Tips 2 Vista/XP
Vista/XP
SUPERFETCH BOOSTS PERFORMANCE for vista
Superfetch is an update of the XP Prefetcher, designed to more intelligently load applications into RAM based on frequency of use. With Superfetch on, your PC should theoretically get faster over time, particularly when loading frequently apps. You won’t see improvement in general performance, like rendering Photoshop files, but Superfetch does tend to make apps load10 to 20 percent more quickly, depending on their size.
DO IT Superfetch is on by default. To ensure that it’s active, go to the Control Panel, open Administrative Tools, and select Services. Scroll down to Superfetch and ensure that it is set to “Started” and “Automatic.”
DISABLING XP’s INDEXING SERVICE CAN IMPROVE PERFORMANCE
You can almost ignore the question of whether XP’s Indexing Service slows down your computer. The fact is it doesn’t do much good anyway. Indexing is supposed to help Windows keep better tabs on files, but it does a terrible job of it and offers the users no options for configuring what gets indexed. It’s almost beside the point that it can slow your system-sometimes only a little and sometimes to an outright crawl. Even Microsoft acknowledges that the Indexing Services can cause hard drives to thrash and that it “uses lots of pagefile space and lots of CPU time”-in fact, Microsoft oftens recommends disabling it. Note, however,that Vista’s integrated search and indexing system is considerably improved.
DO IT There are several ways to turn off XP’s Indexing Service. The most thorough is to open the Control Panel, open Administrative Tools, then open Services. Scroll down to Indexing Services and double-click it. Change the Startup type to “Disabled.”
TURNING ON MULTIPLE CORES IN VISTA IMPROVES BOOT TIME
You’ll find an option within Vista’s msconfig utility that cryptically lets you set the “Number of processors” used during boot. By default it is turned off [with the dropdown set to 1]. We tried upping the setting to 2 on a dual-core system and, guess what, no change in boot time whatsoever. Turns out this is just a debug setting for coders who want to test how programs load on single-core machines without having to physically go to a less-sophisticated PC.it can be completely ignored. By default Windows uses all your cores.
YOU NEED TO OVERWRITE YOUR HAND DRIVE SEVEN TIMES WITH RANDOM DATA TO MAKE DATA UNRECOVERABLE
Conventional wisdom holds that you need to write and rewrite a hard drive numerous times with garbage before it will be totally unrecoverable by forensics experts. That’s not exactly the case: We overwrote a hard drive just once with zeroes and asked the recovery gurus at DriveSavers if they could rescue it. The answer: They couldn’t save a single bit. Now we don’t pretend to know about the hardcore resources of groups like the NSA, so if you’re that paranoid about being branded a terrorist because of a deleted PDF of The Anarchist’s Cookbook discovered on a used drive you bought on eBay, by all means, spend a week wiping that drive. But you’re just casually recycling a drive for resale or donation, a single pass will do the trick and will save you literally days of time waiting for the wipe to finish.
DO IT Run a program like KillDisk [www.killdisk.com] and select a single zeroes-only pass.
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