Increase SATA drive performance.


This tip “enhances” drive performance by allowing the drive in question to perform more write caching to system memory. The danger is if your system loses power and you do not have a backup power source (UPS), whatever data is cached to system memory will be lost. If you’re the adventurous type and want a bit more responsiveness out of your system, click Start, type Device Manager in the Search box, click the Device Manager, open up the Disk drives tree, right-click a drive, and select Properties. Go to the Policies tab and check “Enable Advanced Performance.” Click OK.

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Prasanna Vignesh
MCPD | Web Developer

Speed up Flip3D

This tip will be useful for notebook owners or anyone whose PC is packing less than stellar graphics processing power. The Flip3D animation can bog down weaker graphics cards if it has to flip a lot of windows, so this is a tweak that lets you set the number of windows that will be rendered in 3D at one time.

• Click on the Start Button, type regedit in the Search bar, and press Enter.

• Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER, Software, Microsoft, Windows, and DWM.

• Create a new DWORD and call it Max3DWindows.

• Set the value of this to something between four and nine (“4” and “9”) depending on the performance of your card (a higher number requires more video card power). You should then feel free to experiment to find the best value for your computer. Restart your PC to finalize the change.

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Prasanna Vignesh
MCPD | Web Developer

Two must-have Sidebar Gadgets.

At first blush, we thought the Windows Sidebar was rather useless. The default Gadgets were not useful (who wants an analog clock when you have a clock on the Taskbar?), and it seemed like a poor rip-off of Yahoo Widgets. However, we’ve now come across some rather useful Gadgets at the Microsoft website.

The first is Multi-Meter, which is the first Gadget we’ve ever seen that can measure CPU activity for multiple cores. You can download it here.

Another Gadget we’re quite fond of is DriveInfo, as it displays the free space on multiple volumes. Since we have several hard drives on our home machines, we love this Gadget. It also allows you to access the drives by simply double-clicking them in the Gadget. Download it here.

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Prasanna Vignesh
MCPD | Web Developer

Discover what applications are linked to certain processes.

The Processes tab of the Windows XP Task Manager was a confusing, barren wasteland of cryptically-named processes. If you wanted to find out which application was responsible for a certain process, all you could do was to copy down the name of the executable, and then search for it in Windows to locate it or Google it. This was an annoying process. Thankfully, Microsoft has fixed this in Vista by adding an “open file location” option when you right-click any process. Doing so opens the folder the process is running from, which can help you figure out if a certain process can be turned off or not.

You can also click “View” at the top of the Task Manager and click Select Columns to select which columns to display.

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Prasanna Vignesh
MCPD | Web Developer

Partition drives in Vista.

Back in the XP days, if one wanted to partition a drive from within the OS, he had to purchase expensive, third-party software to do so. Not anymore. Vista includes built-in drive partitioning which is – we can’t believe we’re saying this – totally awesome. The reason it’s so awesome is that you can partition drives on the fly, from within Windows. For example, if you have a 400GB hard drive with 200GB of free space, you can shrink the original 400GB partition down to whatever size you want, and then create a new partition out of the new unpartitioned space. Here’s how you do it.

Right-click My Computer, select Manage, and click on Disk Management. You will see all of your volumes listed. Right-click whatever volume you want to shrink, and click “Shrink Volume.” (You can also extend volumes as well.) Type in the size of the partition, then click Shrink. After a few seconds, the partition will be shrunk, and you’ll now have a whole lot of unallocated space. Right-click it and select “New Simple Volume.” We fooled around with this utility, both shrinking and expanding volumes that had data on them and we experienced no data loss or problems whats ever.

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Prasanna Vignesh
MCPD | Web Developer

Stretch your wallpaper across two displays.

We love our dual displays, but we don’t like staring at two instances of the same image all day. Thankfully, Vista lets us stretch our wallpaper across both displays quite easily. This was also possible in XP, but it was not an intuitive process. Keep in mind, however, that stretching an image across two displays obviously requires a picture that is large enough to stretch all the way across both displays, so you’ll need to add up the resolution of both displays and find an image that is of those dimensions.

Right-click the desktop, select Personalize, and then Desktop Background. Select your image, and then select the middle option for “tile” to stretch it across both displays.

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Prasanna Vignesh
MCPD | Web Developer

Turn off unneeded Windows features.

This one is self-explanatory. Do you need Tablet PC components installed? Probably not, unless you are using a Tablet PC. So turn off whatever you don’t need in the name of keeping your Windows install as lean as possible.

Click Start, Control Panel, then under Programs at the bottom click “Uninstall a Program.” In the left-hand pane you’ll see “Turn Windows Features on or off.” Uncheck whatever you don’t need.

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Prasanna Vignesh
MCPD | Web Developer

Enable Aero mouse pointers.

This is odd. Microsoft made new Aero-based mouse pointers for Vista, but the default mouse pointer is the old 3D white scheme. To enable the new mouse pointers and animations, right-click the desktop, select Personalize, then Mouse Pointers. Click on the drop-down box under the word Scheme, and select Windows Aero (system scheme). Click OK.

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Prasanna Vignesh
MCPD | Web Developer

Make XP computers show up in your network map.

Vista uses a new protocol named Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) to display a network “map” of all computers in a network, but the protocol is only in Vista, so XP computers do not show up in this map.

Microsoft has generously released the software for XP, and it must be installed on an XP machine for it to show up in the Vista map. Click here to download the software for Windows XP SP2.

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Prasanna Vignesh
MCPD | Web Developer

Mount a CD Image


Mounting a CD image is a basic feature of almost every operating system package except for Microsoft Windows. Microsoft has never shipped this feature in any version of Windows including Windows Vista. Mounting a CD image is very useful when you have downloaded a .ISO cd image and you do not want to waste the time or the media to burn a copy. Since Windows Vista does not have this functionality built-in, you will need to download a utility. One popular utility that will mount CD images is called elby CloneDrive. Best of all, CloneDrive is free and easy to use. Follow these steps to mount CD images in Windows Vista with CloneDrive:

1. Visit elby Free Software and download a free
copy of CloneDrive.
2. Install CloneDrive just like any other application.
3. After it is installed you will see a new virtual drive appear in your Computer
drive list.



4. Right Click on the CloneDrive and select Virtual CloneDrive and then Mount.
5. Navigate to the .ISO file you want to mount and hit Open.
6. Your CD image is now mounted.

Enjoy!

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Prasanna Vignesh
MCPD | Web Developer