10 great add-ons for Internet Explorer(part 1)
Bring fantastic new features to Internet Explorer with add-ons- programs that extend your browser’s capabilities. We scoured the internet for the best.
Posts Tagged ‘Vista’
Faster start-up
Rid your machine of superfluous extras and cut vital seconds from your start-up time
- CONTROL PANEL TWEAKS Deleting applications you don’t need can help accelerate boot times – especially those that load into memory when you log in. go to the Control Panel and choose Uninstall a Program.
- DELETING PROGRAMS To delete a program select it from the list and click Uninstall. Some may prompt you to restart. Wait until you’ve removed all programs you want to delete before rebooting your PC.
- BE FRUGAL WITH FONTS When Windows Vista starts up, it loads all your fonts into memory. The memory you have, the longer this takes. It’s likely that you’ll only use a fraction of them – so you can safely remove those you don’t like.
Tips 7 Vista/XP
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.
Tips 6 Vista/XP
YOU CAN TWEAK VIRTUAL MEMORY SETTINGS FOR IMPROVED PERFORMANCE
In the Windows 95/98 era, conventional wisdom held that you should manually set your virtual memory [i.e., pagefile] size to at least 1.5 times the amount of RAM in order to optimize performance. [By default, Windows will manage pagefile on its own: You will likely find the initial pagefile size set to 0.5x or 1x the amount of RAM you have]. We were skeptical about this tip, but our benchmarks surprised us: Some systems showed no change at all, but some(particularly older machines) showed substantial improvement beyond the usual random noise we see in benchmark results. We got at least a 10 percent jump after we upped the initial pagefile size to 2x amount or RAM on two separate machines. It won’t work for all computers, so the jury’s still out on this one, but because it’s so easy to do and there are no negative consequences, it’s worth a shot just to see if it has any effect.
Drive Sentry
A firewall for your hard drive
There’s no quicker way to infect your system than to tread online without the aid of a firewall. Unscrupulous saboteurs the world over are constantly on the hunt for unprotected PCs, and when they find them, it’s open season for unleashing keyloggers, dialers, Trojans, and other toxic trash the riff-raff carry in their arsenals. But with a firewall, you always know exactly what’s trying to access your PC, leaving you in command of who comes and goes.
Tips 5 Vista/XP
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.
ZoneAlarm ForceField
Protects you from threats on the web, but not from yourself
Just surfing the Internet can be enough to infect your system and grant malware uninvited access to your hard drive. But what about the malware that is invited? Malware writers know that the quickest way to infiltrate a system is through the end user, and there’s no shortage of dirty code masquerading under the guise of helpful applications. By the time you realize you’ve been duped, it’s too late, and it’s here that ForceField ultimately falls short.
Tips 4 Vista/XP
SUPERFETCH BOOSTS PERFORMANCE
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.
Tips 3 Vista/XP
WRITE CACHING WILL IMPROVE PERFORMANCE ON SATA DRIVES
This feature is disabled by default in VISTA because if your computer loses power before a write is completed,you can lose data. If you’re confident in your UP’s capabilities, crank it up and you’ll see at least a 10 percent improvement in performance. Remember, write caching is supported only on SATA drives. The options are grayed out for older ATA disks.
