Increase SATA drive performance.
This tip “enhances” drive performance by allowing the drive in question to perform more write caching to system memory. The danger
is if your system loses power and you do not have a backup power source
(UPS), whatever data is cached to system memory will be lost. If you’re
the adventurous type and want a bit more responsiveness out of your
system, click Start, type Device Manager in the Search box, click the
Device Manager, open up the Disk drives tree, right-click a drive, and
select Properties. Go to the Policies tab and check “Enable Advanced
Performance.” Click OK.
Speed up Flip3D
This tip will
be useful for notebook owners or anyone whose PC is packing less than
stellar graphics processing power. The Flip3D animation can bog down
weaker graphics cards if it has to flip a lot of windows, so this is a
tweak that lets you set the number of windows that will be rendered in
3D at one time.
• Click on the Start Button, type regedit in the Search bar, and press Enter.
• Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER, Software, Microsoft, Windows, and DWM.
• Create a new DWORD and call it Max3DWindows.
• Set the value of this to something between four and nine (“4” and
“9”) depending on the performance of your card (a higher number
requires more video card power). You should then feel free to
experiment to find the best value for your computer. Restart your PC to
finalize the change.
Two must-have Sidebar Gadgets.
At first blush, we thought the Windows Sidebar was rather useless. The
default Gadgets were not useful (who wants an analog clock when you
have a clock on the Taskbar?), and it seemed like a poor rip-off of Yahoo Widgets. However, we’ve now come across some rather useful Gadgets at the Microsoft website.
The first is Multi-Meter, which is the first Gadget we’ve ever seen
that can measure CPU activity for multiple cores. You can download it here.
Another Gadget we’re quite fond of is DriveInfo, as it displays the
free space on multiple volumes. Since we have several hard drives on
our home machines, we love this Gadget. It also allows you to access
the drives by simply double-clicking them in the Gadget. Download it here.
Discover what applications are linked to certain processes.
The Processes tab of the Windows XP Task Manager was a confusing,
barren wasteland of cryptically-named processes. If you wanted to find
out which application was responsible for a certain process, all you
could do was to copy down the name of the executable, and then search
for it in Windows to locate it or Google it. This was an annoying
process. Thankfully, Microsoft has fixed this in Vista by adding an
“open file location” option when you right-click any process. Doing so
opens the folder the process is running from, which can help you figure
out if a certain process can be turned off or not.
You can also click “View” at the top of the Task Manager and click Select Columns to select which columns to display.
Partition drives in Vista.
Back in the XP days, if one wanted to partition a drive from within the
OS, he had to purchase expensive, third-party software to do so. Not
anymore. Vista includes built-in drive partitioning which is – we can’t
believe we’re saying this – totally awesome. The reason it’s so awesome
is that you can partition drives on the fly, from within Windows. For
example, if you have a 400GB hard drive with 200GB of free space, you
can shrink the original 400GB partition down to whatever size you want,
and then create a new partition out of the new unpartitioned space.
Here’s how you do it.
Right-click My Computer, select Manage, and click on Disk Management.
You will see all of your volumes listed. Right-click whatever volume
you want to shrink, and click “Shrink Volume.” (You can also extend
volumes as well.) Type in the size of the partition, then click Shrink.
After a few seconds, the partition will be shrunk, and you’ll now have
a whole lot of unallocated space. Right-click it and select “New Simple
Volume.” We fooled around with this utility, both shrinking and
expanding volumes that had data on them and we experienced no data loss
or problems whats ever.
Note: For more
Windows Vista Tips, Tricks &
Tweaks.
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