1. First, run a scandisk or checkdisk. Let Windows fix any errors.
2. Run a disk cleanup utility...this will flush your temporary internet folder, trash can, temp system files, etc.
3. Delete any garbage files or data...if possible, run a Duplicate File Finder program.
4. Run Defrag on all partitions (NOTE: run this after you have deleted all trash and excess files!)
5. Run a registry cleaner utility and delete or get rid of any orphaned entries in that registry.
6. Check your exisiting swap file for it's size and location (*will explain location later in the post). If you have alot of ram (i.e. 1 gig and over) set this swap file to something small, like 250 mb. The reason is that this will force Windows to load more into memory, resulting in faster performance (note: some games and applications actually require a certain sized swap file so check your applications performance after making a size adjustment for any error messages.)
7. Under XP, you can tell Windows to use Classic Style on your desktop, - this will remove the neat single click and internet-style desktop but for lower end systems this will improve performance in other areas, such as gaming and multi-tasking.
8. Run msconfig and under startup and only keep the programs that are essential to load in the tray icon (and hence stay resident in memory). Uncheck anything else non-essential, like an ATI or Nvidia control panel, Quicktime utility, Real Audio, etc.
9. Upgrade drivers! Check for the latest BIOS, video, motherboard, sound, etc drivers from the manufacturers. Alot of my friends had chipsets on their motherboard that had advanced disk management capabilities or AGP port settings but the drivers weren't loaded for them so they were never being used. A simple upgrade realized a noticeable difference. For instance, they didn't have the latest driver for their AGP port so it was set to 1x, instead of being used at 4x!
10. (OK, so this won't speed up your PC but it could save you alot of time and trouble later on!) After making all these improvements, make a working backup! I use Ghost, but for XP users you can also use System Restore...
-FOR ADVANCED USERS-
1. Take a look under the hood (for IDE owners). How are your IDE devices configured? If you have more than 1 hard drive, put the master hard drive on the primary IDE channel and the secondary hard drive on the secondary IDE channel (most motherboards have two IDE channels).
2. Place all CDROM drives, DVD readers etc. on the secondary IDE channel (or SCSI bus, etc). This will reduce I/O contention with your master hard drive which should have your OS and apps installed...
3. Remember when I mentioned the location of the swap file? OK, if you have 2 hard drives and you have one on the primary IDE channel and the other on the secondary IDE channel, move the swap file to a partition ON THE SECOND hard drive (on the secondary IDE channel). This will greatly improve system performance as the PC can write to the swap file while loading and running OS and system commands without I/O contention on the primary IDE channel!
4. Take a look under the hood (for SCSI owners) What kind of SCSI do you have? If it's the newer Ultra 160/320 etc cards then guess what? Any devices placed on the same bus will automatically default to the slowest drive on the chain...this means that if you have say, an Ultra 160 SCSI card, and it has an Ultra 160 drive (capable of transferring 160 mb/sec) on the same chain as a SCSI cdrom drive (capable of only 40 mb/sec) then the whole bus slows down to the 40 mb/sec speed...use different chains for the slower devices and maximize those hard drives!
5. Run a utility like WCPUID and check the settings...is your CPU/front speed bus/AGP port running as fast as they should be? If not, check your drivers and BIOS configuration options. Also, are all of your chipset features enabled? If not, then enable them! (usually done in your BIOS!)
6. Dig in to the BIOS...check settings like boot order, for example...is it checking the floppy first? Change this! Select your order to reflect the hard drive first, then CD, then floppy for a noticeable boot time improvement. Also disable any non-used on board peripherals...for instance, - does your motherboard come with an on-board NIC card? Guess what, if you don't use that NIC card and it is enabled it will eat up valuable CPU cycles and can be detrimental to your systems' performance. DISABLE THAT MUTHA! Also, see if you can play with memory timing and CPU clock frequencies (NOTE! This is for expert users only!) Set these timings to "Aggressive" and see what happens in your games and apps...Also, check to see what your video aperature is set to. If you have a video card with 128 megs of on-baord memory, your aperature should be set to this amount too. Read the BIOS owner manual for further non-general performance tricks or improvements! Do you have the latest BIOS firmware version?
7. Under hardware properties, check to see that everything is working properly, and fix any hardware contention issues. You'll see the dreaded yellow exclamation point (!) beside any hardware componenet that is not working correctly.
8. Evaluate the potential for system/hardware upgrades...usually, the best bang for the buck is adding memory so buy all that you can afford (don't go much above 512 megs for Win 98 or ME). If you have a motherboard with an 8x - capable AGP port but you are using an older 4x video card, consider upgrading to an 8x card. You get the idea here...
9. Quit using software pigs like Norton system utilities, etc. These place files everywhere and can be a real system resource hog on lower end PCs.
10. Did I mention to make a good backup? Do it now! Also, while you're at it, run a good virus program with the latest definitions.
There are more options to make your system faster, such as overclocking, etc. but (just about) everything I've mentioned in this tech post costs you nothing and will result in faster system performance! Good luck and if you have any questions on how to do anything mentioned here, ask a knowledgeable friend or consult a book, - don't mess up something trying to do something you are not sure of!
Good luck and I'd like to dedicate this post to all of WorldWarez which has given me so much! You're all great, peeps!
10 Things That Make Your Pc Faster, Guaranteed
Make XP go Faster
Services You Can Disable
There are quite a few services you can disable from starting automatically.
This would be to speed up your boot time and free resources.
They are only suggestions so I suggestion you read the description of each one when you run Services
and that you turn them off one at a time.
Some possibilities are:
Alerter
Application Management
Clipbook
Fast UserSwitching
Human Interface Devices
Indexing Service
Messenger
Net Logon
NetMeeting
QOS RSVP
Remote Desktop Help Session Manager
Remote Registry
Routing & Remote Access
SSDP Discovery Service
Universal Plug and Play Device Host
Web Client
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Cleaning the Prefetch Directory
WindowsXP has a new feature called Prefetch. This keeps a shortcut to recently used programs.
However it can fill up with old and obsolete programs.
To clean this periodically go to:
Star / Run / Prefetch
Press Ctrl-A to highlight all the shorcuts
Delete them
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Not Displaying Logon, Logoff, Startup and Shutdown Status Messages
To turn these off:
Start Regedit
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\system
If it is not already there, create a DWORD value named DisableStatusMessages
Give it a value of 1
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Clearing the Page File on Shutdown
Click on the Start button
Go to the Control Panel
Administrative Tools
Local Security Policy
Local Policies
Click on Security Options
Right hand menu - right click on "Shutdown: Clear Virtual Memory Pagefile"
Select "Enable"
Reboot
For regedit users.....
If you want to clear the page file on each shutdown:
Start Regedit
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\ClearPageFileAtShutdown
Set the value to 1
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No GUI Boot
If you don't need to see the XP boot logo,
Run MSCONFIG
Click on the BOOT.INI tab
Check the box for /NOGUIBOOT
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Speeding the Startup of Some CD Burner Programs
If you use program other than the native WindowsXP CD Burner software,
you might be able to increase the speed that it loads.
Go to Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Services
Double-click on IMAPI CD-Burning COM Service
For the Startup Type, select Disabled
Click on the OK button and then close the Services window
If you dont You should notice
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Getting Rid of Unread Email Messages
To remove the Unread Email message by user's login names:
Start Regedit
For a single user: Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\UnreadMail
For all users: Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\UnreadMail
Create a DWORD key called MessageExpiryDays
Give it a value of 0
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Decreasing Boot Time
Microsoft has made available a program to analyze and decrease the time it takes to boot to WindowsXP
The program is called BootVis
Uncompress the file.
Run BOOTVIS.EXE
For a starting point, run Trace / Next Boot + Driver Delays
This will reboot your computer and provide a benchmark
After the reboot, BootVis will take a minute or two to show graphs of your system startup.
Note how much time it takes for your system to load (click on the red vertical line)
Then run Trace / Optimize System
Re-Run the Next Boot + Drive Delays
Note how much the time has decreased
Mine went from approximately 33 to 25 seconds.
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Increasing Graphics Performance
By default, WindowsXP turns on a lot of shadows, fades, slides etc to menu items.
Most simply slow down their display.
To turn these off selectively:
Right click on the My Computer icon
Select Properties
Click on the Advanced tab
Under Performance, click on the Settings button
To turn them all of, select Adjust for best performance
My preference is to leave them all off except for Show shadows under mouse pointer and Show window contents while dragging
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Increasing System Performance
If you have 512 megs or more of memory, you can increase system performance
by having the core system kept in memory.
Start Regedit
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\DisablePagingExecutive
Set the value to be 1
Reboot the computer
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Increasing File System Caching
To increase the amount of memory Windows will locked for I/O operations:
Start Regedit
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
Edit the key IoPageLockLimit
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Resolving Inability to Add or Remove Programs
If a particular user cannot add or remove programs, there might be a simple registry edit neeed.
Go to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Uninstall
Change the DWORD NoAddRemovePrograms to 0 disable it
4096 - 32megs of memory or less
8192 - 32+ megs of memory
16384 - 64+ megs of memory
32768 - 128+ megs of memory
65536 - 256+ megs of memory
NTFS Cluster Size, better Hard Drive Performance
Cluster is an allocation unit. If you create file lets say 1 byte in size, at least one cluster should be allocated on FAT file system. On NTFS if file is small enough, it can be stored in MFT record itself without using additional clusters. When file grows beyond the cluster boundary, another cluster is allocated. It means that the bigger the cluster size, the more disk space is wasted, however, the performance is better.
So if you have a large hard drive & dont mind wasteing some space, format it with a larger cluster size to gain added performance.
The following table shows the default values that Windows NT/2000/XP uses for NTFS formatting:
Drive size
(logical volume) Cluster size Sectors
----------------------------------------------------------
512 MB or less 512 bytes 1
513 MB - 1,024 MB (1 GB) 1,024 bytes (1 KB) 2
1,025 MB - 2,048 MB (2 GB) 2,048 bytes (2 KB) 4
2,049 MB and larger 4,096 bytes (4 KB) 8
However, when you format the partition manually, you can specify cluster size 512 bytes, 1 KB, 2 KB, 4 KB, 8 KB, 16 KB, 32 KB, 64 KB in the format dialog box or as a parameter to the command line FORMAT utility.
The performance comes thew the bursts from the hard drive. by having a larger cluster size you affectivly have a larger chunk of data sent to ram rather than having to read multiple smaller chunks of the same data.
How to Copy to, Move to and Send to button in Right Click Menu
Just Copy code and paste it in notepad.
==============================================================
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Copy To]
@="{C2FBB630-2971-11d1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Move To]
@="{C2FBB631-2971-11d1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Send To]
@="{7BA4C740-9E81-11CF-99D3-00AA004AE837}"
=============================================================
Before you start please backup your registry
how to backup registry guide links below
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/registry.htm
A Few Words About Exploits
What is an Exploit?
Well to explain this simply, a Exploit is a program that 'exploits' a bugin a specific software. All exploits are different, they do different thingsexploit different bugs, thats why exploits are allways program specific.Exploits are made to get root on different operating systems. They achive this by exploiting a bug in software when the software is running as root.In UNIX type OS's, software may have to run as root ( or UID 0 ) in order toperform a specific task that cannot be performed as another user. So basicallythe exploit crashes the software while running as root to give you the beautifulroot prompt.
How do I use a exploit?
Since exploits are coded in C 99% of the time, you need a shell on the box you are going to use the exploit on, OR, you need to be running the same OS as the box you are attempting to hack. So basically, you need to put the source
code, or the binary in your shell accounts dir, ( you want to use a hacked, or a shell not yours for this :) ) to put it on your shell, you can ftp to your account and upload it that way, or you can use rz if you are using a dialup shell. Either way, i shouldnt have to explain those to things to much, its pretty easy.
Once you have the exploit on the box you just need to compile it. Usually you would compile the exploit like so;
blah:~/$gcc exploit.c that should compile your exploit. However, be aware that some exploit coders are sneaky pests, and like to pick on people who dont know C, so they will sometimes insert bugs into the exploit, thus uninabiling it to be compiled. So it does help to know C, when playing with C :)
After the compiling is done, you should beable to just run the exploit and its work will be done when you see the root prompt. however, not all exploits are the same, and might require different commandlines to get them to work.
Create Batch File to Start or End Window Services and Third Parties Services
Warning: Manipulating windows services can have unpredictable effects on your system. You should create a system restore point before experimenting.
We all want to tweak or windows systems to the extreme to get the quickest, most powerful system possible. Many people will disable multiple window services manually before game playing. What a pain!
Many times people forget what the services do or forget to restart the important ones. Services can be easily changed by creating batch files.
The important commands are the following:
NET START - starts the service
NET STOP - ends the service
For example:
NET STOP "Error Reporting Service"
Output: The Error Reporting Service service was stopped successfully.
Knowing the commands, one can now easily create batch files called something like beforegame.bat and aftergame.bat.
Before.bat would contain all the NET STOP commands to end the nonessential services.
After.bat would be exactly the same except all the NET STOP commands would be replaced with NET START commands to restart all the common services.
A sample of the before.bat file might look something like this:
NET STOP "Error Reporting Service"
NET STOP "FTP Publishing Service"
SET STOP "IIS Admin"
NET STOP "Messenger"
Likewise, the after.bat file might look something like this:
NET START "Error Reporting Service"
NET START "FTP Publishing Service"
SET START "IIS Admin"
NET START "Messenger"
You may wish to reference this: list of services that can be disabled.
If your system ever becomes unstable and you want to return the services to their default settings, the default settings for the windows services can be found here.
Impact Of Free Articles On Sales Revenue
Thursday, 10 September 2009
Sometimes you have a hold of a good product or service and all you need is the right avenue to generate massive consumer traffic to your website. However, most conventional advertisers look at banner advertisement and off-line marketing tactics rather than thinking of SEO strategies. The main reason for this is the lack of awareness about the effectiveness and impact of free articles and article marketing.
In a nutshell each time a consumer who is looking for a specific product or service types in a keyword into the Internet browser, the Internet browser accesses article directories which have a host of information based on the search query. These are like online libraries which have information on every subject under the sun that is typed in with a keyword. You can easily submit articles into the article directories on particular subjects that are relevant to your website.
Whenever a consumer types in the keyword and it matches most of the relevant items in your article, it will be clawed back by the search engine in response to the search query of the Internet surfer. The more often this happens the more access your website gets because your website link or link to your newsletter is pasted at the bottom of this particular article.
However, it is not enough just to submit one article but you must work on multiple levels and provide fresh and different content to a variety of consumers who are looking for information on the subject you speak of. Once this happens you will establish one way links to your website thereby driving targeted traffic onto your website. This eventually will result in the conversion of potential customers into sales revenue generating consumers.
Once your articles are constantly blanketing the Internet and are accessed by satisfied consumers, they will want to further refer your website to other interested people. This establishes your credibility and reliability in the online industry and thereby increases traffic on a continuous level.
The beauty of this online article marketing strategy is that you simply can create the articles yourself and submit them to article directories. However, if you do not have the time and skill to do this then there are companies who do it at a nominal cost and continuously update articles and populate the article directories with your content and website details.
To get the maximum result you must focus on article syndication and stay on top of the content that you are populating the Internet with. Concentrate on creating articles that hook the consumer by providing them information that satisfies any need that they may have which can be satisfied by your product or service. Then guide them to your website where they can select the items that will help them. This means that your online reputation and credibility will grow over time along with your sales revenue.
Article Source: http://www.ArticleBlast.com
About The Author:
Syndicate free articles to positively impact your online sales at Articlealley.com. The article directory gives you the chance to submit articles and reach out to your target audience.