Faster PC Startup

When trying to figure out how to make your PC run faster, many people turn to look for the best defrag tool and best PC optimizer. Look at reviews, head to the user forums, ask their colleagues and friends to see what the options are. Free or paid for. Automatic or manual. Lots of options or few. Enterprise defrag or for personal use only. It's all well and good, and what drives us here at Raxco to deliver the market's best defrag software year after year.

                                               

But we also like to differentiate ourselves in a different way, through our technical support and customer service. So while we truly believe PerfectDisk is the best defrag software available, we also think our service and support are superior as well. That attitude is epitomized by Wendy Clontz, who heads up our customer service department and whom we are proud to have with us.

Dan Baldry is a 20--year IT professional in Sydney, Australia, managing a team of people who sell maintenance and professional services for one of the world's largest networking companies. Dan wrote to me directly recently about what he described as our "excellent service," which he argues is hard to find these days. Here are some of Dan's words: 

                                                

"I purchased Perfect Disk a few years ago mainly on the basis of an article I came across in a local PC magazine that I thought gave a good impartial review and sold me on the merits of the product. With a computing background, to me disk defragmentation is what I would describe as a routine housekeeping item that I would consider baseline for a healthy PC. In a perfect world this would be delivered as a native part of the operating system. You might argue that it is, but I'm suspicious of the standard utility  and a bit wary of the available freeware (though I know they are reasonably good). With my hard disk capacity getting bigger, I was on the hunt for a good utility that would just do the job and I could be confident in (no doubts), so that was why I decided to stump up the dollars and go for Perfect Disk. In short, I wanted to be sure my system was at optimum health and running with maximum performance all the time. You might ask why? Well, I use my PC  for a mix of work and play and it became a bit of a mission to drive the best performance without resorting to a massive/expensive upgrade as time went on. A few dollars on PD seemed like a good option. Eventually I did upgrade but I still use PD as part of the same housekeeping approach.

However, over the past couple of years, with reinstalls, losing keys, lost downloads etc... and needing to call on support more than once came to realise that the Raxco company offered me an extension of the confidence that I had in the product, and that was the confidence that if I had an issue I would get a reasonably quick, no nonsense, response. Even though it was probably only a few interactions over something like 24 months, I realised it was the same people assisting me throughout, which made me feel the company must have something going for it to be able to retain people like that. The consistent message I hear back is that while customers choose our physical products to drive their business based on value and the vision of our company, it's the Services we offer that keeps them coming back. Not only that, but our partners value our Services above all for the profitable revenue it drives - and customers are willing to pay as they have confidence that they are getting a total package. I think it's how we treat our customers after the sale that creates real business, and I think that's something Raxco has understood from the get go."

                                                 

It seems you can't visit a technology web site or pick up a trade publication today without seeing - oh - 1 to 10 articles on the ubiquitous cloud. Pity the poor, forgotten client PC. It seems nobody cares about it any more. Do they? Should they?                      

Daniel W. Rasmus, author of Listening to the Future (Wiley, 2008), is a strategist who helps clients put their futures in context. He uses scenarios to analyze trends in society, technology, economics, the environment, and politics in order to discover implications used to develop and refine products, services, and experiences. Prior to starting his own consulting practice, he was the Director of Business Insights at Microsoft, where he helped the company envision how people will work in the future. Rasmus coordinated the Microsoft Office Information Worker Board of the Future, an advisory panel composed of college-aged students who share ideas on how to better serve the “Millennial Generation” as they join the workforce. He also managed the Center for Information Work, an immersive experience that helped Microsoft's customers experience the future of work first hand.

                           

Before joining Microsoft, Rasmus was an analyst with the Giga Information Group, and later Forrester Research. His achievements include inventing conceptual frameworks for next-generation collaboration, adaptive workspaces, and intelligent content services. He also served as Giga's Chief Knowledge Officer, managing internal learning within research, sales, and marketing.

Writing on the Internet Evolution website yesterday, Rasmus wrote the article It's Time to Think About Clients, Not Clouds. He asks the question -- "as computers gain more processing power, has the move to the cloud forced us to abandon higher goals for the client?" Rasmus points out that most of a computer's power is used when you sit before it, and writes:

Think about that. When you turn your computer on in the morning, it is no different than it was the night before. Even if you leave the computer on, the most you can hope for is a completed backup, a few patches, a new RSS feed or two, a complete local index, perhaps a hard drive defrag.

Well, there you have it. Yes, computers do a lot of nothing when their owners or users are not driving them. They sit there, waiting for the next user command so they can go off and do whatever it is the user wants. To defrag a computer or defrag hard disk may not be the most important PC issues for many people (although we think it should be!), we're proud that we are one of the few applications that can give the client PC a boost when you're not sitting in front of it. Whether you want to fix a slow PC startup or obtain overall faster PC performance, applications like PerfectDisk and PerfectSpeed address the issues when your PC is idle and not consuming any CPU. Auto defrag when your computer is otherwise idle, through StealthPatrol. It works, even when you're resting.

                                                                

Check out thought leader Daniel Rasmus' article on the Internet Evolution site;  and remember who's thinking smarter when it comes to your computers. 

 

                                            

Happy Mother's Day Weekend! For those of you (and dads) with kids, or those adults who just like animals and games that are “good, clean fun,” you probably know all about Webkinz. For the uninitiated, you can go here to learn about these stuffed animals that take on a life of their own, a life that is controlled by the user — feeding your animal, buying it things, playing with it, etc. Watch a child play Webkinz on a computer, watch that child “lose” themselves in the moment.

                                            

Alas, like most fun things on a PC, Webkinz is more fun when it’s not bogged down by slow PC problems and slow PC performance. Real world — getting stuck in traffic stinks. Webkinz World — waiting to feed your hungry pet dog because your PC is crawling stinks. Who wants to be told by the Webkinz police that you are not taking care of your pet! Good grief.

Fortunately, some of the usual culprits are at play here, causing slow PC performance problems for the uninitiated. In researching these issues, we’ve found that most of the games within Webkinz World are big Flash games. These games consume lots of RAM and put a toll on your PC’s graphics. And often, the more time one spends playing on Webkinz, the worse performance gets. Cookies get created, cache gets filled. What happens is every time you go to the site, a boatload of temporary internet files get created from ads on the site. These get onto your PC, and you've got slow PC performance. 

                                             

This is where PerfectDisk comes into play. Cleaning up your drive of unnecessary files, then defragmenting the files and consolidating the free space. All leading to faster PC performance and a less frustrating Webkinz experience. Files on the drive are put back together in contiguous pieces so they are accessed faster. With the disk cleaned of unnecessary files, you have robust free space consolidation. And your kid, or you, are off and running through the rooms and yards of Webkinz World. Heck, you even get a faster PC startup so you can get playing more quickly!

And most importantly of all, your Webkinz dog, cow, monkey or other pet is fed and taken care of more quickly.