alßlazina.co∑™ Tips & Tricks

Find out more at Meat.org. shows why everyone would be vegetarian if slaughterhouses had glass walls.

When you connect to a web site your computer sends information back and forth. Some of this information deals with resolving the site name to an IP address, the stuff that TCP/IP really deals with, not words. This is DNS information and is used so that you will not need to ask for the site location each and every time you visit the site. Although Windows XP and Windows XP have a pretty efficient DNS cache, you can increase its overall performance by increasing its size.

You can do this with the registry entries below:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Dnscache\Parameters]

"CacheHashTableBucketSize"=dword:00000001

"CacheHashTableSize"=dword:00000180

"MaxCacheEntryTtlLimit"=dword:0000fa00

"MaxSOACacheEntryTtlLimit"=dword:0000012d

Make a new text file and rename it to dnscache.reg. Then copy and paste the above into it and save it. Merge it into the registry.

Use Google to read HTML copies of huge documents

Ah, Adobe Acrobat. It's free and universally used to view documents exactly as they'd print, but few things bottleneck a browsing session like an 8MB PDF file, especially if your browser crashes before showing it. But we can all benefit from Google's zeal to index everything on Earth. If you've got a Google Docs or Gmail account, uploading or emailing a PDF gives you an option to view its as an HTML, which is going to come through a lot faster. The same holds for PowerPoint presentations, Word 2007 .docx files, and nearly any document you can find in Google search. One of those work-arounds that's so simple, you'll be glad when you remember it when you're trying to jam through that presentation on a terrible hotel Wi-Fi connection.

1. Clean Up Registry

The Windows registry is a database repository for information about a computer's configuration. The registry keep growing when you use Windows. With the growing of the registry, it can degrade the performance of the whole system and cause many weird software problems. Be cautious and try to use a registry-cleaning program like PC Washer, which will not only clean out your registry but it will take care of several of some other issues as well.

2. Defragment

When you save a file on your computer it goes to the first available space on your hard drive. When that gets filled up it stores other parts of your file in the next available place, then the next place, and so on. When files become fragmented like this, the computer has to spend time searching the hard drive to piece them back together. This process slows you and your system down. Luckily, this is a fairly easy fix. Simply follow these steps: For a PC, go to Start menu and open your Programs menu. From there go to Accessories then Program Tools. You should see the icon for the Disk Defragmentation program in that menu. Simply click on it and windows will begin the defrag process. Be advised, however, that this process usually takes a long time so it could be something you set up to run before you go to bed or before you go to work in the morning.

3. Get Rid of Junk Files

In using a computer from day to day you're going to accumulate junk files. Some of them are a result of surfing the Web, and others will be left by programs you use. Internet browsers provide a way to remove cache files, but if you want to dig deeper and get rid of all the junk, PC Washer can help you. I also recommend that you defragment your computer after you've removed a lot of junk. Remember, if you take good care of your computer, it will work better and last longer.

4. Turn Off Unnecessary Services

Turning off unnecessary services in Windows XP can greatly reduce your exploit risk, while improving system performance. It's a good time to inject that often there are all sorts of "download optimizers" and other cute programs that vendors like to push on users. Most of the time, installing such things slows your computer down at best. It could subject you to potential security risks. The first rule is "If you don't know you need it, you probably don't.

5. Remove Old Programs

Have things installed on your computer that you haven’t used in ages? Do you even know what’s installed on your computer? It’s possible all these old programs could clog up your hard drive and slow your computer down. Go to your Start menu and select the Control Panel and then Add or Remove programs. It will bring up a list of all the programs that are installed on your computer and also tell you how often you use them. If the answer is “never,” you can most likely safely uninstall the programs and free up valuable space.

6. Remove Unnecessary Startup programs

One way you can speed up your computer is to prevent programs from launching themselves at start-up. Not only do the unwanted programs delay the start of Windows, they also continue to slow down your computer since they use system resources.

7. Check for Spyware and Adware

Spyware is software that allows companies to monitor what websites you visit or even access your computer. Adware is software that displays advertisements. Both use system resources and slow your computer down. Detecting and removing the programs will improve system performance.

8. Adjust Visual Effects for Better Performance

Windows XP provides a number of interesting visual effects like animated windows and fading menus. These effects, however, can slow down your computer. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to customize the visual effects to match your preferences and performance needs.

9. Clean Up Your Desktop

Some of you, and you know who you are, have virtual desktops that are just as messy as your real desktops. This may not seem like a big deal, but it’s important enough that windows will give you little nudging reminders to clean up your desktop (which, if you’re like me, you promptly ignore). Go through all the stuff you have on your desktop, delete the shortcuts you no longer use, and organize all the remaining miscellaneous files.

10. Install Updates

Keeping your computers operating system and drivers up to date is very important in maintaining performance. Updates also help make your computer more secure and reliable, improving performance indirectly as well. Most Windows updates can be downloaded from the Internet and installed (mine does this automatically) but you can use the Windows Update site to gain access to the updates as well. This site is accessible only if you’re running Internet Explorer (IE).

More and more developers and established web sites are moving their services online and using JavaScript to create interactive web pages these days. So when you're browsing Flickr, MySpace/Facebook, or nearly anything made by Google, as a few examples, the speed at which your browser runs all the developers' code can matter a lot. For more responsive pages, it's hard to beat the mind-blowing speed of TraceMonkey, the new JavaScript engine for Firefox 3.1. Mozilla offers nightly builds of TraceMonkey-enabled Firefox 3.1 (called "Minefield" when you run it, because it can be a bit, well, buggy), but Windows users can also test drive 3.1 without harming their existing Firefox. Of course, depending on who you ask (and which test you run), Google Chrome's V8 and the brand-new script engine in WebKit, the foundation of Safari, are potentially faster. In any case, your current browser probably isn't this fast, so taking these speed demons for a test drive can't hurt.

Right-clicking a picture or link, selecting "Save Link As," choosing a download spot—it gets real old, real fast, especially if you try to do it on every picture in a Flickr set, every MP3 on a music blog, or anywhere else you do your downloading. Free Firefox extension DownThemAll, our readers' favorite download manager, makes it easy to do all those things, or set up smart filters and settings to make any page with tons of files easy to navigate. For a good guide on setting that up, try our tutorial on supercharging your Firefox downloads with DownThemAll.

When the browser makes a request for a static image and sends cookies together with the request, the server doesn't have any use for those cookies. So they only create network traffic for no good reason. You should make sure static components are requested with cookie-free requests. Create a subdomain and host all your static components there.

If your domain is www.example.org, you can host your static components on static.example.org. However, if you've already set cookies on the top-level domain example.org as opposed to www.example.org, then all the requests to static.example.org will include those cookies. In this case, you can buy a whole new domain, host your static components there, and keep this domain cookie-free. Yahoo! uses yimg.com, YouTube uses ytimg.com, Amazon uses images-amazon.com and so on.

Another benefit of hosting static components on a cookie-free domain is that some proxies might refuse to cache the components that are requested with cookies. On a related note, if you wonder if you should use example.org or www.example.org for your home page, consider the cookie impact. Omitting www leaves you no choice but to write cookies to *.example.org, so for performance reasons it's best to use the www subdomain and write the cookies to that subdomain.

To download files faster with Firefox you have a Firefox extension DownloadThemAll. It acts as your download manager

Enabling Pipelining

In Firefox the pipeline option is turned off. Enabling the pipelining will allow you to send several request to the web server at a time. To enable it follow the steps below

Step 1: Type about:config into the address bar and press Enter

Step 2: Go to the Filter text box and type network.http. The settings will appear, look at the nearby figure.

Step 2: Go to the Filter text box and type network.http. The settings will appear, look at the nearby figure.

P.S: This is for version Firefox 1.X-2.X

Here's a tweek that will help you to adjust the amount of RAM used by Firefox.

Step 1: In the address bar type about:config and press Enter

Step 2: At the top of the page you get Filter text box. Type browser.cache in it.

Step 3: Double click the browser.cache.memory.capacity

Step 4: It is set at default 50000. in case your system doesn't have lot of memory, like 512 MB or 1GB reduce the number to 15000 and click Ok.

June 17th, 2009 Now if there's an advanced feature in any web browser, no sooner that turns into Firefox extension. Imitating Opera's Speed Dial, Firefox got the Speed dial extension.

back