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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.

By default it is not possible to connect to webdav resources without SSL encryption in Windows 7. To enable unencrypted connections (http and not just https), follow these steps:

Press the keys [Windows] + [R] to open the windows command line and enter

regedit

to start the registry editor. Then go to the registry branch:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters

and change the value for “BasicAuthLevel” to “2” (decimal). Then restart Windows.