The Windows 7 Firewall allows separate configurations by network. This feature makes it possible to configure different firewall rules for the home network , the networkwork or a public network and Windows will apply these rules automatically when the computer gets connected to a different network. To configure the firewall by network, click on Start > Control Panel > System and Security > Windows Firewall

Then Click on “Allow a program or feature trough Windows Firewall” to get the list of open firewall ports for all configured networks.

If the application that shall be able to connect to a specific network is listed there, then allow access by enabling the checkbox in the column of the network. If the application is not in the list, click on “Allow another program” and then select the program in the list that pops up.

Have you ever wanted to save the sound from a youtube video on your harddisk as mp3 file? There is a handy Firefox plugin named “Youtube to mp3″ available for that. Open the following link in the Firefox webbrowser:

https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/11047/

and click on the “add to Firefox” link to install the plugin. Then restart firefox to activate the plugin.

When you install the latest java runtime enviroment, it gets installed beside your existing java installation. With every java update, more space is used on the harddisk. To remove old java versions, there is a tool named JavaRa which can be downloaded here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/javara/files/javara/JavaRa/JavaRa.zip/download

Unpack the JavaRa.zip file and double click on the JavaRa.exe to start JavaRa. Select the language:

and click on “Remove older versions”.

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

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

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

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 comes with a new version of the robocopy command that is able to copy files much faster then the normal copy command or copy function of the file explorer by using several simultanious threads. So if you plan to copy a large number of files, e.g. to make a backup, use the robocopy command.

Example Copy files from C:\myFiles to F:\backup and use 10 simultanious threads. To execute robocopy, open the windows shell window or press the keys [Windows] + [R] to open the windows command line, then enter the command:

robocopy C:\myFiles F:\backup /MT:10

robocopy /?

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

If you like to test if the phising filter of your webbrowser works, open the following URL of the mozilla test page in the browser:

You should get a result page that looks similar to this one if you use the Mozilla Firefox browser:

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 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}