Tag Archives: Performance

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Own a Mac? Well, it might need a clean-up tooâ€¦

March 11, 2015 007admin Leave a comment

Well, believe it or not this is not always the case. As even the shiniest of sports cars need to go to a mechanic once in a while, your Mac needs to get a proper cleanup as, over time, its hard-drive can get cluttered.

In this article, we’ll dive deep into the data clutter that even the newest Macs accumulate after only a few days. I’ll talk about how much disk space you can regularly recover and how getting rid of clutter can improve your privacy and boost system reliability.

Let’s give your Mac a proper spring clean – throughout the year!

The daily data-clutter…

Here’s an unfortunate, little known, but true fact: Almost every time you use your applications, play a game or browse the web, your Mac collects data “junk”. This data is officially known as cache which is the data collected from errors and other system activity in countless log files.

Unfortunately, this data is hidden on your hard disk and can’t be easily deleted.

But it’s not just cache that you need to clean regularly. For most people, both the Download folder and the Recycle Bin remain the central store for all downloaded files (dmg images, old PDF files etc.)

This can easily amount to several Gigabytes if forgotten! It’s time to find out all about why your Mac’s disk may be bloated and how you can easily spot files that you didn’t even know were lurking on your hard disk.

A Quick Lab Test

We’ve analyzed the contents of some of our Macs internally with our very own AVG Cleaner for Mac, and found more than 14.3 GB of unnecessary files in various locations on a Retina MacBook Pro that we’ve been using productively for several months. An iMac® 27” which was purchased and used for just a few weeks for basic tasks such as surfing the web and light office tasks showed 1.3 GB of wasteful files.

Digging deeper, we found that a huge chunk of this unnecessary data was located in the Mac OS® “Download” folder – a folder that we rarely cleaned up and that served mainly as a temporary storage for downloaded programs, audiobooks, videos, ISO files, and more.

What’s more interesting than how much disk space I could recover was the sheer number of unnecessary files on those machines:

On the newly-bought MacBook Retina, I found 2,718 junk files – most located in the hidden user cache folder. The MacBook Air suffered from more than 1,101 unnecessary files. “So what’s with all that junk?” you might be asking. Basically the three most common trash types include….

Application Cache

Most applications that you actively use on your Mac create what’s called “cache” and “log” files. Cache files are helpful, as they’re sometimes known to speed up the application launch or boost web-browsing speed (i.e. the Safari® cache).

Unfortunately, a lot of apps don’t clean up their cache files when they’re no longer being used and this is when the cache gets out of control:

Old and corrupt cache files from previous app versions could cause errors when running newer apps.

Cache files could completely grow out of proportion.

Out of date cache files are forgotten on your hard disk and remain there forever, growing and growing….

We’ve dug deep into all the data trash found on these two machines to give you an example of how junk could affect your daily work (or gaming) routine…..

Uninstall leftovers
Font lists
Browser Cache
History Lists
Application images

These are just some selected examples of unnecessary cache files we found on our test machines. It’s wise to flush the cache every now and then (at least once a month) to either prevent problems or solve them effectively – even Apple^TMitself recommends flushing the cache once in a while to troubleshoot your Mac. More on that below…

Log files

Next to cache files, Mac OS and a lot of applications tend to create log files. These contain protocols of crashes, when you started an application, when the last update occurred and so on. Most of the log entries have one thing in common, no one except professional developers or trained admins are able to get anything out of it.

Update logs
Crash files
General logs

Unless your IT admin wants to analyze your log files, there’s barely any need to keep them. We’ll show you how to delete them safely…

Download & Trash folder

As I mentioned above, the Download folder can accumulate Gigabytes of unnecessary files. Why? Because it’s your browsers default location for storing files. Even I, who cares a lot about disk space and cleaning up, forget to clean out the Download folder. To a lot of users, the Recycle Bin serves the same purpose….you delete files but just forget to go through it and delete unwanted stuff permanently.

AVG Cleaner for Mac helps you clean up all these unnecessary files in seconds. In the meantime, why not download it and give it a try today, it’s free!

AVG

Making your Android battery life go further

February 27, 2015 007admin Leave a comment

In this post, we’ll walk through not only how to limit your app resource use but also how to get the most out of your battery life, device performance, storage and data plan on Android devices.

This guide is for Android devices running Android 3.x or Android 4.x, including:

Smartphones (such as the Samsung Galaxy S5)
Tablets (Samsung Galaxy Note Pro, Nexus 7)

Please note that though many phone and tablet makers use Android, they tend to change the way things look and work. We’ll show you how it works on different systems, but if you can’t find an option for your exact device, don’t worry as many of the steps are the same for most devices.

Limit Notifications

Notifications are one of the most useful features of a smartphone. They give users the information they need to know at a glance. However, not all notifications are necessary and some cause the phone to be constantly active, increasing the drain on the battery and mobile data.

To turn off unnecessary notifications, you need to go into the Apps or Application Manager in your device settings. This will show you a list of all the apps you have running.

To turn off notifications for an app, such as Asphalt 8, tap on it and uncheck the Show Notifications entry.

Control Your App

Limiting notifications is just one way to reduce the impact an app has on your device. In each app’s settings you will find additional options and features you may want to turn off. We’re going to use Facebook as an example to show you how it’s done.

Ranked among the most resource-heavy apps, there are several things users can do to limit Facebook’s resources consumption. As with before, the first step is to go to the app’s settings page (via the settings page and App Settings):

From there you will see a number of features that will tax your device, such as:

Facebook chat: If you do not use the chat feature, you can turn it off and use the standalone Messenger app instead.
Refresh interval: Every hour, Facebook automatically downloads content in the background, even if you’re not using the app. This impacts battery life and data consumption. You can limit this to every four hours or turn it off completely.
Location: Facebook can use the built-in GPS of your device to determine where you are and include that data in posts you make. Disabling this feature can help save battery life.
Notifications: This is an alternative way to turn off the app’s notifications.

While this is specific to Facebook, many apps on your smartphone or tablet have similar settings. In general, however, you should watch out for any that look to involve background activity, such as “Refresh Interval” or “Background Refresh” and limit the use of built-in features such as GPS/Location and Bluetooth.

Free Up Space & Limit Mobile Traffic

Our top storage offenders often start off as small apps or games but collect temporary clutter over time, and swell in size. When this happens, the impact is not just on your device’s storage, which obviously declines, but also on your mobile data.

Many apps tend to download data in the background in order to be instantly available once you open them. The NYTimes app for example automatically downloads news stories to your devices every 24 hours – even though you may not read all of them.

Almost every app stores temporary files, cookies and other date in order to work. In our internal tests, we found that simply browsing through a typical Facebook timeline for roughly 60 seconds produced over 5 MB of temporary files. The NYTimes app created a cache of 10 MB when we watched a 20 sec video and opened one news post.

This cache can be deleted on either a per-app basis or automatically. In this next tip, we’ll show you two ways to limit the growing storage impact of apps.

Open up the Application Manager or App menu from within your Settings menu. Tap on an app, such as NYTimes or Facebook and hit the Clean Cache Button (screenshot to the left):

Doing this for each app on a regular basis can be quite time consuming, which is why AVG built the AVG Cleaner for Android app (screenshot on the right). It scans all apps for these caches regularly and allows for the cleaning of all cache files automatically or in bulk.

The only downside of cleaning a cache may be that information, for example a Facebook image, which has been loaded and cached, may need a few extra moments to load when you open it the next time.

Reduce Data Traffic

In some cases, an app will include settings which allow the user to limit the amount of data it downloads over Wi-Fi or mobile data and stores locally. Below we outline how to do that, again using the NYTimes app as an example:

Open up the app in question and tap on the three little dots in the upper right corner. Go to Settings. From here, you can turn off “Offline Reading” by tapping on Update Frequency and selecting Never (Manual). You can also turn off the Thumbnail Caching which downloads images of news stories so that they display faster if you open them.

There will be some people who do not want to limit their apps to work in a certain way and in some cases – like with games or video streaming – there’s no technical way to reduce the amount of battery consumption or mobile data usage. Which is fine – this is all about user choice. If you do choose to take action however, these general recommendations should help Android device users reduce the overall resource consumption so they can enjoy using their apps without limitation.

Turn down the brightness

These days, virtually all Android smartphones or tablets come with super high-resolution displays that are also extremely bright. While that may be great for browsing the web, sharing photos or playing games, these displays harm your battery life. Did you know for example that on some smaller tablets with high-resolution displays, a display set to full brightness is responsible for 80 percent of the entire power consumption!

If you’re not in bright sunlight, we would therefore recommend turning the brightness levels down to 50-70 percent.

Disable Connectivity

Your Android device is full of features that impact battery life. It is important to make sure they’re off when they’re not being used:

Wi-Fi: Nowhere near a wireless connection? Then turn off your Wi-Fi. Otherwise the built-in Wi-Fi receiver will constantly try to scan for networks – which can increase battery usage by more than 20 percent.
Bluetooth: Not using a Bluetooth headset or connecting your Android device to your car? Then this setting should also be turned off, otherwise it will continually scan for compatible Bluetooth devices, using up battery as it does so.
GPS: Your mobile GPS is probably one of the biggest power suckers there is. The built-in GPS antennas are really power-hungry, and if your GPS is turned on they continue to draw power even if you’re not actively using them – mainly thanks to the alarming number of apps that regularly use the GPS feature such as [Google Maps, Facebook or Twitter]…So if you’re at home or just don’t need to use any GPS, turn it off.

You’ll find the settings for all three features in your swipe down menu or under Settings. Go to “Wireless” (or “Wireless and networks”) and switch off the relevant feature when not in use. Note: GPS can sometimes be referred to as “Location-based services”.

Remove performance-sapping apps

Your Android device is much like your PC: the more apps you install on it, the slower it will get and the sooner it’ll run out of juice. It won’t happen with one app nor probably with five, but once you’ve installed a dozen – or hundreds – of apps, you’ll notice a significant slowdown. That’s because many apps run features even when you’re not using them. So how can you be selective about which apps you do and don’t want on your phone? There are tools that help you identify the worst offenders for performance and battery life.

Ours is the free AVG Cleaner 2.0 app. Here’s how it works as an example:

Firstly, install the free app from the Google Play Store or the Amazon Kindle store and launch it.
Next, go to the “App Uninstaller” page. This will list all your currently running apps.
If you tap on the little blue arrow in the top right, you can then sort the list by:
- App Usage: Shows the apps you haven’t used in a long time.
- Battery Usage: This helps you identify the most power-consuming apps on your device.
  Data Usage: If you’re on a monthly data plan, every Megabyte counts. If you sort the apps by “Data Usage”, you’ll quickly find the top apps that are sucking up your plan.
- Storage Usage: Running out of disk space? Then it’s time to look at the largest apps on your phone.

To uninstall an app, tap on it and hit “Uninstall”. You can even tap and select multiple apps so you can get rid of a batch at a time.

I hope these tips have been helpful to you and that they help you bring new life to your Android device!

AVG

7 Essential Tips When Transferring To A New PC

February 20, 2015 007admin Leave a comment

Before you decommission that old XP, Vista or Windows 7 machine, you must first make sure that you’ve saved everything you need and prepared it to be out of action.

In this guide, I’ll show you what you need to do to get all your stuff backed up and set up.

Don’t forget your files!

Windows has a great tool called “Windows Easy Transfer” which helps you easily move stuff from your old PC to the new one. Using an external drive, it collects files, emails, user accounts, and settings from your old PC. Here’s how it works:

Windows Vista and Windows 7:

Insert a USB thumb drive or hard disk into your old PC.
Click on the Start menu and type in “Windows Easy Transfer” in the search box. You’ll end up with a pretty big “Windows Easy Transfer File from Old Computer.mig” file, which you need to save on to your USB.

Windows XP

If you’re old machine is Windows XP you will need to copy “Windows Easy Transfer” from your new PC. Here’s how:

Insert a USB thumb drive or hard disk into your new PC.
Select “An External Hard Disk or USB Flash Drive”. Go to “This is My New Computer” and click on “No”
Select “I Need to Install it Now”. This will copy Windows Easy Transfer to the to the USB drive so you can use it on your old XP machine.)

Save Your Bookmarks!

If you’ve had your old machine for a while, you’ve probably built a massive library of browser bookmarks or favorites. Make sure you take these with you by backing up your bookmarks.

Internet Explorer: Go to “Computer” and simply open up C:UsersYOUR_USERNAME_HEREFavorites. Copy the entire folder on to your new PC! XP users will find it under C:Documents & SettingsYOUR_USERNAME_HEREFavorites.
Google Chrome: Chrome syncs your bookmarks once you’ve signed into your Google account. If you haven’t done so, sign into your Chrome browser on your old PC – and it will upload your bookmarks to the cloud. Do the same on the new PC to download the bookmarks again. Voilá!
Firefox: The fastest way is to use Firefox Sync, which backs up all your browser settings – including bookmarks – to the cloud and gets it to your new PC easily once you’ve signed in. Here’s how it works.

Clean Up Your Old PC!

When migrating to a new PC, you don’t want to transfer any unwanted files, so it’s important to give it a good clean up before you make the switch.

Probably the best way is to use AVG PC TuneUp’s Disk Cleaner which is part of our AVG Performance bundle – you can also try it out for free here. Disk Cleaner removes unwanted and junk files from over 200+ applications and Windows features, definitely things you don’t want on your new machine.

Click here for a step by step guide on how to clean up your PC with Disk Cleaner.

Find Those Hidden Files!

Even if you’re super-organized and painstakingly keep your files and folders in order, there’s always that odd folder or file that floats somewhere hidden or deep on your hard disk.

Case in point: I recently save my best buddy’s wedding montage, but the tool I used stored it under “C:Program FilesVideo ConverterProjects”. I would have totally forgotten about it, had I not used AVG Disk Space Explorer to get an overview of where music, videos, photos and more are stored on my disk….

…but also where the “Top 100 files” are on my disk:

And there it was, sitting hidden on a old laptop I was ready to completely wipe clean…

Deauthorize your programs!

Some programs are tied to the computer they’ve been installed on, so you may not even be able to use them on a new PC unless you deactivate them on your old one.

Popular example: iTunes! It allows you to activate up to five PCs to play (protected!) content. If you forget to deactivate an account on a PC and wipe it clean or give it away, it’s gone and you’ll soon end up seeing this:

To deactivate an old PC, simply open up iTunes and press the “CTRL” key. This will bring up the classic menu bar. Click on “Store” and “Deauthorize this computer”. Done!

Another example is the Microsoft Office 365 subscription, which allows you to install Office 2013 on up to five PCs or Macs, so you need to log in and go to your dashboard to deactivate the Office installs on your old PCs:

Don’t worry, many programs don’t have a limited number of licenses but it’s always worth checking – and keeping the old PC around for a few days while you’re setting up your old one.

Take a snapshot of your programs settings!

Got a complex program, such as Adobe Photoshop or Excel, perfectly set up for your needs? Then it’s a true pain to set it up and figure out your favorite settings. Here’s what I do: I just take a screenshot of my favorite settings and simply apply them to the new one.

For example, I just took a screenshot of my favorite settings in the video codec configuration tool Shark007 which I use to playback pretty much all audio and video files imaginable – and it’s complicated! So I just use Windows’ built-in Snipping Tool (just use the Start menu search and you’ll find it) to take a screenshot of the settings and apply them later. Sure, a bit crude and manual, but it works:

Don’t forget your savegames!

I recently wiped an old PC which had a 97% complete gamesave from my favorite game of 2011, Super Meat Boy. If you know the title, you’ll know just how frustrating that is!

That save game is gone and I never made it through the final stages. While many modern games save the gamestats under your “DocumentsMy Games” folder or synchronize them with the cloud (Steam, Origin), many games still hide the savefile in their program folder.

If you spend 69 hours completing Far Cry 4 or any other game, you better make sure you don’t lose that savegame. My advice if you can’t find the savefile: Google the games name and add “savegame location” and you will find a blog, a forum thread or a wiki that’ll show you where to look:

If you follow these simple steps you can be sure that you’re not leaving anything behind on your old machine and that your new system will have that personalized, familiar feeling.

Next week we’ll look at breathing new life into your old PC.

AVG

Connect, Click and Clean with AVG Cleaner for iOS

February 19, 2015 007admin Leave a comment

From the day you first turn it on, your iPhone or iPad slowly accumulates hidden clutter that take up storage space and negatively affect performance, especially on 16 or 32GB models.

If you have an iPhone or an iPad and are struggling to find space for all your pictures, music or movies, or just want to make space to install the latest operating system, AVG Cleaner for iOS can help.

Since there’s no way for an iOS app to clean up that clutter, you have to do it from your PC.

How to clean up your iOS device:

Install AVG Performance 2015 from this page. Once complete, click on Performance to launch the 2015 release of AVG PC TuneUp.

From here, click on Clean up iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

Hit Scan Now and have a look at the results. To clean up your phone, hit the Clean Now

Video

How To Clean Up Your iOS Device

Note: in case anything goes wrong, you can always go to Rescue Center and restore the files.

Don’t worry: All we clean are cache files, temporary files, age-old system logs and thumbnail files you will no longer need.

How much space can you get back?

Just how much space can you clear up using our AVG Cleaner for iOS? Well results for each device will differ but in our internal labs we found 340 MB of files on an iPhone 6 that was only four weeks old.

340 MB of junk files cleaneda 4 week old iPhone 6

7.5 GB of junk files cleaned on a 1 year old iPad Air

712 MB of junk files cleaneda 9 months old iPod touch

Don’t forget: you can’t clean up these files from your phone, you have to use AVG Cleaner for iOS as part of AVG Performance 2015.

So what are you waiting for? Unlock the hidden potential of your iOS device with AVG Cleaner for iOS now! Download AVG Performance today.

AVG

The Ultimate â€˜Dying Lightâ€™ Performance Guide

February 12, 2015 007admin Leave a comment

I have to admit it, I got tired of zombies. After the Walking Dead craze, in the past two years, an endless amount of zombie movies, TV shows and games came out of nowhere.

For me, that genre got tiring quickly which is why I also ignored the latest hype around games like H1Z1, DayZ, Days to Die or the Resident Evil Remake. However, one game caught my eye: Dying Light. From the moment I saw the visuals and the gameplay mechanics in the trailer, I was hooked.

The parkour elements, the stealth action, the combat, the entire look and feel – it just captured me. But when I heard that many users are complaining about performance, I just had to write another performance guide!

More than Minimum Requirements

My first piece of advice is that you should largely disregard the minimum requirements as that will likely give you only a lackluster experience:

Minimum System Requirements

Processor: Intel Core i5-2500 @3.3 GHz / AMD FX-8320 @3.5 GHz
Memory: 4 GB RAM DDR3
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 / AMD Radeon HD 6870 (1GB VRAM)

While testing that on my laptop (3.7 GHz, GeForce 650M) I found that I was getting less than 30fps at medium settings, while my gaming PC (Core i7, 3.8 GHz, GeForce 970 GTX) handled things a lot better – at the highest details.

However even on my gaming rig I was able to detect a slight stuttering here and there, which is why I put together a list of tweaks for Dying Light and was able to finally smooth out all the performance problems.

Realistically you need a GeForce 6 series, 8 GB RAM and at least 2.x GHz CPU to run Dying Light properly.

#1 – Start with the basics

Before you start tweaking performance settings for Dying Light, I recommend that you follow the 9 essential steps to boost your PC or laptop speed that I published a while ago. This covers the basic steps to get your machine in top shape, and including how to:

Upgrade your graphics drivers and even use beta drivers
Overclock your graphics card (safely!)
Use our AVG PC TuneUp to turn off all performance-sapping background activity
Defrag your hard disk

As Dying Light takes its toll on your hardware, you’ve got to be sure that it’s tweaked to its absolute limit before you jump into the game-specific settings.

#2 – Get Patch 1.3

As usual, getting the latest patch is always a bonus. Patch 1.3 is supposed to improve performance quite a bit, especially for GeForce GTX 970 users. However, the team is currently working on a patch to solve more deeper routed speed problems including:

Performance issues of systems based on the AMD processor
Freezes when using Nvidia DoF
Unsatisfactory performance on multi-GPU systems

Update 1.3 should be applied automatically once you launch the game over Steam or standalone. But please check back for an upcoming patch which will hopefully fix all the issues above.

#3 – Reduce the View Distance

To almost double the performance of Dying Light, I’d recommend reducing the View Distance slider found in the graphics options (Options, Video) to medium or even low.

Sounds like the game is going to look bad? No, actually there was hardly any difference while the framerate on my gaming PC jumped from 35fps to almost 60 when playing with the lowest setting.

100% Viewing distance

5% Viewing Distance:

You can see that some minor details are missing in the background, particularly when looking at the trees and grass in the background, but it really doesn’t make a huge difference, given that you can double the framerate.

This has much more effect than turning off some of the beautiful visual effects like HBAO+/SSAO (which gives you a plus of 2-5fps at most if you turn if off).

Dying Light also supports “DoF” (Depth of Field) which blurs out parts of the image. You can easily see the effect in the main menu screen under tip 2 (blurry background).

The same goes for Foliage quality, which actually made a difference of just 3-4 fps on both of my machines – only turn this off (or set it to low) if you’re really struggling to hit an acceptable framerate. Because if you do, it’ll literally just remove some of the grass and bushes:

Foliage quality set to “High”

Foliage quality set to “Low” (never mind that zombie, he jumped over that fence and killed me five seconds later while I was taking screenshots for you – that’s dedication!).

If you’re noticing that your framerate goes down over longer periods of gaming time (e.g. 1-2+ hours), then you may want to lower the Texture Quality setting. Why? While it makes no visible difference up close, it defines how many objects are put into the VRAM of your graphics card.

If you lower it, less objects will be stored in your graphics card memory which could cause objects to stop popping in more frequently – but the overall game to run more smoothly.

#4 – Restore the Maximum Viewing Distance

With Dying Light patch 1.2.1, game makers TechLand decreased the maximum view distance by 35% overall: Eagle-eyed gamers with top-of-the-line gaming PCs (we’re talking GeForce 970 or 980s here), can manually override that setting.

However, you must first perfectly set up the graphics of your game as you will basically change a configuration file and make write-protect that file so that Dying Light won’t automatically revert to the lower view distance.

Here’s how:

Make sure that Dying Light is optimally configured and then exit the game. Open up “C:UsersUSERNAMEDocumentsDyingLightoutsettingsvideo.scr” using Notepad or a tool like Notepad++ and look for the word “VisRange”.

Change the value to VisRange(8.26, 8.26) which will restore the 100% visibility. Save the file!

Next, right-click on the file and select Properties. Check the Ready Only box and hit OK.

If you want to tweak your settings from here, you need to undo the write-protect and later apply the VisRange tweak again before write-protecting the file again. A bit of a hassle, but beauty comes at a price, right?

#5 – Get the Game Ready Driver

At end of January, nVidia released a new driver specifically optimized for Dying Light which all users GeForce cards should install asap. Version 347.25 offers much smoother gameplay and adds support for the GeForce GTX 960 and a new Anti-Aliasing technique called MFAA (Multi-Frame Sampled Anti-Aliasing). ATI/AMD users should also look out for the latest drivers to ensure best possible performance.

#6 – Fix The Multicore Problems Yourself (experimental)

Until patch 1.4 comes out and offers a fix for the fact that Dying Light only uses one CPU core in some cases, you can try out this little tweak which helps on some systems.

Open the game and then use CTRL+ALT+DEL to open Task-Manager. Right-click on DyingLightGame.exe, go to Set Affinity, uncheck all CPUs and then re-check CPU 0. Hit OK. Open the affinity window again and re-check all processors. The game should now use all of the cores and balance the load equally instead of taxying only one core.

#7 – Get the Dying Light Manager

On the web you’ll find a dozen or so tweaks which will help you disable the filmgrain effect, change sunlighting or disable some of the blur and coloration around objects or people in the game.

However, these require a lot of tinkering with the game files which is just annoying. Good thing there are modders out there like vismxownz who created the Dying Light Manager and Performance Booster (name is really the game here!).

Note, the MediaFire download may not work the first time – try the Try Again and Repair my download option in case that happens and it should work fine. It gives you a plethora of options to tweak some settings which will definitely help you boost performance of the game and which are not available in game:

Extract the file and browse to the DyingLightGame.exe file on your PC, for example under C:Program Files (x86)Dying Light.

Some of the highlights include:

Filmgrain: While I personally think that the filmgrain effect adds a lot to the scenery and atmosphere of the game, I know a lot of people don’t like it. It also has a bit of a performance impact.
Sunlightering and Sunshadows: Whenever you look at the sun, you will see shadows and the coloration of the entire scene changes. This could be quite annoying in the middle of a hectic zombie fight, so some users may want to turn it off (and also gain a bit of performance!).
Chromatic Aberration: It essentially fakes a bad camera by adding a slight color bleeding effect to the edge of objects. Reddit user sadzora captured this quite accurately:

It’s also quite a strain to performance. If you can live without it (and many users can), it should be turned off.

#8 – Enjoy!

I can’t wait to play this game, now optimized and running smoothly, this weekend. It will be pure joy! Were you able to run the game at its fullest? Do you have any other tweaks we missed? Let us know!

AVG

Grab Our Latest AVG PC TuneUp Update

February 6, 2015 007admin Leave a comment

Fresh off the press: Our engineering team has been working hard to deliver the latest version to the 2015 release of AVG PC TuneUp!

Released last November with improved cleaning capabilities and a new cleaner for your iPad, iPhone and iOS, this first major update (version 15.0.1001.331) doesn’t just provide the regular set of fixes but also greatly enhances cleaning functionality.

Let’s find out what’s new!

The new update brings more under the hood cleaning improvements for a cleaner, smoother working PC!

Greater cleaning for games and media editing programs

We know a lot of PC TuneUp users love to game or edit multimedia at home. That’s why they need our tuning tool to keep these resource-heavy applications running super smoothly and maximise the performance of their machines!

That’s why our Cleaning Definitions Team (who spend day and night looking at ways we can improve the speed of your computer) has identified 26 new and popular multimedia tools and looked for ways to remove the junk files these apps leave behind on your PC:

Audio tools: Ableton Live, ACID Music Studio, ACID Pro, Acoustica MP3 Audio Mixer, Adobe Audition, Audacity, Cakewalk SONAR, Expstudio Audio Editor, MAGIX Music Maker, Sound Forge Audio Studio, Sound Forge Pro, WavePad Sound Editor
Video tools: Alcohol 120%, Avidemux, AVS Video Editor, Blaze Media Pro, Magix programs, ManyCam, MoviePlus, Photo Pos Pro, Pinnacle Studio, Sony Movie Studio, Sony Vegas, VideoPad Video Editor, Windows Live Movie Maker, Windows Movie Maker

If you use any of these programs, you could benefit from the latest PC TuneUp update. Programs such as these handle many large files, which can leave behind logs and temporary files that can quickly clog up your hard disk.

But that’s not all: We’ve implemented a fix that now helps our Browser Cleaner clean up the new cookie format in Google Chrome as well as the HTML5 file storage (see the help description):

However, in this release we’ve improved the cleaning mechanism for the popular platform Steam, making sure gamers get the best possible performance.

There’s a pattern in Steam, which causes large files to be stored in game folders. These files are often tools such as DirectX and usually only run when you first launch a game.

But once that’s done, you essentially don’t need these files anymore! Yet they remain in the folder. That’s why we’re cleaning up these files and you’ll benefit from all the extra space!

8 New Languages

We’ve seen so much excitement from around the globe for the new AVG PC TuneUp that we decided to translate the performance suite into even more languages: Danish, Chinese (Traditional), Hungarian, Indonesian, Malaysian, Turkish, Serbian (Latin), and Slovak. Simply download the file from our website http://www.avg.com/avg-pctuneup to get the version in your language!

So how do you get it?

Easy: Next time you start AVG PC TuneUp, you should get an update notification – just install your free update!

If it doesn’t show up, go to “Help & Support” and click on “Check for Updates”.

AVG

How To Boost Your Home Wi-Fi Signal (Part 2)

January 30, 2015 007admin Leave a comment

Is your Wi-Fi network still going slow even after our first bunch of tips? Are you even experiencing occasional drop-outs and disconnects?

In part two of our Wi-Fi optimization series, we’ll show you how to boost the signal strength of your Wi-Fi network even further. If you missed part one, go check it out!

Set up a wireless repeater

If your property has thick walls or is so large that your router cannot simply broadcast a good signal from one end to the other, it’s probably wise to get a wireless repeater:

These look very similar to a router and pick up your Wi-Fi signal and rebroadcast it with renewed strength. The repeater connects to your wireless router as a regular client, getting an IP address over DHCP much like your regular laptop or PC.

Position: I suggest following our first tip of part 1 of this guide to determine weak spots of your wireless router. Place the repeater close to this spot but make sure that it’s able to pick up a good signal (80% or more) from your main router. Otherwise it won’t be able to repeat a good quality signal.
Hardware: When choosing a repeater, don’t be confused by the different names – some companies tend to name their repeaters as ‘Range extenders’ while others call them ‘Wi-Fi expanders’ or something similar. They are all the same. Simply make sure to pick one that rebroadcasts your 802.11n or ac signal and make sure that it’s compatible.
Set up: Every manufacturer has different setup procedures but in general all that is needed is your network name and password.

Tip: Check out these resources for a general overview or this huge guide on how to use your router as a universal wireless repeater.

Optimize the Wi-Fi settings

There are many complicated settings on your router which can help you optimize the signal in your home. Unfortunately, every manufacturer offers different options under a different name, so we’ll just give a handful of hints that explain where to look and what to look for. Also there are some settings that you should check to see if they are set at their default values:

5 Ghz Wireless Mode: If your router and adapter uses it, I’d recommend setting up a 5 Ghz Wi-Fi network instead of the regular 2.4 Ghz. Devices that support this mode are known as ‘Dual-band’.

Since most Wi-Fi routers communicate at a frequency of 2.4 Ghz, using the less common 5 Ghz mode might give you a better throughput.

To enable a 5 GHz connection, go to your router configuration page (normally shown on the device) and find your wireless settings. If you can see an option for a 5 GHz connection, enable it!

RTS Threshold: RTS stands for ‘Request to send’ and is send by the client to the access point – it essentially asks for permission to send the next data packet. The lower the threshold, the more stable your Wi-Fi network, since it essentially asks more often when sending packages. However, if you don’t have problems with your Wi-Fi you should make sure that the RTS Threshold is set to the maximum allowed:

To do this, go to your router configuration and try to find the ‘RTS Threshold value’ in the wireless settings and set it to 2347. Lower this value only if you are experiencing problems with your network (drop outs etc).

Fragmentation Threshold: This value is used to set the maximum size of packet a client can send. Smaller packets improve reliability, but they will decrease performance. Unless you’re facing problems with an unreliable network, reducing the fragmentation threshold is not recommended. Make sure it is set to the default settings (usually 2346).

Enable Multimedia/Gaming settings: Some wireless adapters can either be configured either for regular use or for gaming/multimedia. If you’re streaming video or playing games, enabling this will make sure that network packets for these are prioritised! In other words: If you’re watching a video file over your network, the video will get most of the traffic.

Benchmark and diagnose your Wi-Fi

This tip is not an optimization technique per se but it’s a great way to determine if our tips so far have had a positive effect on your network. Free ‘QCheck’ is a great tool that will show you the response time, throughput and streaming performance of your wireless setup. You can easily get it from this website after you filled out a short form.

Enter your IP address under ‘Endpoint 1’ and another IP address in your network under ‘Endpoint 2’ to test the speed. This will give you important information when trying to optimize your Wi-Fi with our tips.

Replace your antenna!

Some router manufacturers sell external antennae that are much stronger than the router’s built-in antenna. If your signal is weak in places (and all our other tips have failed), then you’ll need to check if your manufacturer sells either omnidirectional or directional antennae:

Omnidirectional: Sends out a signal into all directions. By default, most built-in antennas are omnidirectional. If an omnidirectional antenna is your choice, make sure to look out for a longer one with ‘high gain’.

Directional antenna: This kind of antenna sends a good wireless signal in a certain direction instead of spreading it in all directions, improving the performance in the target area. It’s like pointing a flashlight in a certain direction instead of using your regular ceiling lamps!

To connect a new antenna, you’ll usually use the SMA connector or MMCX. For more on wireless antennae, I can highly recommend the ‘Do-It-Yourself Wireless Antenna Update’ website by BinaryWolf. You’ll find great how-to guides and hardware recommendations that’ll help you pick the best antenna and the right setup!

That’s it! Using these tips and tricks will definitely improve your Wi-Fi performance and experience – if you’ve got another tip that you use to boost your wireless network let us know!

AVG

How To Boost Your Home Wi-Fi Signal (Part 1)

January 22, 2015 007admin Leave a comment

Do you regularly lose connectivity to your Wi-Fi network at home? Are network speeds so low that it takes forever to even copy a simple picture or music file across your PCs – let alone stream video? In this two-part series, we are covering the most important lessons and tips for boosting wireless (WLAN) throughput across your home network. Ready? Let’s dive in!

Figure out the best possible router position

Have you wondered why your wireless signal is strong in some rooms and incredibly weak in others? It’s not only a matter of distance between your wireless router and your PCs or laptops. It’s also a matter of what objects (walls, doors, furniture, electrical equipment/outlets) interfere with a good signal.

In many scenarios, you will be able to boost wifi strength significantly by just repositioning either your router or the connected PCs slightly.
Now, the “Trial and error” method works eventually, but is a waste of time. To get the best possible location you need to create a visualization of network coverage across your home. Heatmapper, a free software for Windows, will do just that:

Click here to download Heatmapper (100 MByte). Note: A registration is required to download this free tool.

After installation, the program asks you if you’ve got a map of your map of your floor – no worries, if you don’t, you can create this heatmap based on a grid. Simply walk around your apartment or house with a laptop in your hand running Heatmapper. As you walk (slowly!), use the left-click button frequently as you walk. Walk through all the areas of your home left-clicking as much as you can.

When you’re done, right click and HeatMapper will create a map of your home, showing you where the Wi-Fi signal is stronger or weaker. Here’s how my map at home looks like:

The green area in the middle is also the center of my apartment – a good location for the router! However, in the bedroom (upper part of the screen) I only get „ok“ wireless strength because the router is blocked by three walls.

By looking at the heatmap, I quickly knew where to position the router in order to get a better Wi-Fi signal!
General advice: Make sure not to position the router directly on the floor or next to thick walls. Ideally, the best position is in the center (probably the corridor) of your apartment with no or minimal objects blocking the signal!

Use the latest drivers and firmware

It’s rare to find firmware for a router or driver for a network adapter that works perfectly right out of the gate. Most „V1“ drivers and firmwares of network equipment I have used were bad and came with all sorts of problems: slow connections, drop outs, missing features and other quirks. The first thing I always do when I get a new network device is: look for updates!

For example, when I bought my Linksys WUSB600N adapter it didn’t work (at all!) under the 64-bit-version of Windows 7. I actually bought the device and couldn’t use it for a couple of weeks until the manufacturer delivered an updated driver that worked under the x64 architecture.

Upgrading the firmware of your router has become somewhat easy over the past couple of years: Simply open up the firmware configuration page in your browser (see below) and find the „Firmware Upgrade“ page.

Here you will find direct links to drivers for some popular router manufacturers:

These links will you to the most recent Wi-Fi drivers available. Your wireless adaptor is not on the list? You haven’t found anything using popular search engines? Hit the comment section and provide us with the detailed specs of the Wi-Fi adaptor as shown in your device-manager.

Upgrade your Wi-Fi hardware

If you’re using the 802.11g (or even b/a) wireless standard, more bandwidth-related tasks such as video streaming, launching remote applications or file copy operations will be painfully slow. All three network standards provide a relatively low maximum bandwidth:

Theoretical speed

802.11 (1997)	2 MBps
802.11a (1999)	54 MBps (short range, high cost – mostly in business use)
802.11b (1999)	11 MBps (slower, but higher range than a)
802.11g (2002)	54 MBps (long signal range)
802.11n (2006)	300 MBps (through multiple channels and frequencies)
802.11ac (2012)	1 GBps (through multiple channels and frequencies)

As you can see, 802.11ac is the way to go these day– over the next couple of months, it’ll replaced the older 802.11a/b/g networks, and offers much improved speed, coverage and reliability. In general, 802.11n is at least twice as fast than its predessor “n” while promising theoretical speeds of up to 1000 Mbp/s.

If you’re suffering from a low network bandwidth, be sure to pick a router and Wi-Fi adapters that supports at least the 802.11n specification. If you bought a PC or laptop within the last couple of years, it’ll (very likely) have a 802.11ac wireless adapter. To go check, simply fire up Device-Manager…

…or take a look at your hardware specification sheet, for example:

If your adapter does not support 802.11n or ac but your router does, it’ll obviously use the lower N, G, B or even A modes. So make sure that all parts of your wireless chain are “n” compatible!

When shopping for a new network adapter or a router that supports 802.11ac, you should take the following three tips into consideration.

Pick a dedicated USB adapter:

Even if your laptop or desktop has a built-in 802.11ac adapter that is connected to a full-fledged 802.11n router, you might want to look into getting a dedicated (external) USB wireless adapter. Sounds ridiculous, but in my experience many external Wi-Fi adapters perform much better than built-in devices.

When I first got my Linksys WRT610N router, I got quite mixed results and only an average of 100-170 Mbps when the theoretical limit of this beast is around 300 Mbps. So I drank the cool-aid and ordered the adapter that, according to the manufacturer Linksys, “works best with” my router – the WUSB600N USB wireless adapter! And what a difference that made: Signal strength did not change, but the speed went up significantly. Here’s a screenshot of my laptop that’s using both the built-in Wi-fi chip as well as the external USB adapter to connect to the router:

The maximum speed meter went up from 130 Mbps to 300 Mbps. Of course, that is the peak value, but only with this little addition was I able to stream full-definition 1080p video across my apartment with no stuttering or delay whatsoever.

Stay in the family: Besides using external dedicated Wi-Fi devices, I’d also recommend to pick a router and the adapter from the same company. Now, that doesn’t mean that a Linksys router wouldn’t work with a Broadcom or D-Link network adapter, but it’s also my experience that you get the best-possible performance if you „stay in the family“. Now I know that this is what the manufacturer wants but in this case I’d go with it.

Use an external antenna for your router. You can significantly boost your Wi-Fi connection by replacing the antenna or add another external antenna. This guide as well as this one help you figure things out.

Change the Wi-Fi channel

All modern routers are capable of communicating to your PC or laptop on several different channels. However, if your neighbours Wi-Fi equipment is communicating on the same channel, your network speeds and reliability might suffer. Windows offers a built-in solution that lets you see on what channels all your surrounding Wi-Fi networks conmunicate. This is how it works:

Step 1 – Launch the command line. To do that, click on the Start orb, go to „All ProgramsAccessories“ and click on „Command Prompt“.

Step 2 – Type in the following command: netsh wlan show all.

Step 3 – You’ll see a large list of all wireless networks in your area.
Scroll through the list and watch out for the entry that says „Channel“. Out of those 7 networks, 4 are using channel 6 to send data, two use channel 5 and one is using channel 13.

This is why I should probably choose either a lower channel or a channel between 6 and 13.

Try changing the channel on the routers configuration page.

To open the page, you’ll usually enter it’s IP adress into your browser (check the manual to see which address you need to type in), for example http://192.168.1.1, and enter the user name and password you specified at setup – or the default credentials if you never specified it (which is potentially dangerous)!

Find your wireless channel settings. On my router, that’s under the “Wireless” tab right in the “Basic Wireless Settings” category:

Pick the channel that is not (or barely) used in your area. In my example, I choose channel 10. Reconnect all your devices and see if you’ve got better speed or if you’re reliability issues are fixed!
That was part 1 – look out for part 2 that’ll show you even more in-depth tricks to improve your wireless network speed!

AVG

9 Ways to Boost Your Gaming Rig

January 14, 2015 007admin Leave a comment

PC gaming is a $25 billion industry – and it’s growing! No longer is it limited to the young folks, but the industry now delivers blockbuster titles that bring in more revenue than some movies. If you’re one of those gamers, we’ve got a couple of treats for you over the next couple of weeks and months: This week, we’ll kick off a new series around optimizing your PC for the latest games and also how to tweak the blockbuster releases of 2014, such as GTA V, Dark Souls 2 or Watch Dogs, with great tips, downloads and our own AVG performance product, which help boost performance!

If there’s anything that’s not optimized about your PC, your games speed will suffer: they’ll stutter and will look not as beautiful as they could. That’s what this series about: making your games look stunning, fluid and simply more enjoyable.

However, optimizing your PC is just part of the equation: Games themselves have ton of hidden potential that can drastically improve the way they look and feel. For that reason, over the next few months we’ll look at the biggest games and discuss how to maximize their potential. Which games you ask? so far, this is on the list:

Dark Souls 2
Watch Dogs
GTA V
The Evil Within
Dragon Age 3 Inquisition
Alien Isolation
Dying Light
Mad Max
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Mass Effect 4

Anyway, before we dive into each game, let’s have a look at the top things you need to do in order to get your PC or laptop in shape for the latest blockbuster releases:

#1 – Upgrade Your Graphics Drivers for An Immediate Speed Boost

Your graphics card is the center piece of your gaming experience (more on that below), but it can’t unfold its true performance without the proper software installed on your PC or laptop. Going from the driver that came either with your PC or with your graphics card to the latest version can make a large performance difference. Just look at nVidias latest graphics drivers, for example:

As you can see, even with some older games (such as Skyrim or Tomb Raider) you will see a performance increase between 6% and 64% on a GeForce 700 series GPU. That’s because game makers and the big graphic behemoths like AMD, nVidia and Intel constantly work together to make games faster. So let’s have a look at where to get the latest drivers for the three big graphic card types out there:

Nvidia GeForce owners: Go to http://www.geforce.com/drivers. Next, select your graphics card and your Windows version from the list and hit the “Start Search” button. My tip: Always go for the driver marked as “BETA”. This isn’t quite a finished driver, but they all run as stable and good as the final release these days and will likely give you even more performance!
ATI Radeon owners: ATI fans go to http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/downloads.aspx and select the appropriate device. This will give you access to the latest official driver which you can download and install. To get the beta driver with more performance improvements or features, head over to http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/latest-catalyst-windows-beta.aspx.
For Intel HD Graphics owners: Mostly found on ultrabooks or tablets, the Intel graphics chipsets are the weakest of the bunch. I wouldn’t recommend doing any sort of gaming on the older integrated Intel HD chipsets (such as the HD 3000 or earlier) – unless you’re heavily into slideshows instead of smooth gameplay – but their latest graphics chipsets are powerful enough to play even recent titles, albeit not at the highest possible resolution or with all the bells and whistles turned on.To get updated drivers go to the Graphics driver page of the Intel Download Center.

Wait, how do I even know what graphics card I own?

Not a problem: To find out the maker and exact serial number, all you need to do is follow these steps. First, go to “Control Panel” and head to “Hardware and Sound”. From here, click on “Device Manager”:

This will bring up a list of all the built-in devices of your system. Head over to where it says “Display adapters”:

In these cases, you’ll see an Alienware X51 gaming rig with two graphic chips (the nVidia is usually always the faster one) and a laptop with a GeForce GT 650M. At any rate, make sure you’re using the latest drivers!

#2 – Supercharge Your Graphics Card: A Slight Overclock Doesn’t Hurt!

Your gaming performance is mostly dependent on the power of your graphics chip – even more so than on how much memory your have or how fast your processor is! The bottleneck and the reason for stuttering gameplay is in almost all cases the graphics chip. To improve performance, you may want to look at running the graphics card beyond the factory speed setting – or in other words: overclocking! Now, 5-10 years ago, I wouldn’t have recommended overclocking as it posed a significant threat to your hardware, but nowadays most systems turn themselves off automatically before they take any damage. Besides, I only recommend a slight overclock by about 10-15%.

On my desktop gaming PC, an Alienware X51, I pushed the GeForce GTX 660 TI roughly 15-20% above its factory clock. On my main laptop, a MacBook Pro with Retina Display and a GeForce 650M running Windows, I always push the GPU from its factory 900 MHz to 1035 MHz (CPU) and the memory clock from 1800 MHz to 2100 MHz with no problems.

Bear in mind that overclocking increases the stress on and temperature of all of your hardware, not just the CPU or GPU, so it should be done with extreme care. In both cases, I ended up with a system that’s 5° Celsius hotter than before, but still well within the limits:

To overclock the GPU, I recommend two tools:

GPU Tweak –a classic overclocking tool from ASUS.

EVGA Precision X – allows overclocking of both the GPU and memory clocks.

Using 3DMark 11 I measured that overclocking my system as described above yielded a 10% performance boost:

#3 – Boost Your Games with AVG PC TuneUp’s “Uninstaller” and “Program Deactivator”

Windows® keeps getting slower and slower with each program you install on your PC or laptop – and that has a direct effect on all of your games! The reason for this is that a lot of programs run some sort of background activity, even when they’re not being used. AVG makes it easy to uninstall programs that you don’t use and even reduce the impact of ones that you need.

Uninstall those old programs you don’t need! Download AVG PC TuneUp from this page (don’t worries, the 15 day trial works fine). Once you’ve installed the suite, go to the “Optimize” category and click on “Uninstall Programs” first. Now what sets us apart from the built-in Windows uninstaller is a filtering feature that allows you to look for programs you haven’t used in ages. Click on “Filter list” and go to “Rarely used programs” and “Programs not used for a long time”.

Found a program you don’t need? Click the “Uninstall” button!

Turn off programs you need! But what about all those other programs you use on a regular basis that are still reducing your day-to-day performance? Well, with our AVG Program Deactivator, you can turn them off safely. Just go to “Turn off programs” and browse through the list of all applications that affect your PCs performance.

By flipping the switch to “Disabled”, our little helper turns off all background activity of your programs when you don’t need them and turns it back on when you actually do. In short: with no heavy background tasks, your PC will run almost as good as new and your games will run faster.

#4 – Upgrade Your Graphics Card [Desktop only]

Earlier last year I noticed that my Late 2011 Radeon 7850 was quickly running out of steam with the latest titles such as Tomb Raider or Crysis 3. Gameplay was choppy at 1080p with full details. Since I wanted the full graphical experience and also did not want to spend more than $300, I opted for the best bang for the buck which was – in my opinion – the GeForce GTX 660 TI (I went for the EVGA version). There’s even a newer version, the 770, out now.

* Tests were performance on a 2012 Alienware X51 Gaming PC: Core i7 3.4 GHz, 8 GB RAM, GeForce GTX 660 TI

As you can see, upgrading from the older 7850 to the GTX 660 TI brought an increase of about 25-50% in Crysis 3 and Tomb Raider. That’s probably still the most effective way to boost performance.

#5 – Upgrade to an SSD

SSDs are much faster than mechanical hard disks and while this most certainly doesn’t boost your game’s frame rate, it will definitely reduce load time in game.

My recommendation is to go at least with an SSD with more than 250 GB as most games these days take up between 8-20 Gigabytes. My Steam folder, for example, clocks in at a massive 60 Gigabyte and all I bought was Age of Empires III, Bioshock 1-3, Far Cry 3, Tomb Raider and Crysis 3. Add to that Windows (another 30 GB), your personal data and some applications. You’re approaching the 256 GB quickly.

I tried the Samsung 840 which offers a fantastic value (250 GB for 139$). However, I went for the 480 GB SanDisk 480 GB Extreme which boosts an incredible 540 MB/s of sequential read and 460 MB/s of sequential write, for my Alienware X51 gaming rig which – before – featured a stock 7200rpm drive. The performance difference is mindboggling:

As you can see it has slashed my load times, meaning I spent more time playing and less time waiting!

#6 – Disable SuperFetch and Prefetch

Both SuperFetch and Prefetch are Windows features that are supposed to boost Windows and applications startup times. For games, however, I noticed that loading times and background activity actually increases when these features are enabled. That’s why I recommend turning them both off if you’re an avid gamer. Here’s how:

To do this, go to “Control Panel”, “System and Security”, “Administrative Tools”, and “Services”. Scroll down until you see the “SuperFetch” entry, double-click on it, and choose “Disabled” from the list.

Hit “OK” and close all windows. Next, open up the registry; click on the Start orb and type in “regedit”. Hit Enter, and go to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory ManagementPrefetchParameters”. Double-click on “EnablePrefetcher” and enter “0” (default value is “3”) to disable the Prefetcher.

Note: Please follow the above instructions precisely as deleting or changing the wrong values in the registry may cause problems with your PC.

# 7 – Defrag or TRIM Your Disk

As data is written or deleted from your hard disk, files become fragmented and will physically spread out all over the disk drive. This will lead to a significant performance hit, especially with games, as the hard disk will first need to collect all of these portions in order to be able to fully process the entire file. As both your games and their files usually take up several GBs, it is vital that all of these files can be read in a continuous manner.

1. To defrag the disk, fire up the Start menu, and go to “All Programs”, “Accessories”, “System Tools” and “Disk Defragmenter”.

2. Select your Windows disk, and hit “Defragment disk”. Note, if you have an SSD, you should not defrag. Instead, use the TRIM command to optimize them.

3. In Windows 8, Microsoft integrated the TRIM command into the Disk Defragmenter—so, simply hit “Optimize”. Windows 7 doesn’t offer this, so be sure the TRIM command gets executed regularly. To see if TRIM is enabled, open up a command prompt by clicking on the Start orb and typing “cmd” into the search bar. Right-click on the first result (“cmd”), and click “Run as administrator”. Next, type in the command “Fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify”, and hit Enter. If this returns the result “= 0″, you’re good to go! Otherwise, TRIM isn’t supported and needs to be enabled. Try entering the command “fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 0″. If that doesn’t help, a firmware upgrade might be necessary to enable TRIM.

#8 Tweaking the NVIDIA Control Panel

All NVIDIA drivers come with their own control panels that let you tweak the most essential 3D settings. While you can set many of the following options in-game, some are not available or directly controlled by the driver. This is why it’s always a good idea to go through the list of all options and tweak them to best balance performance and visual quality.

To get to the NVIDIA Control Panel, right-click on your desktop, select “NVIDIA Control Panel” and head over to the “Manage 3D Settings” category on the left. These are the some of the lesser known but still important settings to tweak:

• Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames: This controls the number of frames that the processor prepares before transferring them to the graphics card. Increasing this value results in smoother game play, but you may notice a lag when using the mouse and keyboard. To eliminate the lag, try the “1″ setting.

• Threaded Optimization: This option should always be “On”, as it allows the support of multi-threaded optimization for modern multi-core processors.

• VSync: It synchronizes the frames that your graphics card renders with the refresh rate of your monitor. If you disable it, you might find that games run more smoothly; however, you will notice that some parts of the screen might not be rendered correctly and appear to lag. Disable it only if your monitor has a higher frame rate than your gameplay.

#9 Tweaking the AMD/ATI Control Center

The AMD/ATI Control Center is another fantastic way to squeeze out more performance and increase the visual quality of your games. To fire it up, right-click on your desktop, select “Catalyst Control Center” and head over to the “3D Application Settings” on the left.

These are the most important settings:

• SMOOTHVISION HD: Anisotropic Filtering: The higher this setting is set, the sharper distant textures will appear. However, this will also increase the processing load on your graphics card. If your GPU is powerful enough, enable it and see if there is a noticeable visual difference.

• Mipmap Detail Level: It determines texture quality. You can choose between “High Quality” (which equals the original texture quality) and “High Performance” (which omits many details and thus produces a higher frame rate). I found that having “High Performance” makes games look blurrier. If your GPU is powerful enough, make sure to set it to “High Quality”.

• Wait for Vertical Refresh: Vertical Sync (or Vsync) synchronizes the frames that your graphic card renders with the refresh rate of your monitor. If you disable Vsync, you might find that games run more smoothly, however, in most cases, you will notice that some parts of the screen might not be rendered correctly and appear to lag. Disable Vsync only if your monitor has a higher framerate (for example 60hz) than your gameplay (for example 40 FPS).

You can achieve the right balance of performance and visual quality with nearly all of the settings described above. There is no right way to configure your ATI Control Center—it depends on what games you play and the power of your ATI graphics card. If you have a relatively new graphics card but play games that are a couple of years old, we recommend adjusting all of the options to the maximum settings (except Mipmap).

Conclusion

Now that we’ve explored 8 critical tweaks to improve gaming performance, what kind of an effect can you expect? Well, it depends on the hardware you’re using. If you’re running on an older laptop or PC that wasn’t meant for gaming at all, our tips can very well mean the difference between stuttering and smooth gameplay.

But even on faster PCs or laptops and gaming rigs, things will feel faster and loading times will decrease when you’re playing games.

Followed most or all of our advice? Now it’s time to dig deep into the upcoming blockbuster titles to make sure they run great from the get-go.

AVG

iOS users facing new storage challenges

January 8, 2015 007admin Leave a comment

News emerged recently that Apple has been challenged about storage on their iOS devices.

According to news sources, Apple has come under fire for the size of their latest operating system iOS8 which can apparently occupy up to 23.1% of the devices total storage.

On top of this, the upgrade from iOS 7 to iOS 8 alone can take up more than 1.3 Gigabytes of storage space.

While the storage statistics for iOS 8 might be surprising, it’s important that iPhone and iPad users realize that often their storage can be taken up by multiple unnecessary files and not just operating system files.

Operating systems are not the only files that bloat and grow over time; in fact it’s quite common for updates to systematically increase an app’s footprint on our devices as new features and enhancements are added

That’s why it’s very important to regularly clean out your mobile device, get rid of unwanted or unneeded files and apps and create space for the things you really want.

To help you do this, AVG has developed iOS Cleaner as part of the AVG PC TuneUp performance suite. iOS Cleaner can help you reclaim back valuable storage space on your iPhone or iPad devices by locating and removing duplicate files and unnecessary clutter and temporary files.

We’ve also prepared this easy to follow guide to help you get started.