Archive for May, 2009

Five quick Windows Vista speedup tips

by fazle321 on May 19, 2009 in vista, windows with No comments

I split my work time about evenly between Windows XP and Vista. Let me tell you, I’ll take Vista 99 days out of 100. Vista’s safer than XP, it looks better than its predecessor, and it runs at least as fast as XP. Performance has been a knock on Vista since the operating system was released, but there are some relatively simple ways to give Vista a little goose so it performs some common operations a tad faster. These five tips should shorten your workday:

 

Put an encrypt/decrypt option on your context menu

If you frequently encrypt files or folders to protect your privacy, you can access this function via the right-click menu by changing a Registry key. Editing the Registry is always risky, so back it up first by creating a restore point. To do so, press the Windows key, type systempropertiesprotection.exe, and press Enter. Click Create, give the restore point a name, and choose Create again.

With your Registry backup in place, press the Windows key, type regedit, and press enter. Navigate to and select this key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

Right-click in the right pane, choose New > DWORD (32-bit) Value, and name it EncryptionContextMenu. Double-click the new entry, give it a value of 1, and click OK. After you restart your system, you’ll see an Encrypt/Decrypt option when you right-click a file or folder.

Disable DOS-era 8.3 file-name compatibility

Most hard drives on Vista systems are partitioned using NTFS rather than the older FAT32 format. But Vista still supports the old 8.3 file-name convention of DOS and early versions of Windows. This is handy if you still run DOS-era 16-bit programs, but most of us have no need to retain this backward-compatibility. You can speed up your file accesses a bit by disabling this feature.

To do so, open the Registry Editor as described in the previous tip and navigate to and select this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem

Double-click the key named NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation, change its value from 0 to 1, and click OK.

Do without last-access file updating

Whenever you open a file on an NTFS partition, it gets a date stamp that’s separate from its “last modified on” date and time. If you can do without this information, you can disable it and open your files a skosh faster.

Start by opening the Registry Editor as described above. Navigate to and select this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem

Double-click NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate, change the DWORD value from 0 to 1, and click OK.

Windows Vista Registry Editor

Change this Registry key to disable the last-file-access feature to open files faster.

Access Vista’s report on your start-up and shutdown speeds

Among the interesting performance-measuring tools in Vista is the Event Viewer’s log of your system’s start-up and shutdown performance. To view these reports, press the Windows key, type event, and press Enter. Navigate in the left pane to this entry:

Applications and Service Log\Microsoft\Windows\Diagnostics-Performance

Double-click Operational in the middle pane to view the most recent events. Look for entries numbered from 100 to 199 to indicate start-up items, and ones numbered from 200 to 299 for shutdown items. Click the Details tab below the event log and make sure Friendly View is selected.

Windows Vista Event Viewer

Vista’s Event Viewer records your boot times and other performance information about your start-ups and shutdowns.

You’ll see the boot and shutdown times in milliseconds and other information about your start-ups and shutdowns. Compare the numbers for each system start and shutdown to determine whether your machine’s slowing down. If it is, try paring your list of start-up applications using the tips in this post from last October. And use the tips in this post from March 2008 to put Windows to bed in a jiffy.

Let Vista tell you how it’s doing

A little-known addition to Vista is the System Health Report Generator, which gives you an inside look at how well your PC is running. To access the tool, press the Windows key, type perform info, and press Enter. Click Advanced tools in the left pane and choose Generate a system health report.

About a minute later, you’ll see the test results in various categories. For help deciphering the information and on using other components of the Performance and Reliability Monitor, check out this guide on Microsoft’s TechNet site.

Source: cnet

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Microsoft’s biggest blunder: Vista or Wind

by fazle321 on May 19, 2009 in Microsoft, vista, windows with No comments

With the news that Microsoft is recommending that some companies should abandon Vista deployment plans and move instead full-bore into Windows 7, Microsoft is beginning to close the chapter on Vista, one that the company would rather forget. But Vista wasn’t the company’s biggest blunder — Windows Me was far worse.

 

Vista is slower than XP, and when it launched, it had too many hardware woes. But it was also a major step ahead for Windows. The Windows interface got a much-needed facelift, plenty of new useful features were added, such as the Network Center and Network Map, and Aero added some nice eye candy. I’ll admit it: I’m a fan of Vista, and I think it’s been unnecessarily reviled.

Windows Me, on the other hand, was bad in just about every way. Start off with the name. It was officially named Windows Millenium Edition, which sounds like a bad, knock-off science fiction movie with cheesy special effects…and come to think of it, that’s not a bad description of the operating system, either. Windows Me was full of bugs, slow, and unstable. People had trouble getting it to start, getting it to stop, and handling it while it was running.

The operating system was a follow-on to Windows 98 SE (Special Edition), and had no reason for being other than that Microsoft figured it better get something out the door in time for the year 2000. Some people, in fact, referred to it as the true Y2K bug.

So as we bid Windows Vista good-bye between now and October, keep in mind that no matter the complaints you might have had about it, there was a Windows-based operating system that was far worse.

Source: computerworld

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Google Ocean Shows The Effects of Climate Change

by fazle321 on May 15, 2009 in Google, News with No comments

The same satellite technology that allows more than 500 million users to view everything from the Grand Canyon to a neighbor’s backyard is now helping them glide through the depths of the ocean, track a whale or compare reviews of their favorite dive locations.

The developers of Google Ocean – built using visual satellite images, sonar waves bounced off ships and data pooled from scientists and individuals – say it could also help highlight the effects of climate change on the seas.

But three months after its launch, the site has high resolution images of less than 5 percent of the sea – much of it from around the United States and Japan, where research facilities are collaborating closely with Google.

The site has time-delay photos that show the melting polar ice caps, Google’s chief technology advocate, Michael Jones said Friday on the final day of the World Ocean Conference in Indonesia.

Jones said the company is still recruiting teams to collect content that will improve nascent efforts to map the underwater world. He urged governments, scientists and divers to upload reviews, photos and even video footage.

“Those kinds of visualizations help people – not just a fellow scientist but everyday people – develop a certainty about the importance of changes that could affect their lifestyle or their ability to live at all,” he said.

Next to nothing has been uploaded on, for instance, Southeast Asia’s coral reefs, the largest and most biologically diverse in the world, which experts warned this week could be wiped out by the end of the century as water temperatures rise.

“If we help people see (the ocean) by helping scientists to show it, then people can at least have a dialogue about it,” Jones said.

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McAfee Plans New Apple, iPhone Security Products

by fazle321 on May 15, 2009 in News with No comments

McAfee Inc plans to develop new security software for the iPhone and other Apple Inc products.

McAfee, the world’s second-largest maker of security software, already supplies security products for Apple computers and is in the process of expanding its offerings for the consumer electronics giant. “We are working on a much more comprehensive suite for the Apple family,”  Chief Executive, David DeWalt, said in an interview in New York ahead of the Reuters Global Technology Summit. “Through the course of 2009, we’ll have a lot more technology for them.”

McAfee provides a range of security technology including encryption, safe Web surfing, and protection from malicious software such as viruses. DeWalt did not give a specific date for the launch of iPhone security products, or say which products it would provide for the popular smartphone. He said users of advanced devices like the iPhone tend to use a wide range of applications. “The more applications become available, the more the threat of security

and the threat of identity and data loss is there,” he said.

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Windows 7 May Not Be Much Faster Than Vista

by fazle321 on May 11, 2009 in Microsoft, windows 7 with No comments

Improving performance is one of Microsoft’s design goals with Windows 7, and many early reviewers (including ours) have said that the new OS seems peppier than Vista. But tests of the Windows 7 Release Candidate in our PC World Test Center found that while Windows 7 was slightly faster on our WorldBench 6 suite, the differences may be barely noticeable to users.

We loaded the Windows 7 Release Candidate on three systems (two desktops and a laptop) and then ran our WorldBench 6 suite. Afterward we compared the results with the WorldBench 6 numbers from the same three systems running Windows Vista. Each PC was slightly faster when running Windows 7, but in no case was the overall improvement greater than 5 percent, our threshold for when a performance change is noticeable to the average user.

The largest difference was 4 points–102 for Vista versus 106 for Windows 7 on an HP Pavillion a6710t desktop. Our other two test machines showed similarly minor performance improvements: A Maingear M4A79T Deluxe desktop improved by 1 point (from 138 on Vista to 139 on Windows 7), and a Dell Studio XPS 16 laptop improved by 2 points, from 97 on Vista to 99 on Windows 7.

WorldBench 6 consists of a number of tests involving ten common applications, including Microsoft Office, Firefox, and Photoshop. On the individual tests, the benchmark results were generally within a few percentage points of each other. One notable exception, however, was Nero 7 Ultra Edition, where Windows 7 made significant improvements, ranging from a 12 percent speedup to a 26 percent speedup, depending on the PC we used in our tests. Although we have yet to confirm it, PC World Test Center Director Jeff Kuta notes that this difference may be due to updated hard-disk drivers in Windows 7. Any improvements to Windows 7’s disk support will be more noticeable in an application like Nero, which uses the hard drive heavily. The test involving WinZip, another hard-drive-dependent task, also showed marked improvement under Windows 7.

We also measured a noteworthy 7 percent speed increase in our Autodesk 3ds max 8.0 SP3 (DirectX) test on the HP Pavillion desktop, which had an nVidia GeForce 9300GE graphics board. nVidia’s drivers appear to be better optimized for Windows 7 than Windows Vista.

In contrast, however, each of the systems took slightly longer to perform the tests in Microsoft Office and Firefox when they were running the new operating system than when they were running Vista.

Of course, it’s important to remember that we performed these tests with the release candidate of Windows 7. Though the operating system’s features likely won’t change in the final version, Microsoft’s engineers may still find ways to tweak the code to improve performance.

If these test results remain consistent with those for the final version of Windows 7, the news will likely be disappointing to many Windows users. One of the major complaints about Windows Vista was the fact that it was consistently slower than Windows XP. If Windows 7 doesn’t significantly improve that situation, it may fail to convince people to move away from Windows XP.

That said, there may be other areas we didn’t cover in our testing–such as startup times–where Windows 7 may outperform Windows Vista by a wider margin. The best way for you to get a feel for Windows 7’s performance is to download the release candidate and take it for a test drive on your system.
How We Test

We used three PCs in our testing: a Maingear M4A79T Deluxe desktop, an HP Pavillion a6710t desktop, and a Dell Studio XPS 16 laptop. The powerful Maingear comes equipped with a 3.2GHz AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU overclocked to 3.71GHz, 4GB of memory, and dual ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics processors. The Pavilion, a mainstream desktop, features a 2.6GHz dual-core Pentium E5300 with 3GB of memory and an nVidia GeForce 930GE graphics chip. Lastly, the Dell Studio XPS 16 laptop packs a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of memory, and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3670 graphics card. On all three systems, we ran our WorldBench 6 benchmark suite on a clean installation of the 32-bit edition of Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1 and repeated the process with the Windows 7 Ultimate release candidate (again, the 32-bit version). We made both operating systems current with Windows Update, and we installed the most current hardware drivers available.

Source: pcworld

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