TweakyWindows

Protection your system from getting any viruses is the best line of defence. Therefore to keep your system safe from viruses, worms and trojans its best to keep your computer up to date with windows update. This fixes any security holes that hackers might be using to download viruses on to your system. Having a good firewall running is also a great way to keep your computer secure and hidden and stops any viruses already on ur system from connecting to other sites/computers.
Opening attachments you receive from emails is the #1 way of getting caught out, the best advice is to never open attachments unless you’re expecting one from someone, even if it appears to be sent from a friend hackers could’ve infected their system and use it to send out more copies of its virus.
We all know how annoying pop ups are when your browsing but an increasing amount of them contain dangerous and destructive coding that auto-downloads viruses and trojans silently while you browse. No matter how tempting the advert might seem close it as soon as it appears to be safe. You can easily search for that product/website on google yourself.
Leaving the most important to last, always have an up to date anti-virus software installed incase any slip by your defences. Try to remember to run an anti-virus scan once a week to catch any infections early.

Everyone wants a fast responsive computer and as a side effect of computer systems getting faster with time as technology advances, these components expel alot more heat, to combat this better and bigger cooling technology has been more and more important. The problem lies in the fact computers have got noisier, a problem held more by people working from home as the ability to work in a quiet relaxed atmosphere can be ruined by a computer sounding like a personal hurricane. So here are some tips to quiet those beasts down so you can work or play in peace.
It’s important to check that the case of your pc is sitting on a flat surface. Reduce vibration between the PC and the surface it’s sat on by using a rubber mat. Ensure your hard drives and optical drives are secured down firmly and screwed in tight using rubber washers between the screws and the metal of the case. Do the same with the side panels of your case. Tidy your component cables inside the case and use tie wraps to secure them, this will prevent them from obstructing airflow and possibly touching the fans.
A build up of dust on the fans can clog them and/or heat sinks under them which causes the system to overheat and thus making your fans run faster and much louder, so use a small vacuüm to clean out the inside of your case.
If your bios support it, make sure you have cool & quiet enabled.
Add a layer of sound absorbing foam to the case-panel of your computer, this will help dull down any remaining noises, especially the high pitch whines of fans.
When possible always use larger size fans that have lower RPM this will keep the airflow high but the noise low, when purchasing new fans try to get sleeve fans instead of the ones using bearings.
Try to use hard drives that have fluid dynamic bearings to endure fewer whines while your system accesses data, also using a hard drive enclosure will greatly quiet the drive and keep it dust free.
Warming computers worst enemies are dust and heat, if you compromise heat dissipation by taking fans out or blocking airflow, components could burn out or at least only last half as long.
Following these few simple tips will make your speedy windows system a little more hush-hush.

This tweak will make your system shutdown faster by telling it to kill applications faster, this can stop those long system-hangs while its waiting for a program to respond.
This tweak can cause problems though if a process is killed while its saving data, generally it should be ok.

When using the start menu it will delay slightly when opening different tiers, by changing the value by using regedit and make it faster or even instantaneous!

Every time you open up a document or launch a program Windows keeps a record of this information.
This can be a privacy concern if you use a shared computer as anyone that uses the computer after you can see what applications you like to run and see the name of the files you have viewed.
To remove this privacy concern do the following.

Tags: privacy risk

Your web browser saves a lot of information about your browsing habits and therefore information about you. This information could be used to see what websites you’ve accessed and when, and can even give away your passwords to your email addresses. A lot of websites collect the information you’ve been collecting via your browsing by uploading cookies to your computer, So it’s extremely important to clear this information off your system after every session.
Both FireFox and IE have ways to do this so let’s get started.

Tags: remove cookies

When buying online or transmitting sensitive data such as names, addresses and especially credit card information make sure the page you’re accessing has a secure connection.
A secure connection is shown via the address starting with https, so make sure that’s there for a start.
Also make sure that the site has extra security generally shown by a padlock in the address bar.
Just these two simple things will help you recognise a safe site from an insecure one.
Now your browser encrypts any data transmitted between your computer and the server. Anyone who might have intercepted this information would only find scrambled data.

Also before clicking links it is good practise to hover over the link with the mouse cursor as it displays where it will take you in the bottom-left corner of your web browser, make sure the domain name is the site you intended to go to!
This will help to protect you against phishing websites that try to copy the look of popular well-trusted websites.

With IM programs being a popular way to talk these days it is always a good way to share things with your friends like photos or files, but a number of people have started hacking other people’s accounts and pretending to be them, they send you a file that’s ment to look like a photo, it’ll be called something on the lines of ME.jpg.exe any file that ends in .exe is a file which executes code when it’s clicked, so don’t be fooled just because it says jpeg or similar in the file name.
A lot of anti-virus programs will now scan files you receive over IM but it’s always best to pay attention to the filename Before you click accept.

Another security risk to watch out for is people sending links to your instant messaging program, you might think your internet buddy is sending you a link to something funny or interesting to read but it can also easily be a scam website that employs drive-by downloads to your computer silently just from you accessing the link! With so many people’s accounts being hacked into these days you shouldnt presume it really is your friend sitting behind the username.
Some links turn your account into a slave making your account send out the same scam links to all your friends on your friends list!
as you can imagine this can easily infect thousands of users in a short period of time.
Only click links from well-known sites such as Google,YouTube etc

The NTFS filesystem will automatically update timestamps when a folder or file is accessed. This isn’t
necessary and can actually slow down large hard drives! With hard drive sizes increasing all the time this tweak gets more and more important if you wish to keep your Windows computer fast and responsive!
Heres how to disable it: