Tech Friday: Prefetching Firefox and other speed tweaks

It took quite a bit of time to win my friend Zach over to the joys of Firefox, but he eventually saw the light. But, just like me, Zach doesn’t like a slow computer. When he wants to check something online quickly, he’s still been using IE cause it loads faster on his computer. You might have noticed the same thing, which is why today’s Tech is all about speeding up your computer.

Prefetching Firefox
The reason IE runs quickly is Microsoft set it up so that it’s ‘ready to run’ or prefetched. You can easily do this manually for any other program:

  1. Right-click on the program icon
  2. Select properties
  3. In the ‘Target’ box, add ” /prefetch:1″ at the end of the line.
  4. Click ‘Ok’

Speed things up by doing this to any program you use regularly.

Simple programs for Simple Tasks
Besides your internet browser the second most used program is probably a word processor. Many have Microsoft Word, though if you don’t I’d highly recommend OpenOffice as a complete alternative. BUT, I’d also recommend you stop using MS Word quite so much.

If what your writing doesn’t need any formatting why not just pop open notepad? If you want it to look a little prettier you could use Wordpad (both located in your accessories folder). These programs run SO much faster then word or OpenOffice and they work for probably 40% of your needs.

For the other 60% I think I should mention AbiWord. It looks a lot more like Word and has most of the most common features. Give it a whirl and save plenty of time in the process.

2 thoughts on “Tech Friday: Prefetching Firefox and other speed tweaks”

  1. It didn’t load any faster on my computer after trying that. I timed it and then restarted my computer and timed it again and it took the same amount of time.

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