Archive for the ‘Vista’ Category
If you haven’t tried Windows 7
Windows 7 Being the next version of windows coming out later this year.
Then Sign up for the the release candidate (final version before release) now.
I am using the beta version and it works great.
You can try the release candidate for year for FREE.
Very useful, this program will create a entry in send to menu, in the right click menu.
That will upload any file (under 20mb) to Virustotal
The file will then be scanned by Virustotal which uses 39 virus scanner engines to check the file for malware.
I had a thought about Vista..
When XP first came out it sucked real bad, everyone hated it, gamers avoided it like crazy.(even I hated it)
XP required more pc horse power, than windows 98/windows 2000/NT and as a result didn’t perform as well
XP required above average kit, and would turn a ok machine under win98/win2000 into a badly performing one.
Maybe people resented this and didnt see any point in xp at all.
Also many of the the new features in xp took a long time to be understood and appreciated by most people.
This is the current problem with Vista. Its sweet spot performance wise is a lot higher than xp and probably always will be.
However in a couple of years no one will care since PCs will be far beyond that vista sweet spot and it wont matter.
In fact in the future vista will probably start to out perform XP,.
As XP does now with 98/W2K with kit less than a couple of years old.
My Vista would not sleep, it would enter sleep mode for a few secs, then come back on again.
One searched high and, a behold I found the light…
http://www.appcrash.net/2007/02/cant-sleep-try-this.asp
Turned out there was a wake up event in my network card properties.
It can be irritating when you bump your mouse
and it wakes up your pc.
I Found this useful tip on…
http://www.gordonknight.co.uk
Open command prompt and type “powercfg -devicequery wake_armed”
it will show a list of devices that can wake your PC.
For example…
powercfg -devicequery wake_armed
Standard 101/102-Key or Microsoft Natural PS/2 Keyboard
Microsoft USB Wheel Mouse Optical
f you want to disable the mouse type….
powercfg -devicedisablewake “Microsoft USB Wheel Mouse Optical”
Now why for Christs sake cant you do that via control panel ?
With a modern pc there is no real point in turning off your pc.
Sleep mode uses very little power, 4 or 5 watts, also your pc uses the most power by far while booting up.
Make sure you configure your power options to turn off hard disks during sleep mode.
Also may people believe turning your pc on and off a lot can shorten the life span of its components especially the hard disks.
Hibernate saves an image of your desktop with all open files and documents, and then it powers down your computer. When you turn on power, your files and documents are open on your desktop exactly as you left them, the size of the hibernate file is equal to your memory size. IE if you have 1gb of ram your hibernate file is 1gb.
The hibernate file is stored in the root of your windows disk. your only see it you if have “show hidden files set”
If your dont use it (how does?), Open a command prompt window and [type] powercfg -h off [enter]
Quite frankly its a bad idea to keep turning your pc on and off, lowers life span.
Use powersaving instead.
Useful if you cant boot from DVD for some reason.
1. Format an NTFS drive.
2. Copy the “sources” and “boot” directories and the bootmgr, setup.exe files from the Vista ISO to the root of the new partition
3. Run boot/bootsect.exe against the new partition
4. Boot from the newly formatted drive.
5. Hold CTRL while booting.
6. Rebuild the BCD (bcdedit /createstore should do it)
7. Run setup.exe
The other day for reasons one cannot recall I looked into dynamic disks again on windows xp.
I found out something one must share with you since it quite startled me.
Most people use basic disks when using windows. basic disks use partitions, a hardisk can have: 4 primary partitions or 3 primary and one extended partition
A extended partition is just a container for logical partitions, you can have as many logical partitions as you have drive letters left ie A to Z.
However only primary partitions can be used to boot from. Also only one primary partition (on each disk) can be the active partition (the boot disk) at any time.
Well dynamic dump all that weirdness, and use volumes instead, the interesting thing is dynamic disks can be mirrored, spanned, striped, and use raid 5.
Personally I rather eat a cows udder cooked garlic butter than use windows for R.A.I.D. when inexpensive hardware solutions are available, and spanned volumes are just lunacy(unless you have everything backed up).
Saying that though a windows based mirror would probably be OK, but but expect performance issues.
What really put me off though was the fact if you convert a basic disk containing multiple operating systems, “the partition entries for all partitions on the disk are removed, except for the system and boot volumes of the currently running operating system”
Which would be bad very very bad.
This version of ATI tool will let you over clock the 8800 while using vista.