Posted 12/15/2008 at 02:51:54am

If you notice, that tip was cleverly hidden under a "Vista tips" header.

But it's no matter; it's simply known by a less glittery name under Windows XP: "Prefetch", which serves the same purpose. It's also enabled by default. You don't need to do anything to enable it, however there is a registry tweak to disable it. I do those adjustments while building my Windows installations in nLite, so I don't know where to do it post-installation. Google is your friend there. :)

Posted 12/14/2008 at 07:15:16am

Okay, okay, one more and I'll shut up.

The best Vista performance tip, to get the most work and least headaches out of your computer?

It's called an XP disc, and perhaps nLite.

Sorry, I had to say it! ;)

Posted 12/14/2008 at 07:12:26am

One last comment, of course.

Be careful about telling people to turn off 8.3 filename support. For some ridiculous reason, Windows XP itself still refers to the Program Files folder as "PROGRA~1" (its 8.3 filename) in some areas of the registry. On a computer I sold to someone, where I did an experimental drive-splitting cooperative-RAID, I installed Windows, created an empty folder called "Program Fails", mapped the secondary drive to that folder (so it became a mounted drive), moved the contents of the Program Files folder to the drive, then deleted Program Files and renamed Program Fails to Program Files.

The system booted and worked fine, but later down the line mysterious quirks started coming up. Uninstallers wouldn't run (claiming missing DLLs from PROGRA~1, a detail I overlooked at the time - but the DLLs were there), Windows Installer kept wanting to reinstall programs when I tried to run them, program and file icons went missing, almost all tied to Windows Installer. I didn't understand the problem until I tried CD'ing to C:\PROGRA~1, and being told that there was no such folder - it was now called PROGRA~2 because of the similar name I originally gave it! I had to use a registry search-and-replace tool to locate all instances of PROGRA~1 and replace them with PROGRA~2... hundreds, maybe thousands of entries.

Moral of the story is, it may be defunct, but Windows APIs still rely on them for some god-forsaken reason. I wouldn't suggest doing it. If it's disabled, the 8.3 filename for new files becomes "blank", with no way for an 8.3 API to access the files. Not good for relieving a PC tech's headache. ;)

Posted 12/14/2008 at 07:03:07am

Okay, I've been a Maximum PC reader since the years when "1 GHZ!!" was all over the cover in huge caps. And I've been tweaking and building/repairing computers since MFM and RLL hard drives were relevant, and BIOSes actually used those numbered "drive type" settings.
 And I've got two serious problems to complain about in this article. Three, if you count Vistaids.
 First, the header (and therein, verdict) on "You Need To Overwrite Your Hard Drive Seven Times With Random Data To Make Data Unrecoverable: TRUE" doesn't even match the article text below it.  The whole article text was summarizing that it's impossible to recover data after one pass of zeroes (which is true). So therefore, the myth that you'd have to overwrite it 7 times is actually FALSE.
 My second and most serious gripe is an issue that truly should have come to light at least 2 years ago, and it involves page file "optimization". The only TRUE way to optimize a page file on modern Windows computers is to entirely _DISABLE_ it. Windows has been capable of running entirely devoid of a page file holding the system back, since XP SP2 was released. Unfortunately, many people on the internet seem to disagree, primarily due to the lack of media attention this tweak has received.
The fact of the matter is, Windows' memory management model is to "conserve" physical memory by moving data off to the page file - or, as I believe it's actually implemented, to write pages to the page file and purge them from memory to make room for additional disk cache. That was all well and good back in 1990. Now, computers have 2, 4GB of memory, and people still blindly and ignorantly allow Windows to allocate 1.5x (which is the actual value for Windows' page file calculation by default) of physical memory to the page file - so if you have 4gb RAM (effectively about 3.5gb and a potential for crashing, if you're in a 32-bit OS), you end up with a 4gb page file, limited only because Windows can't allocate any more! The irony is, if you have a 32-bit OS, 4gb RAM, and a page file, Windows won't even be capable of utilizing the page file in any shape or form (other than slowing down the system) due to the 32-bit processor's inability to address more than 4gb of virtual memory (where virtual memory is defined as any addressable memory space) within a 32-bit system. So a page file is entirely worthless - it just slows the system down. Even if it does not slow the system down, the only purpose it serves is a potential for slowdowns by the potenial for Windows to swap pages out to disk. That is all.
So I just wanted to bring this issue to light before this false "optimize the page file" tweak gets spread any further in this day and age. The only true way to optimize a page file on a modern Windows PC is to disable it entirely. I would know; I've been running my main PC without a page file for almost 4 years. Why would I suggest something that hasn't worked for me?