Quick Aero Glass Speed Tip

The transparent glass effect in Windows 7 looks very nice but on some computers that have underpowered video adapters users will see a performance hit when running the transparent glass effect.  Animations are slow and choppy and simple tasks like moving around windows on your screen is not very smooth. One way to speed up Windows 7 and keep the benefits of Aero, such as animations, flip 3D and taskbar thumbnails, is to disable glass transparency.This helps significantly on my Windows 7 netbook that does has a weak integrated graphics chip.

    1. Click on the desktop and select Personalize.

    2. Click Windows Color.

    3. Uncheck Enable Transparency.

    4. Click Save changes.

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Improve Sync Performance In iTunes For Windows

On my PC the longest part of the sync process in iTunes with my iPhone or iPad is the device backup. Taking up to an hour at times I can live without a backup. Especially since I jailbreak my devices which makes ever restoring a backup after an OS upgrade a bad idea.

There are two methods to disable the device backup feature. First, I'm going to show you the manual tweak.

Manual Method
Apple made it very difficult to disable the automatic device backup feature manually by burying the setting deep in a configuration file. In order to make the change you will need a good XML text editor. I suggest using the free Notepad++ that you can download here.

First, make sure iTunes is closed and create a backup of the iTunes Preferences file located in C:\Users\Your Username\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes\ called iTunesPrefs.xml.

Open up C:\Users\Your Username\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes\iTunesPrefs.xml in your text editor and go to the <key>User Preferences</key> section.

Then copy and paste the code below just after the <dict> node of the User Preferences section as shown below.

<key>DeviceBackupsDisabled</key>
<data>
dHJ1ZQ==
</data>

Save the file and start iTunes. The device backup should now be skipped when syncing.

Automated Method

If you want a fully automated approach there is a free app called iPhone Backup Switch that you can download from here.

Just run the utility and when iTunes is closed click the Disable iPhone Backup in iTunes button.

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Improve SATA Hard Disk Performance (Convert From IDE to AHCI)

Every hard drive in a modern computer is connected to the system through a storage controller. This controller typically can communicate with the hard drive via a number of different interface protocols. For maximum compatibility many computers are configured in the BIOS to use the older IDE interface protocol to communicate with modern SATA hard drives. This setting is acceptable for the average computer user but IDE lacks support for new technologies such as native command queuing (NCQ) and hot-plugging hard drives (add or remove drives without restarting the computers).

Intel invented a new storage controller interface known as AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) that supports these new technologies with modern SATA hard drives. If you have a hard drive that supports NCQ, it is worth a try to see if your disk performance improves with your workload.

The main problem preventing users from changing the storage interface protocol from IDE to AHCI in the past has been blue screens that could only be cured by undoing the BIOS change or reinstalling Windows. The cause of the problem is the mass storage driver installed when Windows was first setup. Since IDE was enabled at install only the IDE storage driver was configured in Windows. With the AHCI driver missing, Windows cannot read from the hard drive and throws a BSOD with error code 0x0000005B.

Now there is an easy solution that will allow you to switch between IDE and AHCI in the bios and Windows will boot without any problems. The key is to enable the AHCI driver in Windows before you make the setting change in the BIOS.

For most users this will work:

    1. Open Registry Editor and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci.

    2. Right click on the Start registry DWORD and select Modify.

    3. Set the value to 0 and click OK.

    4. Now the Start setting should be set to 0.

    5. Reboot and enable the AHCI setting in your BIOS.

If you are using a RAID adapter or other interface try the following:

    1. Open up Registry Editor and naviage to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\iaStorV OR HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\iaStor.

    2. Repeat the steps above.

Not all users will see a major performance improvement with AHCI and a SATA hard drive but NCQ can be very helpful under the right workload. Post your experience and setup in the comments below.

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Improve Responsiveness By Disabling Min/Max Animations

The minimize and maximize window animations that first debuted in Windows Vista were an improvement over the effect in Windows XP. While this new effect had a high “cool factor” (especially with the slow motion key) it eventually wore off and created an unnecessary delay when switching between windows. 

Disabling the effect will instantly make your computer feel more responsive and faster. Give it a try and see for yourself:

    1. Click on the Start Button and type in SystemPropertiesPerformance and hit Enter.

    2. On the Visual Effects tab locate and remove the check from Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing.

    3. Click OK.

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Improve Old Application Disk Performance

Do you have old programs that have slow disk performance on Windows Vista or Windows 7? If so, you can squeeze a little more performance out of your hard disk by enabling what I call compatibility mode for your file system.  This speeds up the performance of your hard disk by changing how write caching works. However, if your computer is not connected to a battery backup and you loose power you have a increased risk for data loss or corruption. If you have a laptop your chances are data loss or corruption are dramatically less since your laptop battery will kick on if your power source is lost. Let's get started:

    1. Click on the Start Button and key in Device Manager and hit Enter.

    2. Expand Disk Drives.

    3. Right click on your hard drive and select Properties.

    4. On the Policies tab:

        Windows Vista: Check Enable advanced performance
        Windows 7: Check Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device.

    5. Hit OK and close Device Manager.

Read about the interesting history of this feature on Windows Confidential.

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How To: Detect What Process Is Thrashing Your Hard Drive

Every once in a while you notice that your hard drive is working extra hard for what seems like no reason.  A background process has taken your hard drive hostage, forcing it to thrash loudly as it struggles to keep up with the high rate of reads and writes.  Your computer responds slowly as the process overloads the physical limitations of your drive. What are you to do?

The solution is simple, although a little tricky at times: identify and stop the process that is killing your drive.  There are two methods and tools that you can use to identify the process.

Method 1

    1. Click on the Start Button and key in perfmon.exe /res and hit Enter. This should launch the Resource Monitor on Windows 7 and Windows Vista.

    2. On the overview screen click on the Disk section down arrow to see a list of all processes and the files they are writing or reading from your drives.

    3. Click on the Read, Write or Total headings to sort all disk operations to identify which process and file is currently using the disk the most.

Method 2

    1. Visit Microsoft’s Sysinternals web site and download Process Explorer.

    2. After you have started Process Explorer, click on the View menubar item and then Select Columns.

    3. Click on the Process I/O tab and check:

        - Reads

        - Read Bytes

        - Writes

        - Write Bytes

    4. Hit OK.

    5. You will now see the new columns listed for each process. To identify what process is killing your hard drive, just look for the process with the highest number of Reads or Bytes.

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Fix Broken And Slow Tab Issues In Internet Explorer 8

Some users that upgraded to Internet Explorer 8 experience issues with tabs not working properly or taking a very long time to load.  It seems for most users the issue can be attributed to a problem with actxprxy.dll not installing properly during the upgrade.  If you have a similar problem with IE8, fixing the issue is as simple as a running one command.

Just open up an administrative level command prompt and type in regsvr32 actxprxy.dll and hit Enter. Reboot your computer and your tab issue should be resolved.

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