FAQforge » Vista

Using the ReadyBoost Feature on Windows Vista/7

CSch — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:36:08 +0000

ReadyBoost is a Windows feature that uses USB sticks or other flash drives such as SD cards to “speed up your computer”. However the concrete use is not to add the device’s memory to your RAM but to use fast accessible devices as cache storage.

Because of this fact, there are certain conditions that have to be met. The first of course is that you use a flash drive with high reading-rates and access times. If these are lower than those of your hard drive, it will give you nothing. The second is, that you do not turn off your computer every time you complete your work – if you do so every evening, the cache on your flash drive will not even get the chance to properly build up to be used before you shut the computer down. The better choice is to hibernate your computer.
Hibernation is disabled by default on many computers and is not available in the shutdown menu. You can circumvent this however by entering the following into an elevated command prompt (search for cmd, right-click it and Run as administrator):

powercfg -H on

Afterwards right-click on your desktop and create a new shortcut pointing to shutdown.exe /h. Using this shortcut will cause your machine to go into hibernated state (your computer does not use any power here – it just saves the state the current programs are in and cleans the RAM cache, they are restored to that state after turning on the machine again. This happens using a large file where the states are stored in).
Upon hibernating, the flash cache will not be deleted and hence unfolds its use over time.

Another important issue is writing on drives and the defragmentation of drives. The more you write on the drive, the more the flash cache has to be changed – this can result in lower efficiency. If you also defragment the drive, you damage your cache even more – at some point it will become ineffective. Do that only before you choose to completely restart or shutdown your computer (turn off auto defragmentation if you have such things enabled by some kind of software!). Of course, trying to defragment the flash cache will make it unusable.

If you have everything prepared, insert your flash device into the machine. On the what-to-do-with-it prompt, choose Speed up my system using Windows ReadyBoost. Remember not to defragment, restart or shutdown the machine to be able to fully use the device.

Now if you have a decent amount of cache on your flash drive and requests are send to open something, the RAM cache is the first location to look at – if there is nothing there but on your ReadyBoosted drive, the computer will calculate whether it is faster to get the files from your cache or from your hard drive – this is the way ReadyBoost actually can make your machine faster and it has nothing to do with increasing RAM or similar issues.

Disabling Aero on Windows 7

CSch — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:14:25 +0000

The Windows 7 Aero desktop theme can cost you quite a lot of performance, which is why you might consider disabling it. To do so, open the Control Panel and select Appearance and Personalization:

Next go to Change the theme and scroll down to Windows Classic:

Facebook Explorer – Gadget for Windows 7 Sidebar

CSch — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:51:38 +0000

Facebook has become a popular way for communication, but is still quite unhandy because it requires a full browser window to be properly visible. To circumvent this problem you can install Facebook Explorer into your Windows 7 Sidebar and let the new messages be indicated right on your desktop:

You can download Facebook Explorer here: http://buildagadget.com/wsg-fb-explorer/
Facebook Explorer grants you access to all major and frequently used functions of facebook like messaging,notifications, liking and commenting.

Twitter Gadget for Windows 7 Sidebar

CSch — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:47:50 +0000

Since there are many people out there who frequently use twitter to stay up to date on news or in touch with people, a lot of gadgets have come up to speed up the use of twitter by sticking it to the desktop. One of those is Sidechirp, which adopts many functions of the actual twitter homepage, like viewing tweets and your personal messages, posting new tweets and following trends:

Download Sidechirp here: http://buildagadget.com/wsg-sidechirp/

System Control Gadget for Window 7 Sidebar

CSch — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:58:23 +0000

System Control is the right gadget if you are looking for functionality on low space use – it combines buttons for the regular system commands such as shutdown and restart, but also task manager, command-prompt, control panel, screen saver, run and additionally lets you set a timer to execute the available commands at a certain time:

Furthermore, System Control appeals with its high level of customisation. Download on http://buildagadget.com/wsg-system-control/.

Installing Powershell 2.0 on Windows XP

CSch — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 12:26:11 +0000

To install Windows Powershell 2.0 on an XP machine, you must have Windows XP Service Pack 3 installed. Powershell is included in the Windows Management Framework which you can download at support.microsoft.com/kb/968929:

Now scroll down until you find some links listed in the More Information section:

Pick the appropriate one for your Windows system and install it after downloading. To use powershell you need to open a new command line prompt and enter powershell.

Extend Your Windows 7 Trial

CSch — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 09:54:08 +0000

If you have gotten yourself a Windows 7 trial of any edition and it is about to expire, but you need more time to use it for whatever reason, there is a cmd command that allows you to extend the trial by resetting the remaining number of days to the one it was in the beginning. This can only be done three times and will be disabled afterwards. To see how many days of your trial are left, right-click Computer and select Properties:

To extend the time to use the trial open a command prompt by running cmd via Run… and enter following:

slmgr -rearm

The command is only working if the value of SkipRearm in the Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\SoftwareProtectionPlatform Windows Registry key is set to 0.

Shortcuts for creating System Restore Points on Windows 7

CSch — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 10:25:54 +0000

On every Windows system able to create system restore points that undo any configuration changes made after their creation, there is also the possibility to create simple quick-link icons, consisting of a few line of code, that enable you to create restore points with a double-click. On Windows XP this is achieved with only two lines of code. Learn in this post, how it is done. In Windows Vista and 7 however, there are a few problems that stand in the way of our (automatic) one-click system restore point. First one is, that the script we need to run to create system restore points can only be run with administrative powers, so we need a way to get those. Second is the annoying User Account Control that asks as if we really want to run that script. This would not be such a great deal, but if you are the kind to create restoration points quite often or after a time schedule, the UAC may become a great pain.
To start with the administrative rights, there are more than one way to get those. The probably least complex one is to add the Run as administrator option to the menu appearing upon right-clicking the script:

This is done by adding the appropriate keys to the Windows Registry. To open that, open Run… by entering run into the Windows search bar in the main menu and clicking on the program. Type in regedit into Run and the Windows Registry will open. It consists of two columns, one on the left, containing the key directories, and one on the left, showing the keys’ values. Take on the left column and browse the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VBSFile\Shell directory. Right-click it and select New > Key. Name it Runas and leave its values as they are (there is only one). Now right-click the Runas key and again select New > Key. Name the newly created key Command and leave the values as they are. Right-click the Command key and select Export…. Give it a name and save it somewhere you will find it. Go to the directive you saved it and open it with notepad. Erase all of its contents and paste this:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VBSFile\Shell\Runas\Command]
@=hex(2):22,00,25,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,52,00,6f,00,6f,00,74,\
00,25,00,5c,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,00,57,00,\
53,00,63,00,72,00,69,00,70,00,74,00,2e,00,65,00,78,00,65,00,22,00,20,00,22,\
00,25,00,31,00,22,00,20,00,25,00,2a,00,00,00

Save the file and double-click to merge it with the registry. The Open as administrator option should now be available to all Visual Basic Scripts (you can use the one from the linked XP tutorial with this option enabled).
However, this option neither is automatic nor does it circumvent the UAC. An option that enables creating a restoration point on double-click (but still, without disabling UAC) is to alter the script that you use for this. Open a new notepad (it has to be notepad) and paste the following code:

if wscript.arguments.count = 0 then
set objshell = createobject(“shell.application”)
objshell.shellexecute “wscript.exe”, wScript.scriptfullname & ” run”, , “runas”, vbnormalfocus
else
getobject(“winmgmts:\\.\root\default:systemrestore”).createrestorepoint “Automatic Restore Point (Win7 Script)”, 0, 100
end if

Save the script as *.vbs and make sure to select All files from the dropdown menu before saving! With this, you have enabled administrative rights beforehand every time you run the script. Now there still is a slightly circumstantial method to also disable the UAC prompt. To achieve this, you need to have a desktop shortcut pointing to a scheduled task that runs the script with highest privileges grantable. To access scheduled tasks, browse Menu > Control Panel > System > Administrative Tools > Scheduled Tasks. Create a new one without any trigger, executing your script (be sure to remember the task’s name, you will need it once more) and check the Run with highest privileges box on the first tab.

Now right-click your desktop and create a new shortcut. Let it point to following location (enter your own task-name in the last option):

C:\Windows\System32\schtasks.exe /run /tn “EnterYourTaskNameHere”

Upon opening, it should execute the script without asking for anything.

Clean Up Your Windows System (CCleaner)

CSch — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:01:09 +0000

The common computer user often does not know that a simple uninstall of a software he or she is no longer in need of will not erase the program completely but will leave traces on your hard disk. These may stack up to a fairly high size and can slow your computer down. The same goes for all kind of temporary files your system stores, the most common being temporary internet files. Deleting these files manually can be a hard thing to do, especially if you do not know where to find those and how to recognize them. That is why there are plenty of tools on the internet that allow you to search for and erase them automatically.
One of these helpful tools is CCleaner.

CCleaner is a tool that allows you to clean up your Windows Registry (the key storage that is responsible for every kind of configuration on your system), uninstall software properly without leaving any traces, disable autostart processes, delete all kinds of temporary files and even format your hard drives and overwrite them up to 35 times so that your old files will no longer be accessible by any usual means.

CCleaner for Windows can be downloaded here: http://download.piriform.com/ccsetup311.exe
It is also available for Mac on: http://download.piriform.com/mac/CCMac1.00.077.dmg

CCleaner’s menu is divided into four main options, being Cleaner, Registry, Tools and Options. The Cleaner section is there for deleting temporary files, cookies, recent documents and other stored files of that kind. The Registry section searches the registry for disposable entries such as missing shared DDLs, unused file extensions or obsolete software and gives you the option to delete these entries. In the Tools section you can uninstall software, delete system restore points and wipe your hard drives empty. Options, speaking for itself, lets you configure your settings, mainly to include or exclude data from being deleted.

Speed Up Boot in Windows 7

CSch — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 11:14:55 +0000

There is a simple option on Windows Vista and Windows 7 for multi-cored systems that allows you to greatly decrease the time that your Windows system needs to boot. This is accomplished by dividing the process up on more than one core. To use this function, open Run… by searching for it in the search bar and run msconfig through it:

The System Configuration window will open. Go to the Boot tab, select your Windows partition and click on Advanced Options…. Check the box titled Number of processors and select the number of cores you would like to use for booting in the dropdownmenu (I have only one core on the machine I am using, that is why there isn’t any option on the screenshot).

Afterwards, click OK on every window left open and the next time you boot, you should do it a lot faster than before.