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

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Microsoft Windows Vista

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.

DO IT In the XP System Control Panel, click Advanced, then [under Performance] click Settings, Advanced. In the Virtual Memory module, click Change. Click Custom size then up both initial and Maximum size to roughly double your amount of RAM. Click Set [important!], then OK out of all windows. In Vista’s, click “Advanced system settings” in the System Control Panel and follow the same instructions.

CLEARING THE PREFETCH DIRECTORY [OR CACHE] WILL IMPROVE STARTUP TIME

One of the most notorious Windows tips ever is that deleting all the files in the Windows/Prefetch directory will cause your system to boot faster. We tested the tip by repeatedly measuring boot times on a trio of both XP and Vista machines with overstuffed Prefetch folders, then running the same test after clearing the folders out. The result: No improvement in boot time in any of the cases. Some testers have reported that clearing the Prefetch cache actually lengthens boot time, though we didn’t experience this either.

DON’T DO IT

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.

DO IT In Explorer, right-click the drive you want to speed up and select Properties. Click the Hardware tab, select Properties again. Click the Policies tab. Check both of the boxes beneath “Optimize for performance.”

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

Switching to Windows Vista for Seniors: A Guide Helping Senior Citizens Move From XP to Vista (Computer Books for Seniors series)

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.

DISABLING UNUSED NETWORK CONNECTIONS WILL IMPROVE BOOT TIME

Say you set up a network drive for a network drive for a computer you had months ago but is no longer on your network: When Windows boot, it spends at least some time reconnecting to that drive, wasting precious seconds you could be spending on Facebook. While XP and Vista are better than older versions of Windows about network connections [who can forget those interminable “Connecting…’ messages?] it still makes sense to disconnect from network shares you no longer need. You won’t actually boot noticeably faster without those extra drive letters, but Explorer will become usable more quickly after launch. This is especially noticeable in Vista, which has a helpful “loading” progress indicator that overlays the address bar: Having any number of network shares will cause it to take any extra 10 to 20 seconds to fully load.

DO IT Right-click each shared folder in Explorer and select Disconnect. This will permanently remove them from your drive list unless you map them again.

Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Microsoft Windows Vista

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.

Like BufferZone, ForceField protects at the application level, enveloping your web browser in an emulation layer. You’ll know ForceField’s working by the green border glowing around your browser. As you surf the web, unsolicited downloads write to a virtual file system, which prevents rogue sites from thrashing the OS. As a second layer of protection, ForceField issues a warning whenever you’re about to enter a site known to distribute spyware, at which point you can enter anyway or hightail it to safer corners of the web.

But unlike BufferZone, this one-two punch falls far short of providing an impenetrable defense. ForceField focuses only on web browsing, leaving email, IM clients, and other connected applications exposed to the same dangers. And while ForceField neutralizes unsolicited downloads occurring behind the scenes, it won’t save your system if you accidentally execute a malicious file or willingly install a seemingly innocent application only to find out later it was laced with spyware.

ForceField was still in beta from during our tests, and we uncovered a few rough edges. Despite support for both Internet Explorer and FireFox, we initially couldn’t get either browser to load through Vista’s start menu; instead, we had to right-click the ForceField icon in the taskbar. Several reboots later the problem disappeared. XP wasn’t affected, but some applications managed to load unprotected browser windows in both OSes, exposing a major vulnerability.

When we navigated the same shady websites we surfed with BufferZone, ForceField indentified only some of them as potentially harmful, letting several others slip through undetected. You have to wait while downloaded files undergo a scan for known malware, and we had little success getting ForceField to flag files embedded with Trojans and other common cruft. False positives were much less of an issue, but that’s little consolation given the weak detection of real threats.

By limiting virtualization to just automatic downloads made through the browser, ZoneAlarm also limits the product’s appeal. In its current form, ForceField can’t be counted on to provide a reliable defense. And even though ForceField isn’t intended as a stand-alone security application, there’s not enough to it justify a $30 investment.

Zonealarm Forcefield 2008

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.

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.

DON’T DO IT

Windows Vista Annoyances: Tips, Secrets, and Hacks

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.

DO IT In Explorer, right-click the drive you want to speed up and select Properties. Click the Hardware tab, select Properties again. Click the Policies tab. Check both of the boxes beneath “Optimize for performance.”

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.

CHANGE YOUR DEFAULT ‘VIEW SOURCE’ APPLICATION WITH A REGISTRY HACK

Viewing web-page source file in Notepad is hardly a user-friendly experience. You can hack the registry to change which app opens source files, but using TweakUI is a better choice.

DO IT Load TweakUI [http://tinyurl.com/553fw6], browse to Internet Explorer >View Source. Click Change Program… and browse for whatever app you prefer. This only changes the setting for Internet Explorer; to change the View Source app for Firefox, type about : config in the address bar, scroll to view_source.editor. path, and change the setting by pasting in the full path to the application you want to use. [The Firefox tip works with XP and Vista, but you’ll have to tweak the registry if you want to do the same for IE under Vista.]

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

Mastering Windows Made Easy Training Tutorial v. Vista & XP – How to use Microsoft Windows Video e Book Manual Guide. Even dummies can learn from this … through Advanced material from Professor Joe

Say you set up a network drive for a network drive for a computer you had months ago but is no longer on your network: When Windows boot, it spends at least some time reconnecting to that drive, wasting precious seconds you could be spending on Facebook. While XP and Vista are better than older versions of Windows about network connections [who can forget those interminable “Connecting…’ messages?] it still makes sense to disconnect from network shares you no longer need. You won’t actually boot noticeably faster without those extra drive letters, but Explorer will become usable more quickly after launch. This is especially noticeable in Vista, which has a helpful “loading” progress indicator that overlays the address bar: Having any number of network shares will cause it to take any extra 10 to 20 seconds to fully load.

DO IT Right-click each shared folder in Explorer and select Disconnect. This will permanently remove them from your drive list unless you map them again.

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.

DO IT In the XP System Control Panel, click Advanced, then [under Performance] click Settings, Advanced. In the Virtual Memory module, click Change. Click Custom size then up both initial and Maximum size to roughly double your amount of RAM. Click Set [important!], then OK out of all windows. In Vista’s, click “Advanced system settings” in the System Control Panel and follow the same instructions.

CLEARING THE PREFETCH DIRECTORY [OR CACHE] WILL IMPROVE STARTUP TIME

One of the most notorious Windows tips ever is that deleting all the files in the Windows/Prefetch directory will cause your system to boot faster. We tested the tip by repeatedly measuring boot times on a trio of both XP and Vista machines with overstuffed Prefetch folders, then running the same test after clearing the folders out. The result: No improvement in boot time in any of the cases. Some testers have reported that clearing the Prefetch cache actually lengthens boot time, though we didn’t experience this either.

DON’T DO IT

Windows Vista Annoyances: Tips, Secrets, and Hacks

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.

Windows Vista For Dummies