99 ways to make your computer blazingly fast

In this article, I hope to compile a complete list of all the different methods and tricks that I’ve used to get the last bit of juice out of a slow PC. Whether you are using an old PC or the latest and greatest in hardware, you can still use some of these to make your PC run faster.

There are probably a lot of great tweaks and performance hacks that I’ve missed here, so feel free to chime in with comments! Enjoy!

1. Defragment your computer hard disk using free tools like SmartDefrag.

2. You should also defragment your Windows pagefile and registry.

3. Clean up hard drive disk space being taken up by temporary files, the recycle bin, hibernation and more. You can also use a tool like TreeSize to determine what is taking up space on your hard drive.

4. Load up Windows faster by using Startup Delayer, a free program that will speed up the boot time of Windows by delaying the startup of programs.

5. Speaking of startup programs, many of them are useless and can be turned off. Use the MSCONFIG utility to disable startup programs.

6. By default, the size of the paging file is controlled by Windows, which can cause defragmentation. Also, the paging file should be on a different hard drive or partition than the boot partition. Read here on the rules for best paging file performance.

7. In Windows XP and Vista, the Windows Search indexing service is turned on for all local hard drives. Turning off indexing is a simple way to increase performance.

8. If you don’t care about all the fancy visual effects in Windows, you can turn them off by going to Performance Options.

9. You can optimize the Windows boot time using a free program called Bootvis from Microsoft.

10. Clean your registry by removing broken shortcuts, missing shared DLLs, invalid paths, invalid installer references and more. Read about the 10 best and free registry cleaners.

11. One of the main reasons why PC’s are slow is because of spyware. There are many programs to remove spyware including Ad-Aware, Giant Antispyware, SUPERAntiSpyware, and more.

12. If you have a deeper spyware infection that is very hard to remove, you can use HijackThis to remove spyware.

13. Remove unwanted pre-installed software (aka junk software) from your new PC using PC Decrapifier.

14. Disable unnecessary Windows services, settings, and programs that slow down your computer.

15. Tweak Windows XP and tweak Windows Vista settings using free programs

16. Disable UAC (User Account Control) in Windows Vista

17. Tweak your mouse settings so that you can copy and paste faster, scroll faster, navigate quickly while browsing and more. Read here to learn how to tweak your mouse.

18. Delete temporary and unused files on your computer using a free program like CCleaner. It can also fix issues with your registry.

19. Delete your Internet browsing history, temporary Internet files, cookies to free up disk space.

20. Clean out the Windows prefetch folder to improve performance.

21. Disable the XP boot logo to speed up Windows boot time.

22. Reduce the number of fonts that your computer has to load up on startup.

23. Force Windows to unload DLLs from memory to free up RAM.

24. Run DOS programs in separate memory spaces for better performance.

25. Turn off system restore only if you regularly backup your Windows machine using third party software.

26. Move or change the location of your My Documents folder so that it is on a separate partition or hard drive.

27. Turn off default disk performance monitors on Windows XP to increase performance.

28. Speed up boot time by disabling unused ports on your Windows machine.

29. Use Process Lasso to speed up your computer by allowing it to make sure that no one process can completely overtake the CPU.

30. Make icons appear faster while browsing in My Computer by disabling search for network files and printers.

31. Speed up browsing of pictures and videos in Windows Vista by disabling the Vista thumbnails cache.

32. Edit the right-click context menu in Windows XP and Vista and remove unnecessary items to increase display speed.

33. Use the Windows Performance Toolkit and the trace logs to speed up Windows boot time.

34. Speed up your Internet browsing by using an external DNS server such as OpenDNS.

35. Improve Vista performance by using ReadyBoost, a new feature whereby Vista can use the free space on your USB drive as a caching mechanism.

36. If you have a slow Internet connection, you can browse web pages faster using a service called Finch, which converts it into simple text.

37. Use Vista Services Optimizer to disable unnecessary services in Vista safely.

38. Also, check out my list of web accelerators, which are programs that try to prefetch and cache the sites you are going to visit.

39. Speed up Mozilla Firefox by tweaking the configuration settings and by installing an add-on called FasterFox.

40. Learn how to build your own computer with the fastest parts and best hardware.

41. Use a program called TeraCopy to speed up file copying in Windows XP and Vista.

42. Disable automatic Last Access Timestamp to speed up Windows XP.

43. Speed up the Start Menu in Vista by hacking the MenuShowDelay key in the registry.

44. Increase the FileSystem memory cache in Vista to utilize a system with a large amount of RAM.

45. Install more RAM if you are running XP with less than 512 MB or Vista with less than 1 GB of RAM.

46. Shut down XP faster by reducing the wait time to kill hung applications.

47. Make sure that you have selected “Adjust for best performance” on the Performance tab in System Properties.

48. If you are reinstalling Windows, make sure that you partition your hard drives correctly to maximize performance.

49. Use Altiris software virtualization to install all of your programs into a virtual layer that does not affect the registry or system files.

50. Create and install virtual machines for free and install junk program, games, etc into the virtual machines instead of the host operating system. Check out Sun openxVM.

51. Do not clear your paging file during shutdown unless it is needed for security purposes. Clearing the paging file slows down shutdown.

52. If your XP or Vista computer is not using NFTS, make sure you convert your FAT disk to the NTFS file system.

53. Update all of your drivers in Windows, including chipset and motherboard drivers to their latest versions.

54. Every once in a while run the built-in Windows Disk Cleanup utility.

55. Enable DMA mode in Windows XP for IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers in Device Manager.

56. Remove unnecessary or old programs from the Add/Remove dialog of the Control Panel.

57. Use a program click memtest86 or Prime95 to check for bad memory on your PC.

58. Determine your BIOS version and check the manufactures website to see if you need to update your BIOS.

59. Every once in a while, clean your mouse, keyboard and computer fans of dust and other buildup.

60. Replace a slow hard drive with a faster 7200 RPM drive, SATA drive, or SAS drive.

61. Changing from Master/Slave to Cable Select on your hard drive configuration can significantly decrease your boot time.

62. Perform a virus scan on your computer regularly. If you don’t want to install virus protection, use some of thefree online virus scanners.

63. Remove extra toolbars from your Windows taskbar and from your Internet browser.

64. Disable the Windows Vista Sidebar if you’re not really using it for anything important. All those gadgets take up memory and processing power.

65. If you have a SATA drive and you’re running Windows Vista, you can speed up your PC by enabling the advanced write caching features.

66. Learn how to use keyboard shortcuts for Windows, Microsoft Word, Outlook, or create your own keyboard shortcuts.

67. Turn off the Aero visual effects in Windows Vista to increase computer performance.

68. If you are technically savvy and don’t mind taking a few risks, you can try to overclock your processor.

69. Speed up the Send To menu in Explorer by typing “sendto” in the Run dialog box and deleting unnecessary items.

70. Make sure to download all the latest Windows Updates, Service Packs, and hot fixes as they “normally” help your computer work better.

71. Make sure that there are no bad sectors or other errors on your hard drive by using the ScanDisk orchkdsk utility.

72. If you are not using some of the hardware on your computer, i.e. floppy drive, CD-ROM drive, USB ports, IR ports, Firewire, etc, then go into your BIOS and disable them so that they do not use any power and do not have to be loaded during boot up.

73. If you have never used the Recent Documents feature in Windows, then disable it completely as a long list can affect PC performance.

74. One basic tweak that can help in performance is to disable error reporting in Windows XP

75.  If you don’t care about a pretty interface, you should use the Windows Classic theme under Display Properties.

76. Disable short filenames if you are using NTFS by running the following command: fsutil behavior set disable8dot3 1. It will speed up the file creation process.

77. If you have lots of files in a single folder, it can slow down Explorer. It’s best to create multiple folders and spread out the files between the folders.

78. If you have files that are generally large, you might want to consider increasing the cluster size on NTFS to 16K or even 32K instead of 4K. This will help speed up opening of files.

79. If you have more than one disk in your PC, you can increase performance by moving your paging file to the second drive and formatting the volume using FAT32 instead of NTFS.

80. Turn off unnecessary features in Vista by going to Control Panel, choosing Uninstall a program, and then clicking on Turn Windows features on and off. You can turn off Remote Differential Compression, Tablet PC components, DFS replication service, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Meeting Space, and lots more.

81. Install a free or commercial anti-virus program to help protect against viruses, etc. Make sure to use an anti-virus program that does not hog up all of your computer resources.

82. Completely uninstall programs and applications using a program like Revo Uninstaller. It will get rid of remnants left behind by normal uninstalls.

83. If you know what you are doing, you can install several hard drives into your machine and set them up in RAID 0, RAID 5, or other RAID configurations.

84. If you are using USB 1.0 ports, upgrade to 2.0. If you have a Firewire port, try to use that instead of a USB port since Firewire is faster than USB right now.

85. Remove the drivers for all old devices that may be hidden in Device Manager that you no longer use.

86. A more extreme option is to choose a faster operating system. If you find Vista to be slow, go with Windows XP. Switching to Mac or Linux is also an option.

87. One of the easiest ways to speed up your PC is to simply reformat it. Of course, you want to backup your data, but it is the best way to get your computer back to peak performance.

88. Speed up Internet browsing in IE by increasing the number of max connections per server in the registry.

89. If you use uTorrent to download torrents, you can increase the download speeds by tweaking the settings.

90. If you have a desktop background, make sure it’s a small and simple bitmap image rather than a fancy picture off the Internet. The best is to find a really small texture and to tile it.

91. For the Virtual Memory setting in Windows (right-click on My Computer, Properties, Advanced, Performance Settings, Advanced, Virtual Memory), make sure the MIN and MAX are both the same number.

92. If you search on Google a lot or Wikipedia, you can do it much faster on Vista by adding them to the Vista Start Menu Instant Search box.

93. If you have a custom built computer or a PC that was previously used, make sure to check the BIOS for optimal settings such as enabled CPU caches, correctly set IDE/SATA data transfer modes, memory timings, etc. You can also enable Fast/Quick boot if you have that option.

94. If you have a SCSI drive, make sure the write cache is enabled. You can do so by opening the properties of the SCSI drive in Windows.

95. If you have a machine with an older network card, make sure to enable the onboard processor for the network card, which will offload tasks from the CPU.

96. If you are using Windows Vista, you can disable the Welcome Center splash screen that always pops up.

97. If you already have anti-spyware software installed, turn off Windows Defender protection.

98. If you are running a 32-bit version of Windows and have 4GB of RAM or more, you can force Windows to see and use all of the RAM by enabling PAE.

99. Buy a new computer!!!  Pretty easy eh?

I’m sure I have missed out on lots of performance tweaks, tips, hacks, etc, so feel free to post comments to add to the list! Enjoy!

Original post here.

Help Clueless Relatives with Their Computer Problems

Original article here.

“Can you take a look at my computer?” is the dreaded question your clueless family member will ask when you’re home for the holidays. Let’s review some common computer complaints and the easiest solutions.

“It takes forever to start up.”
If your loved one has installed any software on the computer—especially ISP-specific packages that automatically include bundled add-ons—there’s no doubt unnecessary items have planted themselves into its startup. Use our complete guide to speeding up your startup to get rid of the stuff they don’t need, and save CPU cycles and time on boot-up.

“I keep getting a pop-up saying I need to pay for my antivirus software.”

If the default trialware antivirus software that came pre-installed is now bugging your clueless relative to pay for a subscription, uninstall it. Then, check out Lifehacker readers’ five favorite—and FREE—AV packages ready for download and installation. To fast-track to a free replacement, grab the free edition of AVG.

“When I get on the internet things look weird” or “I keep getting these annoying popup ads.”

Thoroughly check your relative’s PC for evidence of malware: like a hijacked web browser that redirects google.com to an Asian porn site, unsolicited pop-up ads, or suspicious programs named things like “Keypress Watcher.” If you suspect nefarious software has glommed onto Windows, get to scrubbing. Back in 2006, we ran down how to fix Mom and Dad’s malware-laden computer and the advice still stands. Go straight for a copy of Ad-Aware Free and Spybot Search & Destroy to get started.
Then, download and install Firefox, set it as the default browser, and replace all the IE shortcuts labeled “Internet” with the fox.

“I can’t find the digital photos I downloaded last month.”

If Aunt Bertha never gets the photos and videos she took with her digicam onto her computer—or she does, but they get lost in the abyss of her hard drive—make sure she has the right software to preview and find ‘em. Install Picasa 3 and scan your loved one’s entire hard drive for digital photos to add them to the library.
Relatives who take digital home videos should also get a free copy of VLC installed to insure that they’ll be able to play any clip they’ve got.

“I’m running out of hard drive space.”

If Uncle Marty thinks he needs a new computer because he keeps getting a “low disk space” message, tell him all is not lost. Find out where all that gigabytage is going by visualizing his hard drive usage with free tools that will map what files are taking up what space. Then, declutter his hard drive of the bits and bytes he doesn’t need (and didn’t know he had).

“The internet stopped working.”

The worst family tech support situation to get in is one that involves no (or a very slow) internet connection. Before you head over to Cousin Bob’s house, load up a USB drive with the software you’ll need to troubleshoot things without a connection (or without a broadband connection).TechRadar compiles a list of fix-it tools you can take with you to the family holiday get-together.

Internet Woes

The internet connection is not too well these days. Sometimes there’s no connectivity at all. It’s been happening since Friday. On Friday, I had come to the PC for the first time in a week. And the internet was down. Completely down. 0 kbps. I was feeling extremely frustrated. First of all I cleaned off the temporary internet files, all of them using CCleaner. It’s the best cleaner I have found so far. Still the connection was down. Then I turned off other unnecessary apps like Google Desktop , OpenVPN , Yahoo Messenger , HP Printer Alerts etc. Nothing worked. Finally I restarted my PC after almost about 2-3 days of uptime. Still there was no connectivity. I now checked the router for problems. But there weren’t any problems I could see. I gave up. I checked it again in the evening. I was able to connect but there wasn’t much speed. Just about 3-4 kBps instead of the usual 28-30 kBps. On Sunday a newspaper report came, saying that some cables have been cut in some sea possibly due to some seismic activity in that area. I really hate it when the internet is not working. I t makes me feel…………disconnected and highly irritated. Although I am browsing the net at regular speed now, it’s not always possible. Just a few hours ago the internet was completely down, then it came back. I don’t know how long it will last now.

The Complete Guide to Speeding Up Your PC’s Startup

You just hit the power button your PC, and now you’ve got enough time to brew a fresh pot of coffee for the entire office—because that’s how long it takes for your computer to go from “on” to “ready to work.” If your PC’s bogged down by a bunch of programs that automatically start up when it does, it can take forever to get started every morning. Without a major hardware upgrade, there’s not much you can do to cut the time it takes for Windows to actually boot—but you can trim and tweak the amount of time it takes for your desktop to get to a working state. Let’s take a look at a few ways you can cut your Windows’ desktop’s loading times using built-in utilities and third-party tools.
When you install a new piece of software on your computer these days, more often than not it will set a little bit of itself to start up automatically when your PC does, either to check for updates, make it seem faster, or just remind you that it’s there at all with a little icon in your system tray. Problem is, when you install lots of software but don’t use it all, these little startup entries can suck away CPU cycles, memory, and time. Reclaim them by removing the ones you don’t need.

Remove Startup Items Without Downloading a Thing

While many programs promise to clean up your startup for you, you can make quite a few adjustments in Windows itself, without using any kind of extra tools.

The best, safest, and most basic place to start is in your Windows Start menu’s Startup program group. Navigate to it and see what programs appear there. Right-click on any one and choose Delete if you don’t need it starting up on its own.
Once you’ve done that, it’s time to bring out the big guns. Windows can also start up items planted in your registry automatically. To see what those are, from the Windows Start menu, choose Run…, and type msconfig then hit Enter to start the Windows System Configuration Utility. Switch to the Startup tab to see a more comprehensive list of what’s starting up automatically. Here’s what it looks like.

Now, this list can seem opaque and confusing. What is ctfmon or RTHDCPL? The command column, which sometimes lists a full path to the item’s location, can sometimes give you a clue as to what the heck an item actually is. As always, Google is also your friend in these situations. From here you can uncheck items to stop them from starting up. Don’t uncheck stuff just because you don’t know what it is; uncheck stuff you know you don’t need. For instance, if you’re not a big iTunes or Quicktime user but you’ve got the installed for occasional use, uncheck QTTask and iTunesHelper.Once you’ve unchecked items in this utility, when you restart your computer, Windows will prompt you, saying that it’s using “selective startup.” That’s ok—you can always renable items by typing the msconfig command in the Run box again.
Messing with msconfig takes somewhat of a brave and savvy Windows user, but a few third-party Windows tweaking and cleaning tools offer startup managers that are more user-friendly.

Download and Run a Startup Cleaner Utility

There are literally a gazillion Windows tweaking utilities that include startup management capabilities, but lets take a look at two good ones.
CCleaner (which stands for “Crap Cleaner”, see our original review) can scan your system for all sorts of extras and get rid of them, but you’re interested in the Startup manager. Hit the Tools button, then the Startup button to get there. Here’s what your list will look like. As you can see, it offers a little more information than msconfig above (in the Program and File column), and that may help you decipher what’s program is what. You can disable and delete items from your Startup using those respective buttons.

If you don’t want to install more software in order to clean up your system (which makes sense), System Explorer (see our original review) offers a portable version, and its startup manager is beefy, with hooks into the registry, an online virus checker, and even Google searches for file names. In the System tab, hit the Startup tab to take a look at what’s auto-starting on your PC. Here’s what it looks like.

As you can see, using the right-click context menu you can go straight to the registry editor, or do a search on ProcessLibrary.com or Google for the item. Also, the program’s publisher and file path are included, which offer more information about what’s what and what you can afford to disable.
Besides CCleaner and SystemExplorer, Lifehacker readers also like MZ Ultimate Tweaker and RegToy.

Delay Item Start to Get to Work Faster

Of course, it’s not that one program that’s starting up automatically and slowing down your whole PC—it’s all of them in aggregate. You may audit your startup list and realize that yes, you do want all these programs to start. But maybe you don’t need them to start up at the exact moment you’re dying to get into Outlook and read your email, or work on that urgent report. The Startup Delayer utility (our review) does just that—it delays items from starting up from anywhere from 20 seconds to several minutes to hours so you can start working sooner. For instance, if your printer driver pre-loads but you’re not printing the moment you log on, you can delay it for a minute or two. Similarly, I really don’t need the Java Updater process starting its work before I do, so it is a good candidate for delaying. Here’s what Startup Delayer looks like.

Don’t Fall for the Myths

There are a lot of myths and misconceptions and misguided “secrets” to speeding up your PC published out there. Don’t fall for them. If you delve deep enough into Windows optimization tips online you’ll find tips about deleting page files, cleaning out your registry, setting your PC to use multiple cores manually, and lots of other authoritative-sounding tweaks. Before you do any of that, check out the How-To Geek’s awesome guide to debunking Windows performance-tweaking myths.

Top 10 Ways to Speed Up Your Web Browsing

Original post here

Even in a world where high-speed internet is just a tall house blend away, anyone can get stuck with a slow or uncertain connection at home, in the office, or at the worst possible time while traveling. There are, however, measures anyone can take to ensure they’re getting the most information and functionality they can when crunched for time or pressed for bandwidth—or if you just don’t like waiting for things while online. We’re offering up today 10 tweaks, downloads, and work-arounds for slow connections, slow computers, or just fast-minded people. Read on for the tips that might just save your life some night when 4 Kb/s is all you can muster.

10. Use Google to read HTML copies of huge documents

Ah, Adobe Acrobat. It’s free and universally used to view documents exactly as they’d print, but few things bottleneck a browsing session like an 8MB PDF file, especially if your browser crashes before showing it. But we can all benefit from Google’s zeal to index everything on Earth. If you’ve got a Google Docs or Gmail account, uploading or emailing a PDF gives you an option to view its as an HTML, which is going to come through a lot faster. The same holds for PowerPoint presentations, Word 2007 .docx files, and nearly any document you can find in Google search. One of those work-arounds that’s so simple, you’ll be glad when you remember it when you’re trying to jam through that presentation on a terrible hotel Wi-Fi connection.

9. Use TraceMonkey in Firefox 3.1

More and more developers and established web sites are moving their services online and using JavaScript to create interactive web pages these days. So when you’re browsing Flickr, MySpace/Facebook, or nearly anything made by Google, as a few examples, the speed at which your browser runs all the developers’ code can matter a lot. For more responsive pages, it’s hard to beat the mind-blowing speed of TraceMonkey, the new JavaScript engine for Firefox 3.1. Mozilla offers nightly builds of TraceMonkey-enabled Firefox 3.1 (called “Minefield” when you run it, because it can be a bit, well, buggy), but Windows users can also test drive 3.1 without harming their existing Firefox. Of course, depending on who you ask (and which test you run), Google Chrome’s V8 and the brand-new script engine in WebKit, the foundation of Safari, are potentially faster. In any case, your current browser probably isn’t this fast, so taking these speed demons for a test drive can’t hurt.

8. Use Safari or Opera

Look at nearly any web site’s traffic statistics, and Apple’s Safari and the Norse-made Opera browser are just a sliver compared to how many use Internet Explorer and Firefox. In our own browser speed tests, though, we found Opera and Safari to be the champs at loading web pages and rendering JavaScript and CSS templates, respectively. There are lots of reasons to use Firefox (extensions! theming! Greasemonkey!) and Internet Explorer (some sites only work with it!), but if your browser is mainly just a window on the web, consider keeping a copy of Safari, Opera, or the well-rounded Google Chrome on hand for speeding up your site visits.

7. Make Faster, Fool-Proof Downloads with Down Them All

Right-clicking a picture or link, selecting “Save Link As,” choosing a download spot—it gets real old, real fast, especially if you try to do it on every picture in a Flickr set, every MP3 on a music blog, or anywhere else you do your downloading. Free Firefox extension DownThemAll, our readers’ favorite download manager, makes it easy to do all those things, or set up smart filters and settings to make any page with tons of files easy to navigate. For a good guide on setting that up, try our tutorial on supercharging your Firefox downloads with DownThemAll.

6. Bump up your cache size (and make other configuration tweaks)

Another set of revelations from living in dial-up land, the configuration options that you’d normally never touch are serious life-savers if you’re on weak Wi-Fi, an older, slower system, or just tired of watching your mouse cursor do it’s “waiting” animation over and over. Upping your cache size definitely speeds up your back button action and speeds up repetitive banners and graphics. Sites that really don’t need graphics to work can be disabled with site-by-site exceptions in Firefox, and these days, any browser can open sites you might need to wait on in a new tab while you keep grooving in another. For getting something done on Google Docs or Zoho, reading feeds in Google Reader, or managing tasks in Remember the Milk, there’s Google’s Gears extension to work offline and connect only when you need to sync your data.

5. Throttle your home wireless network

Your home’s wireless router doesn’t have to be a neutral observer while watching your XBox, BitTorrent downloads, multiple laptops, and other web-connected apps and gear fight it out for a finite amount of bandwidth. Many routers let you negotiate connection rate treaties using Quality of Service settings—and those that don’t can often be made to do so by installing DD-WRT or Tomato. The end result? You can let World of Warcraft run rampant in the evenings, set BitTorrent free in the dead of night, and keep your browser unthrottled during the day. Check out Adam’s guide to ensuring a fast net connection when you need it for the geeky details.

4. Swap heavy sites for RSS feeds and mobile versions

Here’s a not-so-secret tip about your Lifehacker editors—we couldn’t possibly read the full version of every blog, news site, and aggregation site we pull our post material from every day. RSS feeds are this blog’s bread and butter, and they’re great for getting a lot of reading done in a short amount of time. We’re split fairly evenly between the Google Reader webapp and NetNewsWire/NewsGator’s desktop clients, but both are a great way to catch up on your regular web reading with a minimum of bandwidth, or no connection whatsoever. Along those lines, you can run any site that’s chock full of text-y news through the Google Mobilizer for a version that’s fast enough for a mobile phone, and very fast on a desktop.

3. Block Flash and/or JavaScript

Our side editor suggested this move after spending a week on a dial-up connection. Firefox users have it easy: Install the Adblock Plus and Flashblock extensions, and sites bogged down mostly by unnecessary Flash and huge display ads will come through a lot quicker. If you’re cool with tweaking your router a bit, you can set up universal ad-blocking through it with the Tomato firmware, or use a solution specific to Chrome, on Internet Explorer through the Toggle Flash add-on or IE7Pro plug-in, and even on your iPhone or iPod touch. Lifehacker is, of course, an ad-supported site, and we’d ask that you use such tools only when bandwidth or time are at a serious premium, or for sites that bludgeon you over the head with lowering interest rates, free laptops, and the like.

2. Set up OpenDNS on your browser or router

If you’re a customer of Time Warner, Verizon, or most any commercial internet provider, you’ll occasionally end up at an ad-filled page whenever you typo your way to a non-existent page, and how quickly your browser knows where to find its data depends on their heavily-taxed servers. You can do a lot better with OpenDNS, a free service that can speed up your page connections, open pages from keyword shortcuts, serve as a parental filter, and avoid spam-y “no site here” pages. The service provides detailed how-to instructions for both individual computers and routers, so it’s definitely worth at least a try.

1. Use Secure, Automatic Passwords

Auto-saving, auto-filling passwords have made their way into most every browser, but, by default, they’re only as secure as your ability to keep someone away from your keyboard. If your browser offers a master password option, use it—in Firefox, it’s the only barrier between you and a single button unveiling all your passwords to snoopy friends or nefarious interlopers. Of course, if you’re using the same weak password across all your site logins, you’re just asking to have somebody get into your email, private social messages, and other private data. Using a secure password system can fix that. If you’re using multiple browsers across different systems, you can keep your time-saving password fillers synced with Dropbox, or take care of bookmarks as well with the (Firefox only) Foxmarks.

Whether you need to get your browsing done quick, or you’re just a fan of streamlined web surfing, what do you use to get more out of your time online? Tell us your own tips and tricks in the comments.

Transmute Transfers and Backs Up Bookmarks Between Browsers

Original article here.

Some browsers stash all your bookmarks and their metadata in a single folder that’s easy to import to any other browser. For everything else, Transmute makes the work of shuttling bookmarks between Windows browsers much simpler. The simple but powerful application, also available as a no-install portable folder, supports nearly every major browser for Windows—Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Safari, and, of course, Internet Explorer and Firefox. You can set Transmute to export bookmarks to a particular folder, with or without timestamp dates, and have it create its own backup files in case things get messy. That’s about it, but that’s certainly no small feat. Transmute is a free download for Windows systems only, requires .NET 2.0 framework to operate.

How to Protect Your Wi-Fi Network from the WPA Hack

WEP Wi-Fi security has been known as an easy-to-crack security protocol for a while now, which is why it was superseded by the more secure Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) standard. But now a PhD candidate studying encryption has found an exploit in the WPA standard that would allow a hacker to “send bogus data to an unsuspecting WiFi client,” completely compromising your Wi-Fi security and opening your network to all sorts of hacking. Lucky for you, it’s not terribly difficult to protect yourself against the new exploit.

The key: Just log into your router, switch off Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) as an encryption mode, and use Advanced Encryption System (AES) only. TKIP is the only protocol that the hack applies to, so switching to AES-only will ensure that your Wi-Fi network is safe again. It’s quick and easy, so do yourself a favor and make the adjustment now so you don’t run into any problems in the future.

Original article here.

Wrapper

Original article here.

Easily combine executables, Registry changes, and commands into a single, tight, executable with this simple freeware. Wrapper’s deceptively basic interface resembles nothing more than a generic spreadsheet app. As it doesn’t need to be installed, the program is easy to add to a USB toolkit. This is a program for those comfortable with constructing potentially damaging executables.

Though it builds a flowchart of commands, operating Wrapper is not a linear process. Users choose to build projects, or lists of applications, commands, or Registry changes to invoke. The app uses simple press-a-button functionality to add a line to the list. Add File opens a small dialog with numerous check-box-set parameters to browse the executable, set the extract directory if needed, and choose from a short list of Extract parameters. The interface and process is similar to adding a command line process or modifying a Registry setting.

Wrapper doesn’t have it all wrapped up, unfortunately. There is no method to force one item to wait until another has finished or to offer any sort of conditional playback. The app also doesn’t include error checking, and the only help from the publisher is in Arabic. The interface is in English and some pages include small amounts of program information. Still, experienced users wishing to bind often-used applications into a single executable will find Wrapper easy to learn, simple to use, and a consistent performer.

Some Internet Speed Incresing Tweaks

The below compilation is solely my own work and I hope ayone utilising it to put it on their blogs, e-mails etc. mention me as it is a result of some serous time-wasting browsing to increse the internet speed and I hope this who find more, better and free ways (but legal) to speed up the net give me some links to whatever they have got.

I don’t exactly know why but I was having some problems with my internet speed so I started searching for ways to speed it up. In a post I published some time back (Windows XP Tricks) there was a method to increase the bandwidth by about 20% and now I have come across more methods to increase the speed and am willing to share it about now.

First of all ditch Internet Explorer. Now choose a fast browser, preferable Firefox (latest version) or maybe Safari or Google’s Chrome. I prefer Firefox as all the images always load in it (there isn’t a cross like in IE or a question mark as in Safari) and moreover Firefox’s download file (7.8 MB) is much smaller as compared to that of Safari(18.6 MB). This will bring about some change in speed. I don’t use Opera as it is a bit slow and moreover I don’t like the fact that in it for a few seconds the page (which you are visiting) seems unresponsive and then suddenly everything appears. And as for Chrome its faster than Firefox but has its limitations as its in Beta and has no proper bookmarking tool or add-ons although you can use Chromium which is Chrome with tweaks including a bookmarking tool similar to Firefox (but no add-ons here either).

The method below is just for Firefox as it is a bit more preferable tan others.

Next increase the cache size of your browser. In Firefox navigate to Tools, then Options. Now go to Advanced. There will be a box in which the default cache size is given. Increase it. I keep it at 1024 MB. This lets the pages you have visited some time earlier (or maybe longer than some) load faster. Also remove all unnecessary add-ons as this may slow down your browsing speed.

Now download a file by googling it called TCP/IP Configurations or by clicking here as after I got the file the first time I couldn’t find it later.

Now download a Firefox extension called Fasterfox. This is similar to Google Web accelerator but is specific to Firefox and updated to the latest version of Firefox.

All these features help in increasing the browsing speed (except the the TCP/IP Configurations I think). In order to increase download speed of file use Download Accelerator. This has free and paid-for versions. The free version is more than enough but if you are still hungry for more speed you can download the premium version as it has some features as well as it is add-free. This one of the few free download accelerators present (or maybe the only one) and I always use it. It integrates into most of the major browsers. To increase the video buffering speed you can use SpeedBit Video Accelerator. This speeds up buffering from all the major sites you are likely to visit in this lifetime and removes those annoying freezes.
Both the above accelerators increase speed by increasing connections to the associated site.

So there’s as much I could find. If someone has more please tell me by atleast commenting on this post or mailing me at hazmahsa@gmail.com.

Windows XP Tricks

This is something I copied off my cousins blog (http://aymenn.wordpress.com). Click here for the exact article.

Deleting System Softwares:
XP hides some system software you might want to remove, such as Windows Messenger, but you can tickle it and make it disgorge everything. Using Notepad or Edit, edit the text file /windows/inf/ sysoc.inf, search for the word ‘hide’ and remove it. You can then go to the Add or Remove Programs in the Control Panel, select Add/Remove Windows Components and there will be your prey, exposed and vulnerable. 

Creating Shutdown Icon or One Click Shutdown: Navigate to your desktop. On the desktop, right-click and go to New, then to Shortcut (in other words, create a new shortcut). You should now see a pop-up window instructing you to enter a command line path. Use this path in “Type Location of the Item”
SHUTDOWN -s -t 01 If the C: drive is not your local hard drive, then replace “C” with the correct letter of the hard drive. Click the “Next” button. Name the shortcut and click the “Finish” button. Now whenever you want to shut down, just click on this shortcut and you’re done. 
 
Increasing Band-Width By 20%:
Microsoft reserves 20% of your available bandwidth for their own purposes like Windows Updates and interrogating your PC etc To get it back:
Click Start then Run and type ” gpedit.msc” without quotes.This opens the group policy editor. Then go to:
Local Computer Policy then Computer Configuration then Administrative Templates then Network then QOS Packet Scheduler and then to Limit Reservable Bandwidth.
Double click on Limit Reservable bandwidth. It will say it is not configured, but the truth is under the ‘Explain’ tab i.e.”By default, the Packet Scheduler limits the system to 20 percent of the bandwidth of a connection, but you can use this setting to override the default.”
So the trick is to ENABLE reservable bandwidth, then set it to ZERO. This will allow the system to reserve nothing, rather than the default 20%.It works on Win 2000 as well.

Renaming The Recycle Bin icon:
To change the name of the Recycle Bin desktop icon, click Start then goto Run, write Regedit and press Enter. It opens Registry Editor. Now in Registry Editor go to: HKEY_CLASSES_ ROOT/CLSID/ {645FF040- 5081-101B- 9F08-00AA002F954 E} and change the name “Recycle Bin” to whatever you want (don’t type any quotes).
 
Managing Tasks:You can at last get rid of tasks on the computer from the command line by using ‘tas
kkill /pid’ and the task number, or just ‘tskill’ and the process number. Find that out by typing ‘tasklist’, which will also tell you a lot about what’s going on in your system. 
 
Removing Shared Documents folder From My Computer window:
Open registry editor by going to Start then Run and entering regedit. Once in registry, navigate to key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ My Computer \ NameSpace \ DelegateFolders You must see a sub-key named {59031a47-3f72- 44a7-89c5- 5595fe6b30ee} . If you delete this key, you have effectively removed the my shared documents folder.
 
Making Google the Default Search Engine in Internet Explorer:
Open registry editor by going to Start then Run and entering regedit and navigate to following three keys separately and change it as shown below:[HKEY_CURRENT_ USER\Software\ Microsoft\ Internet Explorer\Main]
“Search Page”=”http://www.google. com“
“Search Bar”=” http://www.google. com/ie“
[HKEY_CURRENT_ USER\Software\ Microsoft\ Internet Explorer\SearchURL]
“”=” http://www.google. com/keyword/ %s“
[HKEY_LOCAL_ MACHINE\SOFTWARE \Microsoft\ Internet Explorer\Search]
“SearchAssistant” =” http://www.google. com/ie” .

Improving the Slow Boot up time:
 
There are a variety of reasons why your windows XP system would boot slowly. Most of the times it this has to do with the startup applications. If you would like to speed up the bootup sequence, consider removing some of the startup applications that you do not need. Easiest way to remove startup apps is through System Configuration Utility. Go to Start then Run and enter MSCONFIG and go to the Startup tab. Deselect/UnCheck application( s) that you do not want to startup at boot time. 
 
Customize Logon prompt with your Own Words:
Open Registry by going to Start then Run, entering regedit and Navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_ MACHINE\SOFTWARE \Microsoft\ Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ Winlogon] . In right pane, look for key by the name “LogonPrompt” . Set its value to whatever text you want to see displayed at login screen. 
 
IP address of your connection:Go to Start then Run. Enter ‘cmd’ and then enter ‘ipconfig’
.Add the ‘/all’ switch for more info.
 
Making Folders Private:
Open My Computer Double-click the drive where Windows is installed (usually drive (C:), unless you have more than one drive on your computer). If the contents of the drive are hidden, under System Tasks, click Show the contents of this drive.
Double-click the Documents and Settings folder. Double-click your user folder. Right-click any folder in your user profile, and then click Properties. On the Sharing tab, select the Make this folder private so that only I have access to it check box. 
 
To change Drive Letters:
Go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management, Disk Management, then right-click the partition whose name you want to change (click in the white area just below the word “Volume”) and select “change drive letter and paths.”
From here you can add, remove or change drive letters and paths to the partition.
 
Removing the Shortcut arrow from Desktop Icons: Goto Start then Run and Enter regedit. Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ ROOTlnkfile. Delete the IsShortcut registry value. You may need to restart Windows XP.
 
Get Drivers for your Devices:
Visit Windows Update (XP Only)
Look at the left hand pane and under Other Options click Personalize Windows Update.
Now in the right hand pane check the box – Display the link to the Windows Update Catalog under See Also
Below Choose which categories and updates to display on Windows Update – make sure you check all the boxes you want shown.
Click Save Settings
Now look in the left hand pane under See Also click Windows Update Catalog and choose what you’re looking for. Choose either MS updates or drivers for hardware devices.
Start the Wizard and off you go.
 
Customize Internet Explorer’s Title Bar:
Open Registry by going to Start then Run and Enter regedit. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_ USER\Software\ Microsoft\ Internet. Explorer\Main. In right hand panel look for string “Window Title” and change its value to whatever custom text you want to see. 
 
Disabling the use of Win Key:
If your are a gaming freak then you must be sick of the Win key in your keyboard. To disable use of Win key, open registry by going to Start then Run and entering regedit. Navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_ MACHINE\SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSe t\Control\ Keyboard Layout] . In this look for value of “Scancode Map”. Its binary data so be extra careful:
Set its value to “00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 03 00 00 00 00 00 5B E0 00 00 5C E0 00 00 00 00″ to disable the win key.
 
Restarting Windows without Restarting the Computer:
This one is again is. When you click on the SHUTDOWN button, make sure to simultaneous press SHIFT Button. If you hold the Shift key down while clicking on SHUTDOWN button, you computer would restart without restarting the Computer. This is equivalent to term “HOT REBOOT”. 

Stopping XP from displaying unread messages count on Welcome Screen:
To stop XP from displaying count of unread messages, Open registry and navigate to [HKEY_CURRENT_ USER\Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentV ersion\UnreadMai l] and look for the data key “MessageExpiryDays” . If you do not see this key, create one DWORD key by the name “MessageExpiryDays” . Setting its value to 0 would stop Windows XP from displaying the count of unread messages. 
 
Modify Color Selection of Default Theme:Open registry by going to Start then Run. Entering regedit, navigate to [HKEY_USERS\ .DEFAULT\ Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentV ersion\ThemeMana ger] and locate the key “ColorName”.
Right Click on it and select modify its value from “NormalColor” to “Metallic”
Click Ok, and exit regedit and restart your computer.

Removing the Recycle Bin from the Desktop: If you don’t use the Recycle Bin to store deleted files , you can get rid of its desktop icon all together. Run Regedit and go to: