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Archive for the ‘Windows XP’ Category

Do you receive lots of junk email messages from people you don’t know? It’s no surprise if you do. As more people use email, marketers are increasingly using email messages to pitch their products and services. Some consumers find unsolicited commercial email – also known as “spam” – annoying and time consuming; others have lost money to bogus offers that arrived in their email in-box.

Chamber of Commerce.com has information about the Federal Trade Commission’s recent law enforcement actions against deceptive commercial email and spammers’ responsibilities under the CAN-SPAM law. In the “For Consumers” section, you’ll find tips on how to reduce the amount of spam email in your in-box.

If you get spam email that you think is deceptive, forward it to spam@uce.gov. The FTC uses the spam stored in this database to pursue law enforcement actions against people who send deceptive email.

E-mail spam is not just unwanted-it can be offensive. Pornographic spam provokes many consumer complaints. Decrease the number of spam e-mails you receive by making it difficult for spammers to get and use your e-mail address.

Don’t use an obvious-mail – like “JaneDoe@isp.com.” Instead use one with numbers or other digits such as Jane4oe6@isp.com
Use one e-mail address for close friends and family and another for everyone else. – Free addresses are available from Hotmail and Yahoo! You can also get a disposable forwarding address from www.spammotel.com. If an address attracts too much spam, get rid of it and establish a new one.
Don’t post your e-mail address on a public web page. – Spammers use software that harvests text addresses. Substitute “janedoe at isp.com” for the “janedoe@isp.com.” Or display your address as a graphic image, not text.
Don’t enter your address on a web site before you check its privacy policy.
Uncheck any check boxes. – These often grant the site or its partners permission to contact you.
Don’t click on an e-mail’s “unsubscribe” link – unless you trust the sender. This action tells the sender you’re there.
Never forward chain letters, petitions, or virus warnings. – All could be a spammer’s trick to collect addresses.
Disable your e-mail “preview pane.” – This stops spam from reporting to its sender that you’ve received it.
Choose an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that filters e-mail. – If you get lots of spam, your ISP may not be filtering effectively.
Use spam-blocking software. – Web browser software often includes free filtering options. You can also purchase special software that will accomplish this task.
Report spam. – Notify your ISP so it is aware what kind of spam is slipping through its filters. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also wants to know about “unsolicited commercial email.” Forward spam to uce@ftc.gov.
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When it comes to tweaking tips or tools, you will find that most of them helped a bit but no significant improvement, then you might draw a conclusion that: They are just myths, and no way you can really speed up your Vista! Even so, I am telling you, this is not the case, you are doing it wrongly, and I will show you the correct way…

Myth #1 – One click and done!

There are no software or tricks can be automatic tune up your Vista speed without some manually tuning parameters, you may gain some performance advantage, but certainly not to the maximum level, manually tuning is always a requirement.

Myth #2 – Internet or Network tuning.

Most of these software and tuning tips applied in XP will not necessary suitable for Vista, such as MTU and RWIN parameters. You need to disable Vista TCP auto tuning to get them work, but not necessary maximizing the hardware potential as compare to TCP auto tuning, unless you know how to manually tune them, then the tools will make sense to you.

Myth #3 – You computer will be faster.

However, Vista is running faster, but not your computer. Your PC will always be the same, but saving the resources for Vista and its’ application makes overall performance on Windows faster. If you are enthusiast enough, strip everything else and kept only the core. You might lose comfort to your Windows but gain enormous performance over it.

Myth #4 – More RAM more speed.

This is a bell curve situation, where your RAM amount reached the peak of your needs, it starts to stabilize and drop in performance when application requires more processing power than memory. That is why Vista pre-cache application in memory to accelerate the launch time and speed, it assumed you have more memory than your application needed. For the low memory system, caching will become a nightmare, because no more room for application to run, and Vista needs to use virtual memory such as page file and ReadyBoost to run the application.

You need to try and record each tuning steps to confirm the effectiveness. To save more time on tuning rather than myth, you may want to try “Unleash Vista Power Advance Guide”.

(C) Copyright 2010 V9DF7PQCR35Q.

Frankly, optimization tools work but not to your expectation. Many companies – the creator of these great optimization tools during the day of XP, simply just failed to deliver much performance on Vista. I am not saying they are not good anymore, but rather compliments to Microsoft doing a great Job! I know there are many complaints on Windows Vista, but hey, this is a complicated mission, who gets it done beside Bill Gates? NONE!

OK, I am not going into argument with comparing other operating systems, Vista is the kind of its own, and may be XP is similar to compare!

Back to the topic, I found that doing some manual tuning helped more than commercial optimization software, and some free tools that automate the registry tuning is helpful as well.

You can find all kinds of tuning tips around, try them first before you use any optimization software, because you can spend money anytime, but not necessary get the result for very penny you spend. Therefore, try the free tips first, then consider the tools later.

May be after more tips and tricks developed in the near future, some good software will be appeared to automate those tricks. For now, rather than spend any money on tuning tools, I prefer to spend more money on hardware for greater performance.

For majority people who do not want to spend more, I would still recommend manual tuning over software tuning, certainly you can use some free or paid tools to assist your tuning work, but you can’t 100% rely on them.

I have tried few optimization tools on Internet connection tuning, and almost each of them tuned rather differently…The parameters of MTU and RWIN is different between each software! Which to follow? You better stay with one tool at a time to find out the result.

My conclusion: Vista optimization tools are not a SCAM, but does not perform well at the time of this article, you can expect better result in the near future, may be 1 year hence forward? Meanwhile, optimize your Vista manually!

Times are Uncertain – do you really need that upgrade or new PC?

Our customers and prospective customers frequently come to us and ask that we suggest either upgrades or whole new PC’s that will solve their current non-performance nightmare with an aging PC.  It’s quite amazing how sometimes as the conversation and understanding of requirements and problems experienced proceeds we discover that actually the PC they already have may just still have a few laps around the circuit left in its tired chassis.  In this article we will explain how you can diagnose your performance woes, streamline and tune them up.  You’d be surprised just how much more you can get out of what you have.

Tip!  Before making any serious system changes such as some of these are its wise to take a backup or restore point of your system before each change.  Then should you subsequently find something is ‘broken’ you can restore back to a previous working configuration.

Analyse the problem before implementing the solution…

Use monitoring tools regularly – get in the habit of watching Task Manager and lookout for tasks and processes that are hogging your system memory or CPU.  Task manager displays both in the process view as you can see below, you can also sort by clicking on the column headings.  Even if you only use the Internet and eMail both these applications are renowned for memory leaks and processor bound loops (see an explanation of these problems in the next section).

Monitor Free Disk Space – ensure you have at least 20% disk space, preferably 30% or more should be free.  If you don’t the file system struggles to operate as it needs some space in order to allocate and deallocate files the operating system and applications require while in use.  Imagine walking into a hall full of boxes and you need to order them all by colour, in a room 70% full you’ve got 30% free space to temporarily put things in while you move other stuff around, in a room 99% full you may have no room at all to use as a temporary store.  Use our earlier tip for reducing disk space consumption by eliminating unused installed programs or disk space is cheap these days with 1TB at under £100, upgrade your disk.

New Software invariably uses more Memory – finally, if you need an upgrade the one that makes the biggest difference in 80% of cases is simply adding more memory.  RAM is now fairly cheap and you should consider 2GB to be the minimum of practical RAM to have installed.  Every time you upgrade it try to double it or you’re unlikely to really notice the difference.  On 32-bit systems there is little advantage to having more than 3GB of memory but usually it makes sense to upgrade to 4GB due to the size of memory kits available.  If you need more than 4GB you will also need to upgrade to a 64-bit operating system.  You can see your memory utilisation by consulting the Task Manager, ctrl-alt-del presents you an option to start the task manager.

In a typical example 2GB of physical memory is installed, of which roughly 1GB is available, although windows is misleading us a bit here as it will always make sure some memory remains available or it will simply cease to function.  So don’t look for 0 available free memory as an indicator that you need more, it never will be allowed to reach 0 as windows will swap a process out into the page file to free more memory up.  There is 1.11GB of memory currently consumed (in the page file ‘PF Usage’, Commit Charge – Total).  The page file is actually virtual memory on disk as tasks become active and inactive they may be swapped into and out of memory into the page file, hence that pause sometimes when you switch to another task as the disk is accessed to bring it back out of the page file.  Activity in the page file and virtual memory is complex and I won’t go into any more of that here as it doesn’t help you with performance issues.  The key point to remember is if Windows is swapping memory out to the page file on disk then your system will be going a lot slower as you can be sure however fast your disk is it’s an awful lot slower than physical memory.

What we care most about is activity in real physical memory and the point at which we might run out of it and the page file becomes more active hence slowing down the system.  Crucially the Commit Charge Peak should balance the physical memory available otherwise it means an awful lot of page file swapping is going on (known as ‘Page Faults’).  If it was the yellow line in Page File Usage history would be bouncing around, or worse just steadily increasing.

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Everyone is talking about: XP is faster than Vista, removing Vista from new PC or getting XP for your new PC, and that goes on…The fact is: You can turn your Vista into XP and still enjoy some new features introduced in Vista! Sounds great? Let’s find out HOW !

Here are the four steps to turn your Vista into XP:

Step #1 – Strip unused features with vLite.

vLite is a Vista installer stripper and generator, you can use it to create much smaller installer with only core functions. Use it to remove any unwanted features and drivers, you can also preset the product keys and some tweaks. After generated the installer, it will then be transferred into CDs or DVDs, you can install Vista faster with this new installer.

Step #2 – Disable Aero Theme.

You can easily disable Aero Theme and use classic interface like XP, you will decide on what level of similarity you want your Vista towards XP. For me, I would just keep the Aero theme without transparency support, then may be changing the Windows menu to classic start menu.

Step #3 – Remove or Disable Advanced Features.

By removing advanced services like:

a) Superfetch

b) ReadbyBoost

c) Search Index

d) Theme

You can free more resources for your Windows. You may remove the services during installer creation, or retain them for future hardware upgrades. If you include them in the installer, you can still disable them later.

Step #4 – Optimize your Windows

There are many optimization tips around, if you want to save yourself some time, you should get the step by step “Unleash Vista Power Advance Guide”. You can also use some FREE tweaking tools for Vista, such as Thoosje Vista Tweaker, should help you tweak Windows registry easier.

That concluded all steps. However, step #4 is a huge topic, you need some studies before performing any tuning, or you may need to re-install your Windows again! Just backup your Vista hard disk image before trying any tricks!

(C) Copyright 2008 Kok Choon – Feel free to reprint this article in its entirety as long as all links and author resources box in place.

In this article, we hope to share with you the many aspects of PC Optimization.

I have been playing with PC optimization for 12 years since Windows 95, I am not the best optimizer, but rather an enthusiast for Personal Computer…

I still remember the old days of Windows 95 and 98! Back then we can only rely on some tips and tricks from the books, and Internet is just starting to get hot! Norton Utilities is the most popular Windows optimization software in those days.

Not until the introduction of Windows XP, things has started to change! We get more and more maintenance software, Norton Utilities becomes less important for up-keeping a healthy Computer, and because of Windows XP hunger for resources (Same with all New launch Windows), tuning the necessary service and maintain a good resources, becomes critical to home user, because they need a lot of application for their Computer. The tool that only load and unload necessary application, accelerate the computer performance, has became important to every home user; But home user are always looking for something more user-friendly and rather than effective, and at the same time without the requirement of professional knowledge…

Computer optimization often refer to software tuning, but you can’t ignore hardware tuning as well, the PC Over-clock (CPU and Memory over-clock). Software tuning is more important because it unleash the hardware potential by multiple times, and safer to play with, because it won’t damage your PC (Normally…).

Ask yourself a few simple questions to determine if you fully understand the concepts that we have went over so far.

The Computer optimization we discuss here is all about Windows optimization, how to unleash the real power of Windows, what kind of software should we use to effectively speed up the computer. I am going to talk more details about XP optimization, and some of this will apply to Vista as well. Windows 95 and 98 has limited coverage here.

Since Windows XP launches Service Pack 2 (SP2), the operating system has never been so stable and fast! But still there are more to be done in order to maximize your PC potential power. If you are still using SP1, go get SP2 fast.

The first step to speed up your computer is to minimize your Windows Registry entries by removing unnecessary records. To do that you can either use free registry cleaner or commercial registry cleaner (Which is better in every way).

In the next Step, you should minimize the memory and CPU resources by disabling unused services and minimizing startup programs. The biggest optimization problems is to know what kind of services to stop, what kind of start-up program to disable, if you do it wrongly, you might have abnormal behavior with certain applications.

You don’t have to be expert in Windows, there are many software around to help you, to select the best optimization software, you should always prepare a clean machine, install Microsoft virtual PC as the major testing tool (This is free from Microsoft) and test with any tools you can find in the Internet. I know this is time consuming, so We have done some of the test for you.

Get the FREE Tools and resources from PC Optimization today!