A year ago this week I built a test Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate machine with a 40 GB SSD drive from Intel. I have all the same security and misc. software that I use on my other computers so it is a fairly easy one-to-one comparison. Well, talk about fast boot times. From “power on” to ready(and I mean ready, not just at the Windows desktop but still loading background “stuff”) takes 38 seconds. Yes, you read that right, 38 seconds. My next fastest machine takes just shy of 2 minutes.

Beyond boot there is what we have to deal with in the everyday, that is the opening and closing of programs, checking e-mail, retrieving, creating and storing of data as well as internet research.

Before we go any further let me go over how I have setup this computer. The SSD only has my programs on it (Windows, Office 2010, ESET, Adobe…). For my data (files, videos, music) I have installed a 1 Terabyte Western Digital “Black” hard drive. I chose the Black series for stability, this PC was to replace my home media center computer (XP Media Center 2005) that has an original 200 GB hard drive from a vendor I rather not mention. The problem with it is that it takes almost 9 minutes to boot. I have reinstalled that system twice over the years, it is the hard drive in this case.

Back to this system, SSD drives are not supposed to be defragmented, I did not believe this to begin with, just like I never believed that Windows NT machines did not need to be defragmented. By defragmenting you wear out the SSD drive much faster. Why? Well, basically these SSD drives are just glorified USB / Thumb drives and the way they are written to and read from is totally different than regular hard drives that spin on platters. At this time, Diskeeper has come out with a program specifically for reorganizing the files on a SSD drive while maintaining the life of the drive. http://www.diskeeper.com/hyperfast/. I plan on experimenting with this program over the next few weeks, hopefully I will remember to report this to you all.

With that said, even without defragmenting over the last year, I still get excellent performance with my SSD. Opening any application is almost immediate, especially Outlook. When you need to switch between programs, open and close others throughout the day and retrieve data you can count on a SSD to save you time.

Is a new SSD drive the answer to all your speed issues? No, not by a long shot, but with plenty of RAM (4GB for 32 bit systems and 8 GB for 64 bit systems), up to date BIOS and drivers and a quality network connection (Gigabit) you will have the best performance in a laptop or PC that can be achieved within reason. Now if you want to tweak your operating system, you certainly can get more speed out of a computer, just check out the articles and PDF downloads free located throughout this site.

Until we meet again, have a virus free week!

Enjoy the tips (18 pages worth) and have a virus free week!

Now that you are done scrounging through your pencil drawer looking for old drives and you have finished hugging yourself for saving a USB tree from being dismembered, let’s continue.

Before we go any further, yes you can use and old SD or Compact Flash card for the same effect in Windows XP but not as “ReadyBoost” in Vista and Windows 7, they just usually are not as large in capacity so I will refer to them in this article but you can substitute as you please.

As a rule of thumb, USB drives are faster than the current mechanical hard drives (the new SSD drives are faster and I hope to write about them soon). That is why we would, could and should use them as Virtual Memory and ReadyBoost in your computer.

Using two or three 512MB USB drives is better than nothing, but using one 2GB is even better. I would not use more than two drives (only one is really needed) and several small ones can slow things down instead of speeding them up, so use the old 32 and 64 MB drives on your kids computer, just because you can.

Be sure you don’t want the data on the drives and then format the drive. To do this click on the “Start” button and then on “My Computer” (in XP) or “Computer” (in Vista and Windows 7) in the new window that appears, right-click on the USB drive (be 100% sure it is the drive you want to format and use). Select “Format” from the drop down menu and off you go. I choose to format as “NTFS” as the file system and I do NOT do a “Quick Format”.

To use ReadyBoost in Windows 7 and Vista, simply plug the drive in to get started. If it is blank when you connect it, you should get a screen / auto play window that has several choices, with one being “Speed up my System using Windows ReadyBoost”.

If the auto play window does not appear, simply click on the “Start” button, and then click one time on “Computer”. Now navigate to the flash drive and right-click on it and select “Properties”. The 5th tab should be “ReadyBoost” click on it and continue below.

Select that choice (ReadyBoost), a new window should appear and you should select the radio button “Use this device”.
Next you will want to drag the “Space to Reserve for system Speed” slide all the way to the right, using all the available space on the drive.
Select “OK” at the bottom of that window.

ReadyBoost is not exactly the same as Virtual Memory (VM) so if you have two extra USB drives, use the 2nd as VM.

To set up VM in Windows 7 or Vista, click on the “Start” button, and then right-click on “Computer” and select “Properties” from the drop down list.

If you have the standard window that appears on the left side click on “Advanced system settings”, a new window will appear and or a “Continue” window will appear too.

The new window (named “System Properties”) has several tabs, click on the “Advanced” tab.

Under the “Performance” section of that window click on “Settings” and a new window will appear.

Once again you will need to click on the the “Advanced” tab of the new page and under the section “Virtual memory” you will need to click on the “Change…” button.

The new window that appears most likely has “Automatically manage paging file size for all drives” selected, uncheck that box and then click on the USB drive that is NOT being used by ReadyBoost.

The ReadyBoost drive will show 0MB under space avaliable.

Click in the “Custom size” radio button and then fill out the “Initial size” and “Maximum size” which both should be the full amount of the USB drive listed minus 5MB or 10% of the total space (for some reason, Microsoft requires that much, probably for the Recycle bin).

Select “OK”, you might get a message “The changes you made will require you to restart your computer before they will take effect”  or something of that sort.

You will need to “OK” your way out of the other open windows and reboot.

If you are still using Windows XP, simply install the USB drive, format it (you want all the space you can have) and then follow the directions in my previous articles.

If you want the best performance out of this tweak, I would suggest purchasing a new USB drive. Personally I like the “OCZ 4GB Rally2”. The reason is that this is simply the fastest USB drive available and you want speed for your virtual memory, however whatever you have on hand is better than nothing. You can get the OCZ Rally 2 in 4GB from IFix Computers for only $24.99.

Well, that is all for now, until we meet again, have a virus free week.

The best way to tweak Firefox is by accessing its hidden preferences by using the “about:config” feature. Be warned that about:config and many of the preferences it can access are hidden for a reason.

About:config is a much more powerful configuration tool than Firefox’s standard dialog boxes. This means that it’s also much easier to really screw things up if you don’t pay attention.

In fact, when you launch the about:config page, the first time, you must accept an agreement warning you of tool’s dangers before you can proceed, in fact the button says “I’ll be careful, I promise!” on it.

Remember the last time you were not careful, yup, that will happen, but not only to you but to your children and grandchildren, and not in the good way.

To be on the safe side, back up your “prefs.js” file before you start editing. Then, if something goes wrong, you can restore your original preferences by copying the backup over the corrupt file.
Instead of writing an entire article on how to backup, just go to the Mozilla site here.

If you’re unable to restore your preferences the way the Mozilla web site states, you can exit Firefox and open Firefox in “Safe Mode”. To do this, simply go to your “All Programs” folder and under the “Mozilla Firefox” folder choose the “Mozilla Firefox (Safe Mode)” icon. Then, just select “Reset All User Preferences to Firefox defaults”. This will get you back up and running, but remember it will restore all user preferences to their default values and you will lose Bookmarks, security settings and the such.

Now with all the warnings and recovery instructions out of the way, let’s open the “about:config” tool.

Launch Firefox, go the Address bar, and enter “about:config” where you would normally type in a web site you want to visit.
Once the page is open, you’ll see a very long list of preferences (one per line). Each entry is searchable by keywords.
The entries can be a Boolean, integer, or string value and each entry contains a Name, Status, Type, and Value. Typically, you will be modifying only the Value, by double-clicking on it and making the change.

Now that you’re in, let’s look at a three handy tweaks.

First, if you have a broadband (High Speed) connection and want to speed up Firefox, and who doesn’t, you can tweak the browser’s HTTP pipelining and max connections preferences. BTW, I have an article on how to do this in Internet Explorer here.

Enabling pipelining allows Firefox to make multiple requests from a responding server without waiting on a response, and tweaking max connections will increase the number of simultaneous connections Firefox can have with a single or multiple servers.

To find the about:config entries we need for the first part of this hack, search for pipelining by typing the “network.http” in the “Filter:” section at the top of the page. Within the results, you will find the entries that we’re interested in.

Locate “network.http.pipelining” and change its value to “True” by simply double-clicking on any part of the line. True is the value at the end of that line and the default is “False”.

Now find “network.http.proxy.pipelining” and also change this to “True” by double-clicking on the line somewhere.

Lastly, find “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” and change this to value to 8 by double-clicking anywhere on the line. A new window/box appears and the number “4″ is the default.

Now go back and enter “max-connections” in the filter box at the top of the page. Find the entry “network.http.max-connections”, double-click on it and change this value from “30″ to “96″.

Locate “network.http.max-connections-per-server” (which should already be in the list) and change it from “15″ to “32″.

If you’re like me and you hate the annoying countdown that occurs every time you install a Firefox extension, there’s an about:config preference that can disable it.

Search for “enable_delay” and you should see the entry “security.dialog_enable_delay”. Change this value to 0 (zero).

Finally, here’s a tip for all of us who didn’t win those elementary spelling bees (sorry mom, I really did try).

By default, Firefox checks spelling only in multiple-line text boxes. You can set it to check spelling in all text boxes easily enough.

Enter “spellcheckdefault” (all one word) in the filter and you should locate the “layout.spellcheckDefault” entry. Change the value to “2″.

Of course, these are only a few of the changes you can make using Firefox’s about:config tool. If you’ve discovered any useful Firefox about:config hacks, let me know.

Until we meet again, have a virus free week!

Before you make the following changes to the registry, be sure to first back it up, otherwise expect meteors from the heavens to destroy your computer! So back it up just like you have learned in other articles here.

To edit the registry, click on the “Start” button and then click on the “Run” button and type in “Regedit” in the box provided.

Now you will need to navigate the left side by clicking on the “+” symbols to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop.

On the right hand window pane double click on MenuShowDelay (the list is in alphabetical order).

The current value should be 400, I believe this is milliseconds but I could be wrong. Change the number to a lower number down to and including 0 (Zero). I choose 10, just in case.

Restart your computer and see the change.

Until we meet again, have a virus free week.