Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP Tweaks, Tips and Secrets!

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.

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).

A long load time when a user starts Internet Explorer is one of the most common performance issues seen with Internet Explorer 8. The primary cause of this problem is third-party add-ons that were either preloaded on a new computer or bundled with other software and installed over time. These extra mini programs must be loaded along with the core Internet Explorer code every time Internet Explorer is launched

To showcase the new touch technologies in Windows 7, Microsoft created the Windows 7 Touch pack originally just for OEM manufactures to ship with new computers with integrated touch hardware, the touch is now available to the public. Included are six programs that range from fun touch enabled programs to mini games.

If your computer has some RAM to spare, RAM drives are perfect for increasing the performance of any application that must read and write a lot of data. Using a special kernel mode driver along with system memory, a temporary RAM drive can be created that is significantly faster than traditional storage. Spindle based hard drives found in almost every computer have a maximum read and write speed of around 100 MB per second. The performances of RAM drives are only limited by the speed of the memory and chipset. That results in read and writes speeds well above 1 GB per second and on high end systems much faster.

Taskbar Meters expand the Windows 7 taskbar beyond the static icon and dynamically update to show the utilization of system resources. Made up of three separate programs, Taskbar Meters show CPU usage, disk IO and memory utilization.

By default Internet Explorer stores a user’s temporary internet files within a user profile typically located under C:\Users or C:\Documents and Settings. This setting can be easily be changed within Internet Explorer.