Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"If there's one thing everyone dreads, it's rebooting their computer. It may only take a minute or two, but it can seem like forever. Here are our top 10 tweaks that'll make your computer boot a little faster."

There are some good tweaks on this list, but the biggest factor is definitely switching to an SSD - the change is significant. That hardware costs big bucks though, so the second most effective tip on this list is to run msconfig and remove programs that load at startup. You'll probably find at least half a dozen that have wormed their way in there over time. If you have iTunes or Zune installed for instance but don't connect a player to that computer, you can disable the "helper" programs that load at startup to detect the connection of said players.

"You can build a pretty sweet home theater with an HDTV and a nice set of speakers, but just because you've got the gear doesn't mean you've got the optimal viewing experience. With all the time setting up a TV, audio receiver, Blu-Ray player, and HTPC can take (and all the confusion it can cause), you may not have made the small tweaks that can make all the difference in delivering the high quality audio and video you paid for. If it's been awhile since you thought about the nitty-gritty of your system, here are some things you may want to go through to make sure your theater's performing in tip-top shape."

I implemented a good number of these suggestions with noticeable improvements years ago. But, thinking about it, I really need to do them again, as I've slowly replaced most of my components since then. Great, something else to add to my to do list.