July 20th, 2009 by Aseem Kishore
Prefetch is a feature, introduced in Windows XP, that stores specific data about the applications you run in order to help them start faster. Prefetch is an algorithm that helps anticipate cache misses (times when Windows requests data that isn’t stored in the disk cache), and stores that data on the hard disk for easy [...]
July 18th, 2009 by Aseem Kishore
If you want to improve your searches, the best place to start is with the indexing feature itself. In Control Panel, open the Indexing Options window to show the folders in which Windows currently looks for files. Here, you can choose each folder to include in the index; you can index an entire drive index [...]
July 15th, 2009 by Aseem Kishore
Most components directly attached to your motherboard—including PCI slots, IDE controllers, serial ports, the keyboard port, and even your motherboard’s CMOS—have individual interrupt requests (IRQs) assigned to them. An interrupt request line, or IRQ, is a numbered hardware line over which a device can interrupt the normal flow of data to the processor, allowing the [...]
July 10th, 2009 by Aseem Kishore
By default, the Quick Launch toolbar comes with a Show Desktop button, which allows you to quickly hide all open windows and access stuff on your desktop, and then quickly bring them all back when you’re done. But what if your Quick Launch toolbar doesn’t have one? If your Show Desktop icon got deleted in [...]
July 6th, 2009 by Aseem Kishore
To avoid some of the drawbacks of Vista’s Sleep power-saving mode, you can hibernate your PC. Hibernate saves a copy of everything in your PC’s memory (RAM) onto your hard disk before it shuts down. Windows uses the file hiberfil.sys, stored in the root folder of your hard disk, to hold your hibernation data. Because [...]
April 4th, 2009 by Aseem Kishore
Auto-Play is a Windows feature that lets you automatically play a CD or DVD media when it is inserted. Notice when you insert an Audio CD that Windows will begin playing the CD using Media Player? Or when you insert a DVD movie it gets played using PowerDVD or a software that came with your computer? [...]
March 31st, 2009 by Aseem Kishore
We know the pain of forgetting a lost password. If you only use a single administrator account and you forgot THE password, you’re dead. To preempt this scenario, Vista lets users create a password recovery disk. Since this is a preemptive tool, you need to do this while you are still logged in to Vista. [...]
March 23rd, 2009 by Aseem Kishore
Has your processor been at 100% utilization lately? If you went to the Task Manager in Windows and looked at your processes tab, you may have noticed a process called msmpeng.exe eating up all your available CPU. So what is msmpeng.exe and how can you prevent it from slowing your system down? Well, unlike what [...]
March 19th, 2009 by Aseem Kishore
Windows Defender is a built in malware protection software included in Windows Vista. If you are running other spyware and malware protection tools like Avira, Norton or McAfee, it is a good idea to turn off specific redundant Defender processes to avoid system performance loss. On the other hand, you might not be satisfied with [...]
January 30th, 2009 by Aseem Kishore
Can’t seem to find the Mail icon in your Control Panel? Well, here’s another quick tutorial that might help a few Administrators out there! I wasted quite a bit of time trying to figure this one out! Basically I was trying to setup Outlook 2007 on my Windows Vista Ultimate machine to connect to an [...]