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To start the Windows 7 dccw application that calibrates the colors and gamma of your monitor, press the keys [Windows] + [R] to open the windows command line and enter:

dccw

Then click on “OK”.

and click on “next” and  follow the instructions on the screen.

A commenter of my robocopy article asked me if a multithreaded copy tool like robocopy is really faster then a single threaded copy tool like xcopy as normally the harddisk is the bottleneck and not the CPU when copying files. As I did not found any benchmarks, I decided to do my own benchmark. Here are the results:

In my test, I copied a folder hierarchy with 429 directories and 6313 files with a overall size of 522 MB. I’ve run every test 2 times to ensure that the speed differences are not caused by filesystem caching. I know that this test was not made under scientific conditions, so if you have your own results, feel free to post them here as comment.

xcopy

Command:

xcopy D:\server\test D:\tmp\test /D /E /Y /Q

Time to copy files

First run: 42 seconds
Second run: 41 seconds

robocopy with 1 thread

Command:

robocopy D:\server\test D:\tmp\test /MT:1 /E /LOG:d:\tmp\robocopy.log

Time to copy the files

First run: 43 seconds
Second run: 41 seconds

robocopy with 10 threads

Command:

robocopy D:\server\test D:\tmp\test /MT:10 /E /LOG:d:\tmp\robocopy.log

Time to copy the files

First run: 38 seconds
Second run: 36 seconds

Conclusion: Using a multithreaded copy tool like robocopy with 10 threads speeds up file copying and makes sense if you have to copy a large number of files. At least on my system.

Windows 7 contains a application to create a rescue CD easily which can be used to boot the system and diagnose problems in Windows.

To create the rescue disc, press the keys [Windows] + [R] to open the windows command line and enter:

systemre

Have you ever tried to install a software on a network drive or use a network drive as data directory were the software installer checks for the drive type and refuses the installation on network drives? A workaround that helped me in these cases is to use a symlink on Windows. For example, the application wants to put its data in the path C:\ProgramData\appname but you want the data to be stored on the mapped network drive X:\mydata\appname, you can use the following command on the windows commandline to symlink the directorie:

mklink /d "C:\ProgramData\appname" "X:\mydata\appname"

The benefit is, that the application installer detects now C: as valid local harddrive and uses the symlinked path to store its data on the network drive X:\mydata\appname.

The general syntax for the mklink command is:

mklink /d symlinkpath targetdirectory

The “GodMode” in Windows 7 is a special folder which contains links to all system settings that are available in Windows 7. To Access this function, create a new folder (e.g. on your desktop or home directory) with the following name:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

and save it. If you open this folder, you will get a list of all admin functions of Windows 7, there are also many functions listed that are normally not available in the Windows 7 system settings.