What is ReadyBoost in Windows Vista

Windows Vista has introduced a clever new caching system that can take advantage of your existing high-speed storage devices (such as USB Drives and Memory Cards). This should boost performance when performing disk intensive tasks. Some flash memory devices are up to 100x faster than a standard hard disk, so it makes sense to use these to cache common files.

ReadyBoost works with SuperFetch to store information that can be accessed quickly from the cache on startup, rather than relying on slower reading from the hard disk.

There are several requirements that your flash memory device must meet to be used as a ReadyBoost device:

• At least 256 MB in size
• Access time of <>
• Capable of 2.5 MB/s read speeds for 4 KB random reads spread uniformly across the entire device and 1.75 MB/s write speeds for 512 KB random writes spread uniformly across the device
• At least 235 MB of free space.

It is recommended that you have between 1-3 times the amount of ReadyBoost cache as physical RAM. However, ReadyBoost devices are limited to 4GB max.

Assuming you meed the minimum requirements, plug your device in to a USB 2.0 port and wait for a Windows Autoplay dialog box to pop up. Select the Speed up my PC option from this menu.



You can then set the amount of space on the device that you wish to allocate to ReadyBoost (you may as well use the maximum possible, up to the 3x RAM recommendation). If your device is not compatible or is too slow, you will be informed of the reasons at this point.



Users with low amounts of system RAM (512MB - 1GB) will notice the biggest performance increase, and those with 2GB or more may only notice marginal gains.

How to use Windows Vista System Health Report

Vista is able to generate a System Health Report that is great for troubleshooting potential problems with your system. This 60 second process will create a list of system technical details, earmarking those which could cause system performance problems.



To load the application, run "perfmon /report" from the command line or find it in the control panel by visiting:

Control Panel > System and Maintenance > Performance Information and Tools > Advanced Tools > Generate System Health Report

Most of the likely problems encountered will be missing drivers or high usage of system resources, which will quite often be the memory but could be poor disk I/O performance or a whole other range of unexpected issues. This information is a great basic diagnostic tool for problems that you may not have realised you had, and resolving them could result in a more stable, faster system.



Once the report is generated, any problem areas will be marked with a warning symbol or a red light, followed by information and links to help troubleshoot the problems. It won?t be possible to detail how to fix every problem you encounter within this page, however most of the suggested resolutions are actually really useful (unlike previous versions of Windows that would go round in circles).

How to fix Windows Vista Slow Network

Windows Vista has been known to cause slow network transfer speeds for some users, most noticeable when copying files across a network that take much longer than before.

Some suggestions that may help users experiencing slow network performance are as follows:

1) Download the latest drivers for your network adapter from the manufacturers site (do not rely on the Windows Update drivers). Then, check they are configured properly by viewing the device manager settings.

2) Install the latest Windows Update patches, including Vista SP1.

3) If you use a 3rd Party firewall, be sure that it is configured correctly. For example, in Kaspersky Internet Security there is a "high speed" setting that should be ticked.

4) Try disabling Remote Differential Compression by clicking Start > Control Panel > Programs > Programs and Features. Then click Turn Windows features on and off, untick Remote Differential Compression and click OK:



5) The final thing to try would be to disable network Auto-Tuning. First, load the run box by pressing WINDOWS KEY + R and then run:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

You will need to restart your PC after this and retry the network transfer. If speeds are still low, you can return the auto-tuning to default mode by re-running the following command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal

How to increase Windows Vista Menu Speed

Windows Vista has a built in menu delay setting so that it waits a certain length of time when you hover over a menu item before expanding the further options. For most users this is fine, but power users may find the wait rather annoying and would rather have instant menu opening speeds on mouse over.

A simple registry tweak will allow you to speed up the menu. First load the registry editor by launching regedit from the Run menu (Press WINDOWS KEY + R to access the run menu):



Then, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop in the side panel, then right click on MenuShowDelay and select Modify:



Now, enter the menu delay time in milliseconds (1 is near instant, do not enter 0!) and press OK:



Once you have restarted your menus will slide at near instant speeds. The default setting is 400 should you wish to restore the default menu setting.

Windows Vista : How Speed Up Internet Explorer

It may be possible to speed up the browsing performance of Internet Explorer with some careful tweaking (assuming you already have a reasonably high speed connection, i.e over 512kbps).

Normally Internet Explorer makes use of a maximum of 2 connections to a server when downloading a webpage. For example, this page is made up of a single HTML file, several images and other scripts. All of them are needed to render the page, so Internet Explorer uses 2 connections to download them as quick as possible.

Two connections are used as this is a defined in the HTTP standards, however increasing this limit may speed up some pages made from many elements. This does involve modifying the registry, so should only be attempted if you are confident in doing so (and have appropriate backups).

To start, load the Registry Editor by starting "regedit" from the run box (press WINDOWS KEY + R to load this):



Then browse to the following folder:

Code:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]

In the right panel there are two entries called MaxConnectionsPerServer and MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server that store the maximum connection values. Double clicking each of them and selecting a decimal value will create a new connection limit. 8 Connections is a sensible limit to see how the performance changes:



Once you have restarted your computer, the new connection limit will be in place. To revert the changes, simply change the connection limit back to 2.

How to improve Vista Slow Shutdown Problems

It is fairly common for Windows Vista to shutdown slowly sometimes, and this can be for a variety of reasons (such as installing updates, crashed applications or driver problems). If this happens more frequently, it indicates that this problem shouldn't be happening and is worth troubleshooting.

Start by loading the event viewer "eventvwr.msc" from the run box (press WINDOWS KEY + R to start this):



Once event viewer has loaded, browse to Applications and Services > Microsoft > Windows > Diagnostics-Performance > Operational. This may take a few seconds to appear, as lots of data is loading. Once complete, it will display any significant events in the centre panel. You can scroll through events occurring at the time of a slow shutdown to see which applications or services caused a slowness (look for "Shutdown Performance Monitoring" under the "Task Category" tab):

In this example, a service called TrkWks caused a shutdown problem ("This service caused a delay in the system shutdown process"). Once you have determined which services or applications are causing the problem each time, you can then google for more information to diagnose each item individually. Often, patching or updating drivers can improve these issues.

[Via : winvistatips ]

How social media website users dress up ?

How to fix problem "Oops! This link appears to be broken" problem in Google Chrome

Google Chrome works by pre-fetching the IP addresses of all websites that are listed on that page. The idea is to make the page load faster since it has IP addresses of all the links in advance. The problem is pre-fetching fails you will the “link broken” error.

How to fix this ?

Tools > Options (or Preferences on a Mac) > Under the Hood and uncheck the setting that says “Use DNS pre-fetching to improve page load performance."

This will solve the problem.

3D Tutorial : Making Of 'Aston Martin V8 Vantage

Step by step 3D tutorial how to make Aston Martin V8 Vantage

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Step by step tutorial : type art with Photoshop & Illustrator

Type art is popular at the moment for all sorts of reasons – and it’s a highly versatile skill to have. You can use illustrated lettering in projects ranging from posters to brochures – making it a great technique to add to your creative toolset.

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On-the-fly decisions for instant ads

Now, companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft let advertisers buy ads in the milliseconds between the time someone enters a site’s Web address and the moment the page appears. The technology, called real-time bidding, allows advertisers to examine site visitors one by one and bid to serve them ads almost instantly.

For example, say a man just searched for golf clubs on eBay (which has been testing a system from a company called AppNexus for more than a year). EBay can essentially follow that person’s activities in real time, deciding when and where to show him near-personalized ads for golf clubs throughout the Web.

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BreakingNews is now on Facebook

Last December, MSNBC acquired the Twitter account @breakingnews, which was started as a basic newswire by Michael van Poppel and gradually grew to 1.4 million followers (it’s now up to over 1.6 million). A month later, MSNBC announced that it had acquired BreakingNews.com, which will has become a web portal for the online newswire. And today, it’s completing the triefeca: MSNBC has just launched Facebook Page at Facebook.com/BreakingNews.

MSNBC spokesperson Gina Stikes says that the new Facebook account will only send updates for the biggest stories to break (you can still use its other feeds if you want to receive every story to come from the service). The page is obviously still quite new (it only has 645 fans right now), but you can expect that the grow quickly.

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PlayStation Move: Video preview

Sony finally released it's new movement controller named PlayStation moved. I read few reviews about the controller and it has some advantages and disadvantages compared to the wii . I am quite excited from what i heard that the new playstation move can track its controller precisely within real 3D space, instead of just relative movement based on a previous position. For gameplay this means less of those cute little flicks Wii pros have come so fond of -- most gameplay motions require a full and complete movement on Move. it means no more lying on the couch to play tennis.

Check out the video preview of the PlayStation Move


Click here If you want to read a complete review of PlayStation Move.

x.minutes.at : Cool web browsing timer

Do you have problem speding too much time browsing instead of doing your work. x.minutes.at is a simple web utility that will remind you with “Time’s up!” popup after certain period of time.

You can just enter "periodoftime.minutes.at" at the beginning of the url and it will start counting down the time. A simple example is "http://5.minutes.at/idiotheaven.blogspot.com , after 5 minutes the “Time’s up!” popup will show up to avoid you from spending to much time browsing non related things to work.

The idea is to keep you alert from being distracted by the sweetness of browsing the internet.