathematical data for the current operation. Flag registers are special bits that are set individually by certain instructions. That's an into to what is inside the cup. FYI - the wires inside a CPU are smaller than a centimeter. The reason the chip is made so big is so that we can handle it.

HISTORY ON COMPUTER

About the first in home computer made by Intel was an Intel 8088 with a 8 bit data bus, a 20 bit address bus and a 16 bit register. Next inline from Intel was the 8086 with a 16 bit data bus and a 20 bit address bus. Then a 80286 with the same thing as the 8086 but a 24 bit address bus. Then their was a 80386 SX with a 16 bit data bus, 24 bit address bus and a 32 bit register. Next was the 80386 DX with a 32 bit data bus, a 32 bit address bus, and a 32 bit register. Then the 80486 SX with the same as the 80386 DX but a little faster. Then Intel came out with a 80486 DX and also a built in FPU. (floating point unit) What the FPU did was let the CPU be able to do decimals super fast which enabled 3D games to run super fast. Next was the 80486 DX2 which was twice as fast as the 80486 DX, and after that came the 80486 DX4 which was three times as fast as the 80486. Then they introduced the Pentium chip. The Pentium chip had a huge 64 bit data bus, a 32 bit address bus and a 32 bit register. It is estimated that every 6 months technology doubles. So as technology advanced computers will get even faster. (I cant imagine needing anything bigger than my 400 MHz) Hope that didn't bore you do death.

HARD STORAGE

Since most people are familiar with such things as a CD-ROM drive. I wont go scrutinize about hard storage. I will just briefly cover it. Most computers typically have a 3 ½ floppy drive, usually assigned to drive letter A. what a lot of people do not know is that there is 3 types of 3 ½ floppies. There is a double density that formats to 720 kb. Then they came out with a high density disk that formats to 1.44 Mb which is twice as much as the double density disk. After the high density disk came the super density disk which formatted came to 2.8 Mb which as you might have guessed is twice as much as the high density disk. There is also a zip drive that holds 100 Mb's of space but not everybody has one and since a zip disk wont fit in a 3 ½ floppy drive and with the creation of the LS-120 disk which holds 120 Mb and 3 ½ floppy's can fit in LS-120 drives I predict zip drives wont really ever take off. Now about CD-ROMs. There is two major types of CD-ROMs out right now. One is scsi CD-ROM. Scsi cards are usually cheap and if you ever find a CD-ROM out somewhere that is fairly new and very cheap then odds are it is a scsi. The reason they are cheap is because they don't run by their self, u have to have an adapter to go with it and that adapter costs about 50 bucks and most people don't know that when they buy the scsi and that's how scsi sellers make their money. Another brand is ATAPI. ATAPI CD-ROMs plug into the IDE slot and then once plugged in you will have to install the CD-ROM driver and translator and it should work if you use the right driver. There is more proprietary CD-ROM's but most of them plug into the sound card and that can cause problems so I would stay away from scsi and proprietary and go with ATAPI.

PARTITIONS

Every hard drive must be partitioned and formatted before they can be used. You will need a copy of a partition too. At this time fdisk is a good partitioning too. Read the manual that comes with it and it will tell you how to use it. Dos partitions are super easy to make.

INTERRUPTS, DMA's AND IRQS

An interrupt is just like it says, it interrupt's something. I'll give you an example of how it works. Say your in school and your teacher is giving a lecture and somebody raises their hand and the teacher stops the lecture and asks the student what his question is. That is just like a computer interrupt. Lets say that you were connected to the internet. You type in a URL to go to www.yahoo.com and your modem sends out the data to all those DNS servers and then when a DNS server finds the address www.yahoo.com it will send back the information to the modem. Well the modem cant hold all of that info and has to send it to the memory so the modem can get some more info. But first it has to get the attention of the CPU so the CPU can put the info into the memory. So it uses it's interrupt to do this. It sends out a signal saying "hey I need you" (not really but close enough) and the computer sends back to the modem "go ahead and tell me what you need" and then the modem asks where it can store it's info in memory and then the CPU gives it the address to store the info at. Then the modem sends info to the memory using DMA. (direct memory access) DMA means that it can access the memory directly without having to go through the CPU. But sometimes it might have to go to the CPU once just to know where to put the info it has into memory then it can access the memory without any help. So now you know what an interrupt is and what DMA is, but what is an irq? An irq is the order of interrupt assignments in which the accer in. On older computers their was only 8 interrupts

1. 0) available
2. 1) sound/available
3. 2) floppy disk controller
4. 3) available
5. 4) first DMA Controller
6. 5) sound/available
7. 6) available
8. 7) available
   

so 0, being the first interrupt and 7 being the last. Now on the newer computer's there is currently 16 irq's.

1. 1) system timer
2. 2) Keyboard controller
3. 8) Real-time clock
4. 9) Available
5. 10) Available
6. 11) Available
7. 12) Motherboard mouse port/available
8. 13) Math coprocessor/available
9. 14) Primary IDE
10. 15) Secondary IDE/available
11. 3) Serial port 2
12. 4) Serial port 1
13. 5) Sound/parallel port 2
14. 6) Floppy disk controller
15. 7) Parallel port 1
    

This might look out of order but this is the way they come in. I'll explain what this means and how it works now. Lets say you were moving your mouse. Your mouse is irq number 12. Every time you move your mouse it sends out an interrupt 12 to your CPU and says, I need u! Then the CPU will reply back "what do you need" and then the mouse will say, "where am I on the screen and the CPU will tell it "you in position dah dah dah." That's how the irq works, well lets say that your moving your mouse while using your serial port 2. Your mouse has priority over your serial port 2 because your mouse comes first on your irq list. So when your sitting their just swishing your mouse around making a figure eight on your computer, you could be interrupting a function that your computer is doing and it will slow it down a tad.