World's Fastest Computer

Scientists want faster, more powerful high-performance supercomputers to simulate complex physical, biological, and socioeconomic systems with greater realism and predictive power. In May, Los Alamos scientists doubled the processing speed of the previously fastest computer. Roadrunner, a new hybrid supercomputer, uses a video game chip to propel performance to petaflop/s speeds capable of more than a thousand trillion calculations per second. "The computer is a speed demon. It will allow us to solve tremendous problems," said Thomas D'Agostino, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees nuclear weapons research and maintains the warhead stockpile. The computer might also have many medical and science applications, including developing biofuels or discovering drug therapies. Modern supercomputers have thousands of identical computer nodes, each containing a microprocessor and a separate memory. The nodes are connected to form a cluster and work simultaneously on a single problem.A huge obstacle to increased performance is the memory barrier. In the not-too-distant past, the time to fetch data from the node memory and load it into the processing units (called the "compute core") of a microprocessor was comparable to the time it would take that core to do the number crunching. Now the number crunching is 50 times faster than the time to fetch and load data. The time spent in data retrieval and communications can no longer be ignored. Clearly, the old solution for increasing supercomputer performance—miniaturizing circuits and using faster clocks—is breaking down. "We replace our high-performance supercomputers every four or five years," says Andy White, leader of supercomputer development at Los Alamos. "They become outdated in terms of speed, and the maintenance costs and failure rates get too high." In 2002, when Los Alamos scientists were planning for their next-generation supercomputer, they looked at the commodity market for a way to make an end run around the speed and memory barriers looming in the future. What they found was a joint project by Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba, and IBM to develop a specialized microprocessor that could revolutionize computer games and consumer electronics, as well as scientific computing.

Roadrunner is a cluster of approximately 3,250 compute nodes interconnected by an off-the-shelf parallel-computing network. Each compute node consists of two AMD Opteron dual-core microprocessors, with each of the Opteron cores internally attached to one of four enhanced Cell microprocessors. This enhanced Cell does double-precision arithmetic faster and can access more memory than can the original Cell in a PlayStation 3. The entire machine will have almost 13,000 Cells and half as many dual-core Opterons.

2009 China TOP100 List of High Performance Computer

This China TOP100 List of High Performance Computer is released by the Specialty Association of Mathematical & Scientific Software (SAMSS),CSIA. The list is available from here. Highlights of China HPC TOP100: Total Linpack Performance of 2009 TOP100 is2.2 PFlops, 1.036 PFlops on 2008, 2.12x increase;No. 1: TianHe-1 561.1 Tflops (DAWNING 5000A 180.6Tflops on 2008), 3.12x increase;Linpack Performance of No. 100: 6.8 Tflops, Average Linpack Performance is 22 TFlops ;96 systems are Clusters（92 on 2008).
Clusters still dominate the TOP100, higher than TOP500. TOP 10 >=31.03 Tflops (17.68Tflops on 2008)
9 systems are quad-core processor based Blade Clusters. 1 system is CPU+GPGPU hybrid Blade Cluster.6 by IBM,2 by Dawning,1 by NUDT and 1 by Lenovo5 systems for Gaming! 77 systems use quad-core processors, 11 systems use dual-core processors, 8 systems use single core processors and 4 systems use six-core processors.77 systems use Intel processors, 21 systems use AMD processors, 2 systems use IBM processors;55 systems use Giga Ethernet, 37 systems use Infiniband, 2 systems use 10GE, 6 systems use other networks;System share: Dawning 27% , IBM 26% , and HP 23% systems. Performance share: NUDT 25.8%, IBM 24.64%, Dawning 20.47%, HP 13.32%There are 14 application areas, the major application areas are Geophysics, Gaming, Scientific Computing, and Industry;

About New Topologies and Old Sins

The 32nm processors, with which Intel is initiating the era of the x86 CPUs with integrated graphics, are not exactly keeping their old promises – but yesterday’s sins are now catching up with Intel. Just one and a half years ago, Intel published “Detecting Multi-Core Processor Topology in an IA-32 Platform” where it explained how to correctly determine the CPU topology in a future-proof way in order to optimally distribute one’s software on any system. Whoever counted on that ... will now be disabused: at least in the systems we have tested until now, the Arrandale and Clarkdale processors behave like quad-core processors with crossed out cores and so the “robust algorithm” that Intel presented then, now returns “holes” in the core IDs. And although the newest processor generation features a nice extension of the CPUID command, which can alternatively provide Information about the Topology, old software might fall flat on its face for now. Also the advertised new crypto commands weren’t really convincing. They might make the code look more elegant, but, until now, we couldn’t make out any mentionable performance advantages for “real” applications like Winzip 14. However, those are all petty fault-findings and otherwise the new dual-core processors with their integrated graphics chip perform well enough and should conquer the market for low priced home and office PCs rather quickly. Their technical specifications and pricing alone allow for that and further-reaching sales promotional measures, like the ones Intel obviously deemed necessary in the past, should therefore be water under the bridge now. Anyway, even after the reconciliation with AMD, the past is catching up with Intel. After all, the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust at the United States Department of Justice, Christine Varney, appointed by Obama, plans to swing her broom the European way. At least the commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission see enough reasons to drag Intel to court again. Their statement of claim is a cannonade of severe accusations, worse than the ones formerly put forth by AMD and now amplified by Nvidia and GPUs. However, the case won’t be tried in a federal court, but, after the rarely applied section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, by a FTC Administrative Law Judge. Still, in the last 30 years, the FTC has never had any success with this kind of lawsuit – all judgments were quashed by normal federal courts during later appeals procedures. Nonetheless, Intel boss Otellini doesn’t plan to wait it out and has called the FTC complaint a misguided case.

Probably he isn’t entirely wrong, especially the measures demanded by the FTC partly exceed elsewhere common regulations by far. Among other things, the commissioners want to oblige Intel to change its licensing policy and release x86 technology, like CPU interfaces, to third companies – Nvidia Boss Jen-Hsun Huang is already rubbing his hands with glee. As an example for the tenor of the statement of claim, I’d like to revisit an issue the c’t is indirectly involved in. In the beginning of 2005, we openly complained about the unfairness of Intel’s compilers, which, at that time, deprived the competitors’ processors of operating at optimal performance. With a simple patch, we were able to circumvent this lock. The result was that one of the over 20 benchmarks of the SPEC CPU2000 suite, 181.mcf, ran 31 percent faster on an Opteron. Defective Compilers The FTC is now talking about defective compilers in this context. According to the FTC, many design changes to the compiler had the sole goal of making the competition look bad. Furthermore, Intel used misdirecting or false statements about their processors’ benchmark results without indicating that the performance advantage was mainly or solely caused by their compilers. The FTC now wants Intel to replace the defective compilers with operational ones free of charge, compensate companies for the effort of recompilation and inform the companies’ clients that, as the case arises, they should exchange the inferior software. And, of course, Intel may not bring such discriminative products to the market in the future. Intel always argued that, because of the product liability laws, it could only enable features that have been sufficiently validated. Special optimizations for competing AMD processors and the ample corresponding validation effort would have been very demanding – Intel just had not been able to bring itself to do it. However, according to our ratings, the code produced by Intel’s “defective” compiler was mostly also faster on Opteron systems than the “operational” one from Microsoft, PGI or GNU. Unlike Intel – which, of course, like IBM, Sun and all the others, wanted to shed the best light on its processors – we realized our ratings using different compilers and, more important, compatible code without any special optimizations. Commercial software, the kind of software the FTC most likely refers to when talking about “defective”, very rarely employs choosey optimizations anyway – after all, who wants his or her software to perform well only on a limited range of CPUs? As opposed to its CPUs, Intel has been and is a long way from a leading market position with its compilers; their application is mostly restricted to high performance computing. Apart from that, C/C++ is dominated by Microsoft VC under Windows and by GNU C/C++ under Linux. Also, the aforementioned feature, which the Opteron was deprived of, a cache optimization for badly organized data structures, only very rarely had any effect (basically just with the given example from the SPEC benchmark). With the c’t patch, however, performance minded developers were able to circumvent this restriction. In the end, there won’t be a lot of “defectiveness” to be found in the wild. And so, the FTC is out hunting with pretty big cannons and thus overshooting the mark a little. Still, Intel might think about splitting off its compiler development into a separate company, or at least handle it with a little more neutrality. Maybe then, some day, one will also find the flag /Bulldozer in Intel’s compilers. And Something Else Hewlett-Packard plans to update its highly available NonStop server family for its 35th anniversary – only for that, HP still has to use the ancient and extremely slow Itanium-9100 Montevale processors. Only sometime in the first half of 2010, after numerous delays, the next generation Itanium Tukwila – also called Godot – is supposed to finally make an appearance. Just in time for the NonStop anniversary, Red Hat has now announced that it’s abandoning the Itanium: RHEL 5 for Itanium will still be serviced for a few years, but the development of version 6 has been suspended owing to a lack of demand. Update
Intel is stating that the mentioned white paper "Detecting Multi-Core Processor Topology in an IA-32 Platform" was first published early in 2006 and is obsolete since the summer of 2008 when it was superseded by a new paper "Intel® 64 Architecture Processor Topology Enumeration". This was made necessary because the Nehalem design did require a small change in the CPUID instruction architecture in terms of how it reports raw data related to multi-core topology enumerations. Comment from the author
Since this Processor Whispers was published, Intel has removed the old paper from the website and linked to the new one, but the issue at hand was not the publishing date but the fact that recently developed software, that is, written since August 2008 that relied on the then current algorithms will fail to correctly detect the CPU topology of some modern architectures. There's no apparent reason why Intel has chosen this incompatible path, but even software being developed now may suffer when they use older Intel Compilers with OpenMP and KMP_AFFINITY_MASK settings. It is true that the impact is only a possible performance degradation and, at least for now, is limited to the Nehalem dual core processors Clarksdale and Arrandale, where OpenMP software is rarely run, but we will have to see how the six core per chip Westmere-EP and Gulftown processors will behave.

About Beauty and Creativity

They were almost history, but they got a second chance and here they come: the tablet PCs. The talk at is about Microsoft, HP, Dell, Nvidia, Apple, Google and many others – and increasingly about snapping dragons, too. Apple did it again. Just like last year at CeBIT, with the news of the Nehalem processor inside the Mac Pro, Apple’s marketing strategists managed to draw a lot of attention - without even being present as an exhibitor or actually having a product to show off. On the internet, as yet unconfirmed rumors about an Apple tablet PC in the form of some kind of giant iPod Touch have made their rounds for a long time, everybody thought they knew something about it. Maybe it will come with an ARM chip from Qualcomm inside or perhaps it will be an Intel x86 after all? But do we really care? Nowadays it’s the apps that matter and not the underlying hardware. Intel seems to be of the same opinion and is now planning to enter the game with the launch of its own app store, the “AppupCenter”. The other competitors are also trying to hurriedly map the terrain ahead of the presumed market entry by Apple: Microsoft, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Freescale, Nvidia, Archos and all the rest of them. The Redmonders had already dedicated themselves to the topic of tablet PCs years ago, though with little success. However, they couldn’t or wouldn’t present their new device in the making, the “Courier Tablet PC”. Instead, CEO Ballmer briefly and unemotionally showed off the HP product “Slate” running Windows 7 during his keynote at CES. Neither Microsoft nor HP would talk about the processor, but most probably it’s an Intel Atom. Dell was equally tight lipped concerning the hardware innards of its 5 inch prototype (Moorestown?). Unfortunately, the Intel chips continue to be clearly inferior to the ARM Glide on some important points. Concerning energy consumption, pricing, and HD viability, for instance, the ARMs can position themselves very well; one example being Nvidia’s new duo-core Tegra with a consumption of a mere 500mW when playing HD video - with a resolution of up to 1080p. A resolution that Intel’s new Atom “Pineview” with integrated graphics can only dream of as it won’t squeeze out more than 720p. Intel has always highlighted a superior internet viability of their x86 chips in comparison to ARM, but what about judder-free HD videos from Youtube and company? – the Pineview leaves you out in the woods. Master Builders Intel boss Otellini was able to present the first Moorestown equipped smartphone, but the ARMed forces weren’t idle either. Apart from Samsung, also Qualcomm is now increasingly getting into the act. Not only Google’s smartphone Nexus and the Smart from HTC rely on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, but also more and more important Intel partners like HP, Dell, Lenovo and Asus, with their mobile solutions. Add Acer, Samsung, LG, Marvel and Freescale as Qualcomm partners and you’ve got a fresh wind blowing against Intel. Additionally, Qualcomm is having a go at small devices, with the color ebook “mirasol” for instance.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, soon as OSD8672 with duo-core and 1.5 GHz clock rate. With an annual turnover of about 6.5 billion dollars, the company from San Diego is the international number six of the semiconductor business now - even though, in contrast to most of the others in the business, it doesn’t produces semiconductors itself. The manufacturing is taken care of by TSMC, UMC and Chartered. This year, according to a recently signed preliminary contract, Globalfoundries in Dresden, Germany, will be added to that list. Qualcomm revived a frequency hopping method - which had once been invented by the prettiest woman of Hollywood, Hedy Lamarr, and the composer Georg Antheil - for mobile telecommunications, Bluetooth and so on with much success in the 90s. The actress born in Austria with the name Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, who acted with Heinz Rühmann, among others, before the Nazi era, was not only beautiful, but also creative. She and Georg Antheil filed the U.S. patent 2 292 387 for a “secret communication system” during World War II. It was 50 years later that the method was first commercialized – by Qualcomm. Today, the company can show off 10,000 U.S. patents, of which 7000 are still stuck in the queue at the U.S. Patent Office, though, for evaluation. Only a small fraction (391) of them was granted last year. However, that’s still almost twice as much as AMD and Globalfoundries got (202) and also more than Apple received (307). Yet, it’s still by far too little to get into the top-35 list of the most inventive companies. The patent rage of semiconductor-market leader Intel subsided a little – down to 1563 granted patents in 2009 from 1775 in 2008 – and only sufficed for the eighth place. On the top, IBM strengthened its long lasting leadership by an 18 percent increase with almost 5000 patents granted and hence got further ahead of Samsung (3830). Also Microsoft is advancing – even if partly with inexpressibly petty software patents – and holds the third place with 2900 of these overwhelming patents now. If you know how to go from one page of a document to the next using software – voilà, that’s Microsoft’s U.S. patent 7 415 666, granted in 2008. Master Brewers Speaking of Microsoft: the strenuous company Qualcomm is also dabbling in operating systems now. The Smart from HTC is supposed to pass the moose test, which is called Flash or Shockwave for the small mobile devices, with BrewMP. While Intel was recently still giggling over the lacking flash viability of ARM operating systems – today, that’s yesterday’s flash in the pan. Apparently Adobe provided ample assistance in the brewing of Qualcomm BrewMP and Google Android 2.1 and has fermented some valuable Flash compatibility. So it seems Intel will have to come up with something new. Anyway, until now, Windows Mobile is of little use as a promoter for x86 in small portable devices. It’s mostly been used for ARM in any case and it’s unlikely that the long promised super-duper version 7 will roll out before the second half of 2011. Thus, Symbian, iPhone OS, RIM OS, WebOS, BrewMP and Linux – the latter in its Android version – can divide the market of the ultra portables among themselves. By the way: I like the name of the Qualcomm operating system best. PC breaks Pi Record So far, the calculation of pi to insane numbers of digits had been a job for large supercomputers. But not anymore: The French software engineer Fabrice Bellard equipped his desktop PC (Core i7) with 7.5 terabytes of hard disc space and – by using an intelligent algorithm and an efficient program – was able to set a new record of 2.7 trillion digits after just around 100 days. For those of you who want to do a quick check if his results are correct: the last digits after the 2 699 999 989 991st digit are 75972 30153.

U.S. to build world's fastest computer

WASHINGTON - Viewing supercomputers as crucial to scientific discovery, the Energy Department will announce plans Wednesday to build the world's fastest computer at a research laboratory in Tennessee.The supercomputer to be built at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory will be funded over the initial two years by federal grants totaling $50 million.Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham was to make the formal announcement in a speech Wednesday, in which he will call development of the world's fastest computer for general science "critical to our nation's competitiveness."

What is the world's fastest computer?

To put things in perspective, let's start with the computer sitting on your desk -- the computer you use on a day-to-day basis to browse the Internet, handle spreadsheets, create documents, etc. Most people have something like a Pentium computer running Windows, or a Macintosh. A computer like this can execute approximately 100 million instructions per second. Your particular machine might be twice that fast or half that fast, but that's the ballpark.
The fastest computer in the world is much faster than that, and it is sitting right on top of your shoulders! The human brain is an amazing computing device and the fastest processor available right now. Let me give you an example: Your desktop computer is just starting to get to the point where it can "understand" speech and take dictation, translating spoken words into written words. It can only understand one speaker, and that speaker has to train it for about 20 minutes, and the dictation software will still make a lot of mistakes. So 100 million instructions per second can barely handle dictation. Your brain, on the other hand, can understand any number of speakers. It needs no training and will make zero mistakes. It may even be able to understand multiple languages! And the speech processing portion of your brain is just one small part of the whole package -- your brain can also process complex visual images, control your entire body, understand conceptual problems and create new ideas. Your brain is made up of about one trillion cells with 100 trillion connections between those cells. We might take a rough estimate and say it is handling 10 quadrillion instructions per second, but it really is hard to say. In the 2006 TOP500 list, which ranks supercomputers by speed, the top three supercomputers are as follows:

IBM details world's fastest graphene transistor

IDG News Service - Thanks to a change in recipe, IBM has created a graphene-based processor that can execute 100 billion cycles per second (100GHz), almost four times the speed of previous experimental graphene chips. With this research, IBM has also shown that graphene-based transistors can be produced by the wafer, which could pave the way for commercial-scale production of graphene chips, said Yu–Ming Lin, the IBM researcher who led the work. If commercialized, such graphene processors could be the basis of superior signal processing componentry, improving the fidelity of audio and video recording, radar processing and medical imaging. IBM conducted the work on behalf of the U.S. Defense Department's DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), under a program to develop high-performance RF (radio frequency) transistors. A write-up of the results has been published in the Feb. 5 issue of Science. Graphene, a single-atom-thick honeycomb lattice of carbon atoms, can transport electrons more quickly than other semiconductors, a quality called electron mobility. "That makes graphene a promising material for high-speed or high-frequency electronic components," Lin said. This prototype processor was created on a 2-inch wafer, though in principle it could be done on even larger wafers, which should bring the production costs down, Lin said. Graphene is produced by heating a silicon carbide wafer, allowing the silicon to evaporate. Until now, the downside of graphene has been that it is very sensitive to the environment. During the fabrication process, an oxide layer is deposited over the graphene to form the gate insulator. Typically, this deposition degrades the graphene's electron mobility, due to defects in the oxide that scatter electrons in the graphene. The IBM researchers minimized the damage by separating the graphene from the oxide with a very thin polymer layer. This new approach has been instrumental in allowing the researchers to almost quadruple the frequency of graphene chips. Last year, research teams from IBM and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology both demonstrated graphene processors capable of frequencies around 26GHz. By comparison, silicon-based transistors of the same gate length (240 nanometers) have only been able to scale up to a clock rate of 40Ghz or so. It also sets the stage for commercial production. The research shows that "high-quality graphene can be produced on a wafer scale, and graphene transistors can be fabricated with those processes used in the semiconductor industries," Lin said. Lin cautioned against thinking of graphene as a substitute for the silicon-based microprocessors used in today's computers, at least at anytime in the near future. One major roadblock is that graphene does not work easily with discrete electronic signals, he explained. Because graphene is a zero bandgap semiconductor, meaning there is no energy difference between its conductive and nonconductive states, transistors made of the semiconductor cannot be turned on and off. In contrast, silicon has a bandgap of one electron volt, making it good for processing discrete digital signals, Lin said. Instead, graphene is better suited for making analog transistors, such as signal processors and amplifiers. Today, such circuitry is largely made from GaAs (gallium arsenide), though GaAs offers nowhere near the same electron mobility, Lin said

How to Make Your Computer Faster

How to Make Your Computer Faster

Making your computer faster is not very difficult. However, if your computer is running slow, it is very common that most of you in a bid to find a solution on how to make your computer faster, must have installed an antivirus software. But this may not solve your problem. Do you know that certain antivirus softwares can make your computer run slower, if you do not have sufficient RAM or a processor compatible with your antivirus software. Well, we will take a look at this detail at a later stage. Right now, let me provide you with information on how to make your computer faster with very few steps.

Basic Steps to Make Your Computer Faster

Disk Defragmentation
Clusters of fragmented data at different locations of your disk space may cause your computer to run slow. A particular type of data should all be clustered together, else it takes longer time for the computer processor to retrieve the same. Hence, it is very important that once in a while (eg. Once a week) you defragment your disk space. The process to do so is simple. In Windows operating system, you need to go to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragment.

System Cleanup
There is something called paging file size recommendations, that does affect the speed of your computer. Here, we won't go into the details of what this paging file size recommendation is, but for the time being, let me tell you it is very important to have some free disk space for this. Hence, it is always important that you keep a certain portion of your hard disk empty. The easiest and safest way to delete unnecessary files is to use the Windows System Cleanup Utility. You can find the option in Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup. In this option, you can select all the items like temporary Internet files and cookies that you want to be deleted.

Windows Startup
Many of you must be wondering, why is my computer slow during startup? The reason is the large number of startup programs that are running in your computer. Many a times, when installing a particular software, we do not read the steps properly and hence forget to uncheck the options for running the softwares during startup. This causes a large number of softwares to load when the computer boots up, hence reducing the computer speed. The solution for this is to run msconfig and uncheck all those programs that you do not want to run during startup. Read more about ways to speed up your computer.

Other Ways to Make Your Computer Faster

If you have tried all these options, but without much benefit, then you can try the following methods. If you find your computer running slow, when running a software that is using a lot of memory space, simply hit the Ctrl-Alt-Del key combination, to start the Task Manager. From the Task Manager, select all those programs that you do not want running in the background and click on End Task. This will free up your memory space and hence cause your computer to run faster. When it comes to dealing with computer viruses, it's not necessary to say that they can also reduce the speed of your computer drastically. Thus, you need to have an antivirus loaded into your system. But, it is also important that the antivirus software you use, should be compatible with your computer configuration. A computer with a low configuration, when uses an antivirus software that needs a lot of memory space, may reduce the computer speed even further. Thus, the computer runs slow.

How to Repair Hard Drive

Knowing how to repair hard drive and doing the basic troubleshooting is a very easy process. But if there are serious complications in the hard disk, you may need professional guidance. Read on to learn how to repair hard drive errors and problems.

Similar to other components in the computer, hard disks are also vulnerable to complications and problems. There are many times when you might have experienced some problems with your computer's hard drive. When you come across hard drive problems, do not worry, as with some simple steps and guidelines, you can diagnose the exact problem and try to fix it. It is not necessary to call up a computer repair professional as soon as any hard drive-related error pops up on the screen. You first need to diagnose the exact problem, try to troubleshoot it, and if you are not successful, then you can go ahead and call computer repair services.

Hard Drive Problems

There are many types of errors that may come up on the screen due to hard drive problems. If there are errors on the computer monitor, but there is no clicking or scraping noise from the hard disk, they you need to know that it is a problem that can be resolved by using a software application. But if there is a certain noise coming from the hard drive, you need to realize that it is a serious hardware issue which only needs to be repaired by a professional. So if you are thinking how to repair hard drive motor or an part of the hard disk, it is better to take the disk to a PC repair shop. If your hard drive is in warranty, you can get it repaired at no charge at all.

How to Repair Hard Drive Bad Sectors?

If the hard disk is not making noise, but there are some errors popping up on the screen, you can try to resolve the problem with fixing bad sectors. The hard disk has several sectors on which the data gets stored, and if these sectors go bad, the data stored thereon is lost and cannot be accessible. However, data on other sectors of the disk will remain as it is. The bad sectors then need to be tagged as unusable, after which the operating system will not try to store data on them. This would however reduce the overall storage capacity of the hard drive.

Those thinking how to repair hard drive on Mac OS or Windows need to understand that these operating systems have an inbuilt application that scans the hard disk for errors and tries to resolve them. For fixing bad sectors on the hard drive, you need to open 'My Computer', right click on the drive which is to be be repaired, select the 'Properties' tab, and then the 'Tools' option. You then need to select the 'Check Now' button which is located in the 'Error-checking' section. A window will be displayed wherein you need to select both the check boxes. Click on 'Start' in the window to start the process. Read more on hard drive repair.

How to Repair a Corrupted Hard Drive?

If you want to repair a hard drive which has been corrupted, you need to use a particular software for getting rid of all the corrupted data and emptying the disk. Download a hard disk utility application to a floppy disk from another PC. Insert the floppy in your computer's floppy drive, and switch on the computer. After the BIOS of the PC loads, the utility will start. Follow the step by step instructions on the screen to delete all the corrupt data and make your corrupted hard drive data-free. You can now use your hard disk as anew.

PC Performance Increase

Your computer is a lot like an automobile. Both of these require frequent routine preventative maintenance. Both of these will need to remain optimally tuned so that they can be able to deliver optimal performance and to extend their useful lives. Automobiles go through oil changes and tune ups. Thus, PCs also need to get tune-ups of their own.

Spelled out below are a few essential tune-up actions you ought to perform against your machine on a routine basis:

1. Virus scan - Scan your OS for viruses regularly. Even if your antivirus app is configured to identify viruses in real-time, it is still a prudent idea to schedule it to conduct a full scan once per week.

2. Antispyware scans - Spyware has become an increasingly greater menace daily, as it spreads quietly through the Internet to unknowing users who are not aware that not all clicks are created equal. Virus is different than spyware and thus each must be dealt with differently.

3. Hard drive defragmenting - You can accelerate read operations and write operations to and from your computer's hard drive by defragmenting it on a regular basis.

4. Run firewall software - If you spend a great deal of time online, then it is very urgent that you protect your OS around the clock with personal firewall software. This blocks malicious hackers from trying to infiltrate your system.

5. Registry repair and optimization - The system registry is the main database that the operating system uses to maintain sensitive data on all software and hardwaer programs connected to your OS. Gradually over the course of time, it can become corrupted and unoptimized, causing the computer system to slow down or even crash. An optimized registry database is vital to optimal system performance.

How to Fill Out a Deposit Slip

How to Fill Out a Deposit Slip
A deposit slip is a small form that can be used to deposit funds into an account. A depositor has to fill in the details like his name, account number, amount of cash, coins, checks to be deposited and the depositing date. To know more on how to fill out a deposit slip, read the information provided.

How to Fill Out a Deposit Slip

One small, but essential step to learn to manage your banking, is to learn how to fill out a deposit slip. Follow these simple steps on how to fill out a deposit slip

• Write your name (first and last), date (with the month and year) and the location of the branch on the places allotted on the slip.
• Enter the details of amount of cash in 'CASH' and coins in 'COIN', that you have to deposit.
• Enter details for checks separately in the appropriate column. If you have more than 3 checks to deposit, you can write them on the back of the deposit slip.
• Calculate the total amount of the checks and the cash and put it into the 'SUB-TOTAL' column in the deposit slip.
• Deposit the slip with the cash and checks with the teller.

How to Fill Out a Bank Deposit Slip

Filling out a deposit slip to accompany your check or cash, in a bank is easy. Just follow these steps on how to fill out a deposit slip

• Gather the checks and money you want to deposit in the bank and the deposit slip, that is provided at the back of your checkbook. The bank will provide you with a deposit slip if you don't have a checking account.
• Check if you have the correct deposit slip, as a bank has different deposit slips for different types of bank accounts. If you want to deposit money in your savings account, fill in a deposit slip that says 'SAVINGS ACCOUNT DEPOSIT SLIP'.
• Fill in your name in capital letters in the space provided
• Write the correct date, including the month and year.
• Check for the bank account number and bank routing number. You can find these numbers at the bottom of the deposit slip on the left hand side. Ensure that you have the correct deposit slip and correct account before filling in the blank deposit slip.
• Count the amount of cash that you have to deposit and fill in the amount in the space marked 'CASH'. Some deposit slips have separate space for currency amount (dollar amount) and coin amount (cents amount). Check the deposit slip for accuracy and fill it accordingly. If you do not have any coins to deposit, then put two zeros (00) after the decimal point. For example: $25.50 (with cents), $25.00 (without cents).
• If you have a check to be deposited, enter the check number (found at the top right corner of the check) in the space marked 'CHECKS'. Enter the amount from the check in the columns on the right side of the check numbers. If you have more than two checks to deposit, you can fill in the details on the reverse side of the deposit slip, where extra space is provided.
• There is a space for filling the total dollar amount from the backside of the deposit slip labeled as 'TOTAL FROM OTHER SIDE'. Fill in that amount in this space found on the front of the deposit slip.
• After adding the check amount with the cash amount, write this total in the space marked 'SUB TOTAL'.
• Fill the amount, if you want some cash back, in 'LESS CASH'.
• Subtract the amount in 'LESS CASH' from the 'SUB TOTAL' and fill that amount in 'NET DEPOSIT'.
• In the box labeled 'TOTAL ITEMS', enter the number of items that you will depositing. The cash (whatever amount of cash you have) is counted as one item and number of checks (if you have more than one check) are counted separately.
• You can now hand the deposit slip with the check and cash to the bank teller. But ensure that you have entered all the details correctly before depositing the slip.