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Tips 7 Vista/XP

admin — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 09:43:45 +0000

MINIMIZE MENU LOADING DELAY TIME THROUGH A REGISTRY HACK

By default,both XP and Vista wait 400 milliseconds before presenting expansion menus [those menu items with right-facing triangles on them]. You can eliminate the wait completely for instantaneous menu expansion [though be warned, you may not actually like it]. Note that this will not make, say, you’re your primary File or Edit menu show up faster-those menus automatically load as fast as possible.

DO IT Run regedit at the Run prompt. Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Desktop. Double click the MenuShowDelay key in the right-hand pane and set the value to 0.

DISABLING QOS AND IPV6 OPTIONS WILL IMPROVE BANDWIDTH AND WEB PERFORMANCE

The theory goes that you should disable any service you aren’t using, and that turning off IPv6 and QoS Packet Scheduling options in your NIC properties will boost browsing speed. One absurb legend holds that QoS alone actually “reserves” 20 percent of your bandwidth. Microsoft has formally debunked this tip, and our test back that up: We found zero difference at all in file-transfer speeds whether QoS and IPv6 options were on or off, on both XP and Vista systems.

DON’T DO IT

PUTTING YOUR PAGGING FILE ON A SECOND HARD DRIVE WILL IMPROVE PERFORMANCE

Splitting up the pagefile and your everyday apps is common sense. Doing this allows Windows to dump temp junk onto one drive while not having to interrupt reads or writes on the other. If you have two hard drives, this is a tip that definitely works and works well: Expect at least a 5 to 10 percent speed boost, depending on the existing speed of your rig and, especially, the performance of your drives. But any second drive will help at least a little: While not recommended, you can even put the pagefile on an external USB drive and see some performance gains.

CLEANING OUT CACHED AND TEMP FILES IMPROVES PERFORMANCE, ESPECIALLY OF YOUR WEB BROWSER

Unless you have so much junk on your hard drive that you are nearly out of free space, deleting any number of files-whether they’re temp files or permanent ones-won’t improve performance at all. The only exceptions to the rule are for programs or processes that involves every file on your drive: Virus scans or full disk backups, for examples, are faster if there’s less data to deal with. It make sense to clear this files out using Disk Cleanup every now and then for the sake of good digital hygiene, but you won’t get a performance boost for your trouble.

DON’T DO IT

Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Microsoft Windows Vista

Canon PIXMA Ip3500

admin — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:39:17 +0000

The quality of Canon’s inkjets has never been in question, with its top-end products, such as the ipF5000, offering close to printing nirvana. It’s consumer inkjets have been just as reliable, and the quality of its PIXMA range, while far from perfect , is a huge hit with home users.

The ip3500, then, shows what happens when three year old high end technology hits the low end marketplace. This is, after all, a four ink desktop printer capable of 4800×1200 dpi resolutions, which prints borderless 10×15cm full-bleed photos in just under 50 seconds. More importantly , it gives a wad of change from $300.

So where’s the catch? Well, there isn’t once, really. Quality inkjet technology has finally filtered down to the masses, and it makes the ip3500 both fast and precise. It prints full-bleed A4 and 10×15cm with excellent results-more than adequate for presentations and colour mock –ups. It also prints black and white and text exceptionally quickly , knocking out six pages of heavy text in under 40 seconds while producing crisp fonts from 2pt to 72pt.

In short, there’s little wrong with the ip3500 other than the fact that it’s not professional printer: there are no tweakable profiles, it’s USB only and there’s a distinct lack of adjustable settings. But should Canon produce an A3 or dare we suggest, an A2 printer using the ip3500’s blueprints, it would be all but indispensible in the creative marketplace. As it stands, if you need a fast and reliable A4 printer that produces decent results, you’ve found it.

Canon Pixma iP3500 Photo Printer (2170B002)

Get rid of Microsoftpowerpoint.exe virus

admin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 04:12:02 +0000

Mircosoftpowerpoint.exe is a file that is created by a virus named w32.USBWorm. This virus is an epidemic and spreads very rapidly through USB drives. When a USB drive is connected to a computer which is already affected by this virus, it gets affected. The virus in the computer will transfer all its files into the drive. When this USB drive is connected to another unaffected computer, it will transfer all the required files to the computer’s hard drive.

Once the program runs, your computer system is infected. This virus will not destroy any of your system files. It hides all the hidden folders and disables “Show hidden folders” option in folder options menu. It runs its process in the memory. This makes the worm to start with windows start-up and and displays annoying pop-up like “I dont hate mozilla, but use IE or else“, Orkut is banned you fool. It will not let you open Orkut using Internet Explorer. It will not let you access even YouTube too.

The virus, after affecting your computer, creates a folder named “heap41a” in your root drive ie; C drive, where it resides. This folder will be hidden and since this virus disables show hidden files and folders option, it is not easy to locate. This folder contains following:
* Offspring – an empty folder.
* 2.mp3 – a laughing sound.
* Icon.ico – a blank icon file.
* reproduce .txt – codes to change registry entries.
* svchost.exe – gives all kinds of pop-ups.
* script1.txt – codes for displaying pop-ups.
* std.txt – codes to change registry entries.

You can find this folder by typing C:\heap41a in Start Menu> Run. If you go through the text files, you will get an idea what the worm does to your computer. It runs the executable file vchost.exe and also changes the following keys in the registry which in turn inactivates the hidden files and folders option.
>> regread,regdata,REG_DWORD,HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\Folder\ Hidden\SHOWALL,checkedvalueifnotequal,regdata,2
>> regwrite,REG_DWORD,HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\Folder\Hidden\ SHOWALL,checkedvalue,2

To rectify this, you will have to change these keys in the registry, back to actuals. To open the registry editro, go to Start Menu>> Run>> and type ‘regedit’. Browse to find the following entries and change them.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced. To the right hand side, you will find the value “Hidden. Right click and modify it to 1. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\Folder\Hidden\SHOWALL and find the Checked all key to the right and change it to 1 from 2. This will enable “Show hidden files and folders” in the folder option menu.
Now open Windows Task Manager and end the process named svchost.exe that runs under your user name. Then delete the folder C:\heap41a and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\Explorer\Run and clear the entry that says heap41a.

Now to make sure that the computer is free from infections, search the entire computer system and see whether there are any files with the same name as the .exe file mentioned earlier. If found, delete them. Now your computer system is completely free from worm infection. But make sure that you format the USB drive. This will prevent the virus, if present in the USB drive, infect other computers too. If you are a little careful, you can prevent your computer system from virus infections through USB drives, otherwise called Pen drives or Flash drives.

http://chip.revivalx.com/?tag=virus

Verbatim SmartDisk External Hard Disk 640GB

admin — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:02:12 +0000

Which equates to a stunning 9p for every one of the 640gb on offer. But the compromise is in the features : there are no eSata or FireWire connections, for instance, so it’s USB only. This puts performance behind eSata drives, such as the A-listed Western Digital MyBook but, when compared with the quickest of USB drives, performance was more mixed. The Verbatim was quicker than the Freecom Hard Drive Pro when handling single files, but fell far behind when tasked with groups of small files. This means the Verbatim is only ideal if you’re willing to trade performance for storage.

External USB Audio

admin — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:01:01 +0000

Here’s yet another solution for intergrating your PC’s audio capabilities into your home-theater system: Use an external USB audio device. These won’t deliver multichannel sound over HDMI ,but they’re dead simple to install: Plug the device into your A/V receiver with another, and install the accompanying software.

Asus’s Xonar U1 USB Audio Station (Asus Xonar U1 Sound Card (White)
) and Creative’s X-Fi Surround 5.1(Creative Labs SB1090 USB Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1
)are two examples of external USB audio devices. Both products use Dolby Digital Live to encode any audio signal to 5.1-channel Dolby Digital in real time. The audio is then output through a S/PDIF interface to your A/V receiver.

Asus Xonar U1 Sound Card (White)