2607 Smallvoid.com - Windows Tips and Tweaking

Fighting with Vista on a small system partition

15 June 2008 by Snakefoot | No Comments » | Trackback Off
I changed from Windows 2000 to Vista some time ago, and low and behold Vista uses a wee bit more disk space. Sadly enough the system partition is only 15 GByte, so it is a "daily" struggle to keep disk usage down (Especially when SP1 had to be installed). Right now there is 2 GByte available free space, after installing all my usual applications, this lead me down the futile road of trying to minimize the size of the Windows install. Note AVG is frequently nagging about upgrading to version 8.0, and the new AVG version introduces a Link Scanner plugin. The Link Scanner will be installed even if selecting not to install it. The Link Scanner will make hooks into you web-browser, and be activated whenever a link is clicked or a search result is displayed. If not interested in having this babysitter around, then one can uninstall it with this command-line (Better than disabling as it will prevent the warning about an AVG component not running):

avg_free_stf_*.exe /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch

Updated service guides with Vista SP1 and WinXP SP3

27 May 2008 by Snakefoot | No Comments » | Trackback Off
Microsoft have made Vista even more stable with SP1 (though the major contributor is probably Vista ready drivers), and have at the same time given XP some love by collecting all patches released since SP2 into a single tested SP3 package.

Vista SP1 introduces a new Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol service, which allows VPN over SSL and makes it easier to setup VPN connections.

WinXP SP3 now also includes the Network Access Protection Agent, which makes it easier to protect the network against simple user mistakes, such as forgetting to apply security and antivirus updates. The Wireless Zero Configuration have been split into two, so now it only takes care of Wireless 802.1X authentication, while the new Wired AutoConfig service takes care of wired connections.

Note Firefox 3 RC1 also seem ready for prime time (besides the usual bug fixes). Been using FF3 the last few weeks and it has been very stable (Had to upgrade my firefox addons and the Flash Player plugin manually). Really like the new features in the address-bar, but I miss the persistent Go-button. Another new feature is the ability to duplicate a tab by holding down the CTRL-key while dragging the tab with the mouse (Would be nice with a right-click option). Detailed list of Changes in Firefox 3 14ee

Investigating the new Vista networking features

29 November 2007 by Snakefoot | No Comments » | Trackback Off
Windows Vista includes support of several new network features if they are available on the network interface card (also possible with Win2k3 SP2). One of the new features is the Receive-side Scaling (RSS), which actually solves the issue of MMCSS needing to throttle network traffic, as it offloads the handling of interrupts and DPC to other CPU cores. Though one cannot use RSS if using Internet Connection Sharing (ICS).

Scratching the surface of the Vista boot manager

30 October 2007 by Snakefoot | No Comments » | Trackback Off
Seems a lot of people like to save hard-disk space using NTFS compression, but accidently also compresses the boot manager files so it fails to boot.

Have added some articles about the Vista Boot Manager and system recovery:

Upgraded bbPress forum and enhanced blog search

5 October 2007 by Snakefoot | No Comments » | Trackback Off
Have now upgraded the bbPress forum to ver. 0.83, eventhough it is marked as an update to be compatible with Wordpress 2.3 then it still works fine with WP 2.0.

Have also modified the Wordpress blog search, so now it displays the categories which contains matching posts (This is also used when showing posts with a certain tag). Instead of showing the categories at the top of the search result, then I'm considering to move the relevant category listing into the sidebar.

Added the following articles:

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