7 Ways to Speed Up Windows Vista

There are many ways to speed up Windows Vista. Some methods are more straight forward than the other and some will help you see huge improvements to the performance of Windows while others offer less noticeable results. Here we will look at 7 most effective ways to speed up Windows Vista from my personal experience.

Turn off unnecessary Windows features.

By default, Vista comes with tons of features that are enabled based on assumptions which may or may not apply to you. Hence you get a system that is running lots of background processes, most of which you do not need at all. So one of the great ways to speed up Windows Vista is to disable them. To see the list of Windows features and turn them on or off, go to Control Panel, change to "Classic View", click on "Program Features" and then select "Turn Windows Features On And Off". Some examples of features you may want to disable are:

- Remote Differential Compression

- Windows Meeting Space

- Tablet PC optional components

- And so on.

Graphical features.

One of the better ways to speed up Windows Vista is to turn off fanciful graphical features if you are not too much into aesthetics. One example is the Aero feature. Open your start menu, go to run, and type in 'systempropertiesperformance'. At the Visual Effects tab, uncheck 'Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing'. This will do the job. There are many graphical features that you can take out from here. This can give you more immediate results as compared to other ways to speed up Windows Vista.

Turn off Windows Indexing.

The Windows Indexing service was initially designed to be one of the ways to speed up Windows Vista by shortening the search time for files. However, as the volume of hard disk increases exponentially, the service has proven to be a resource intensive program causing massive slowdowns when Windows start to index the millions of files in the system. Select Start then choose Computer, right click on your C Drive and select properties. Under the General Tab, uncheck "Index this drive for faster searching". On the next dialog box, choose "Include subfolders and files". Do the same for the other Drives.

Remove Spyware and Trojans and protect your system against future attacks.

Out of the many ways to speed up Windows Vista, this has to be one of the most crucial things you need to do. This is because not only your system performance is at stake, the security and confidentiality of your data is too. Use free tools such as Avast for anti-virus protection, Spybot for spyware removal and protection as well as Zonealarm for firewall protection. There are other good tools around but make sure they are not spywares themselves!

Remove unnecessary start up programs.

When Vista boots up, many programs run at the start up either in the background or as pop up Windows. Many of these you do not need. You need to take control and eliminate these memory suckers that are lurking in the background. Open your start menu, go to run, and type in 'msconfig', choose the Startup tab and uncheck any items that you do not want to auto-load and click OK.

Defrag your hard disk.

This may not be new to you but if you are thinking of using the Windows Defragmentation Tool in Vista, you can forget about it. Instead, use a free 3rd party tool known as Defraggler (Google it for the download link). It is still quite effective in comparison to other ways to speed up Windows Vista.

Clean your registry.

One of the often neglected portions of Windows is the registry itself. Many do not realized that one of the best ways to speed up Windows Vista is to make sure the registry is clear of invalid entries that causes Windows to perform unnecessary tasks. Cleaning the registry has other advantages too. In certain cases you can remove Windows errors that pop up during boot up.

George Tho is an IT support specialist. One of the best ways to speed up Windows Vista is using registry cleaners. Read his review on the top 3 Registry Cleaners that come with free scanning features to help you improve your system's performance and remove errors.

By George Tho

Author's review website on clickbank products: http://www.clickbankproductreview.com
Disclaimer: The content of this article is provided for the purpose of education and illustration only. This article may be freely reprinted or distributed in its entirety in any ezine, newsletter, blog or website. The author's name, bio and website links must remain intact and be included with every reproduction

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Basic Configuration Tutorial For the Cisco ASA 5510 Firewall

Continuing our series of articles about Cisco ASA 5500 firewalls, I'm offering you here a basic configuration tutorial for the Cisco ASA 5510 security appliance. This device is the second model in the ASA series (ASA 5505, 5510, 5520 etc) and is fairly popular since is intended for small to medium enterprises. Like the smallest ASA 5505 model, the 5510 comes with two license options: The Base license and the Security Plus license. The second one (security plus) provides some performance and hardware enhancements over the base license, such as 130,000 Maximum firewall connections (instead of 50,000), 100 Maximum VLANs (instead of 50), Failover Redundancy, etc. Also, the security plus license enables two of the five firewall network ports to work as 10/100/1000 instead of only 10/100.

Next we will see a simple Internet Access scenario which will help us understand the basic steps needed to setup an ASA 5510. Assume that we are assigned a static public IP address 100.100.100.1 from our ISP. Also, the internal LAN network belongs to subnet 192.168.10.0/24. Interface Ethernet0/0 will be connected on the outside (towards the ISP), and Ethernet0/1 will be connected to the Inside LAN switch.

The firewall will be configured to supply IP addresses dynamically (using DHCP) to the internal hosts. All outbound communication (from inside to outside) will be translated using Port Address Translation (PAT) on the outside public interface. Let's see a snippet of the required configuration steps for this basic scenario:

Step1: Configure a privileged level password (enable password)

By default there is no password for accessing the ASA firewall, so the first step before doing anything else is to configure a privileged level password, which will be needed to allow subsequent access to the appliance. Configure this under Configuration Mode:

ASA5510(config)# enable password mysecretpassword

Step2: Configure the public outside interface

ASA5510(config)# interface Ethernet0/0

ASA5510(config-if)# nameif outside

ASA5510(config-if)# security-level 0

ASA5510(config-if)# ip address 100.100.100.1 255.255.255.252

ASA5510(config-if)# no shut

Step3: Configure the trusted internal interface

ASA5510(config)# interface Ethernet0/1

ASA5510(config-if)# nameif inside

ASA5510(config-if)# security-level 100

ASA5510(config-if)# ip address 192.168.10.1 255.255.255.0

ASA5510(config-if)# no shut

Step 4: Configure PAT on the outside interface

ASA5510(config)# global (outside) 1 interface

ASA5510(config)# nat (inside) 1 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0

Step 5: Configure Default Route towards the ISP (assume default gateway is 100.100.100.2)

ASA5510(config)# route outside 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 100.100.100.2 1

Step 6: Configure the firewall to assign internal IP and DNS address to hosts using DHCP

ASA5510(config)# dhcpd dns 200.200.200.10

ASA5510(config)# dhcpd address 192.168.10.10-192.168.10.200 inside

ASA5510(config)# dhcpd enable inside

The above basic configuration is just the beginning for making the appliance operational. There are many more configuration features that you need to implement to increase the security of your network, such as Static and Dynamic NAT, Access Control Lists to control traffic flow, DMZ zones, VPN etc.

Visit my website in my resource box below for more information about Cisco products and solutions. You can also learn how to configure any Cisco ASA 5500 Firewall Here (applicable for ALL ASA models running software versions 7.x and 8.x).

By Harris Andrea

You can check out my website for more Cisco configuration examples and other related details about designing and implementing Cisco solutions: Cisco Tips and Tutorials

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Windows XP Registry Power Policies - How to Manipulate Power Policies in Windows XP Registry

Want to manipulate your PC or laptop's power policies using Windows XP registry? The steps are simple and enable you to quickly modify the power policy of your PC or laptop with a double click. Of course you need to know what you are doing to your registry which is what this article is about.

Before we go on to talk about modifying Windows XP registry power policies, please note that you need to make sure that the power schemes are set according your preferences. To do so, right click on your desktop and click on "Properties". Go to the "Screen Saver" tab and click on "Power" button. Then you can start to modify the power schemes to suit your preference. The steps are particular to XP but Vista should have similar interface though I am not absolutely sure. After you have done so, then you can now choose which power scheme you want using Windows XP registry power policies setting which is much faster than going through the steps above. You just need to prepare one registry file for each scheme and double click on the one you want to set subsequently. It is fast and convenient.

I mentioned that in order to modify Windows XP registry power policies, you need one registry file for each scheme. There are 6 power schemes in XP so you will need 6 registry files. Launch notepad and paste the following content removing texts in brackets:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
(blank line)
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/PowerCfg] (replace the forward slashes with black slashes)
"CurrentPowerPolicy"="0"

And then save the file as "scheme1.reg". You can choose any name you want but the file must have the extension .reg. You should have noticed that the "CurrentPowerPolicy" is set to 0 which refers to scheme 1 which is "Home/Office Desk" scheme in XP. You can now proceed to create 5 more registry files for the rest of the schemes.

What you need to do to apply the Windows XP registry power policies setting is simply to double click on the registry file that you want to set the scheme for. When prompted on whether you are sure you want to add the information to the registry, just click Yes. If you see any error, chances are you have not created the registry file properly. Make sure there is no space before or on top of the sentence "Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00" and make sure you replaced the forward slashes with back slashes. Manipulating Windows XP registry power policies will be a breeze from now on.

George Tho is an IT support specialist. Read his review on the top 3 Registry Cleaners that come with free scanning features for you to improve performance of Windows on your system and remove errors caused by registry.

By George Tho

Author's review website on Clickbank products: http://www.clickbankproductreview.com

Disclaimer: The content of this article is provided for the purpose of education and illustration only. This article may be freely reprinted or distributed in its entirety in any ezine, newsletter, blog or website. The author's name, bio and website links must remain intact and be included with every reproduction

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=George_Tho

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Windows Background Wallpaper Registry Settings - Tweak Windows Background Wallpaper With Registry

Windows background wallpaper registry settings enables users not just to change the wallpaper itself but users can also choose to restrict or allow the change of wallpapers. Such a feature may be applicable for companies who do not want their employees or public users to modify the wallpaper of their desktop PCs or laptops. On the other hand, if you find that you are not able to change the wallpaper of your personal computer, you may want to look at the registry settings to see if the change of wallpaper has been restricted and thus undo it. Let's look at how to modify Windows background wallpaper registry settings.

Let's look at how you can restrict or enable the change wallpaper feature. You will need to prepare a registry file with the following content:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
(blank line)
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/policies/ActiveDesktop] (please replace the forward slashes with backslash)
"NoChangingWallPaper"=dword:00000001

Save the file as "XXXX.reg" and double click on it. Select Yes when prompted and the Windows background wallpaper registry setting should have been applied. However, if your PC is affected by a group policy which may be the case for company desktops, then this method may not work.

If you would like to change the wallpaper using registry, go to Start --> Run and type in regedit. Go to folder HKEY_CURRENT_USERControl PanelDesktop and look for Wallpaper, double click on it and change the path to point to your desired wallpaper.

If the above steps to tweak Windows background wallpaper registry settings are just too much hassle for you, you can download a free tool known as Tweak UI (Just do a search on Google). This freeware not only allow you to play with Windows background wallpaper registry settings, but also other aspect of Windows UI such as the taskbar. Users of slower computers can use it to improve performance of Windows by turning off fanciful graphical features on the operating system.

George Tho is an IT support specialist. Read his review on the top 3 Registry Cleaners that come with free scanning features for you to improve performance of Windows on your system and remove errors caused by registry.

By George Tho

Author's review website on Clickbank products: http://www.clickbankproductreview.com

Disclaimer: The content of this article is provided for the purpose of education and illustration only. This article may be freely reprinted or distributed in its entirety in any ezine, newsletter, blog or website. The author's name, bio and website links must remain intact and be included with every reproduction

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=George_Tho

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How to Buy a Computer the Smart Way

Most of the people buy a computer to navigate on the Internet. They also use it to send a receive emails. Occasionally the computer is being used for working on text documents or other types of documents. Today even the worst computer may do this with no problems. And this at very low costs. If this is your case too, you need a computer with no special features. It will surely help you with everything you need.

But maybe your requests are higher. Maybe you need to edit images. Or access a data base, perform table calculus. Many of us will often play computer games. If you want to be able to play the latest games you should consider a last generation computer. Even if the technology advances in a great rhythm, buying a top computer will save you money in the future. This is because it will face the software requirements of the future with no problems. The most active segments on the computer market is the gaming PC segment and computers designed specifically or games.

The gamers spend hundreds of dollars on the latest graphics boards and processors. From Dual Core to Quad Core, performances keep increasing. Playing computer games is more than a hobby or a passion for the people who have too much money. It's a billions of dollars industry.

In the end, there is one simple advice on how to buy a computer. The sellers will try to sell you components that you will never need as a simple user. As a person who doesn't play that much on the computer but just uses it for its functionality, the cheapest computer will do everything you need at the speed you need. So just buy the computer that satisfies your minimal requirements. And don't let yourself fooled in buying components or performances you don't need.

By Sturat Mitchel

Sturat enjoys writing articles on topics like How to buy a computer and How to start in safe mode. For more information you can visit us

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My Computer Keeps Crashing - Has This Happened to You?

If you are asking the question "Why does my computer keep crashing?" then you are probably having problems with your computer registry and it's now time to take these problems seriously. If you just ignore them, then the crashes will get more frequent and in addition, you will probably also have dll error messages appearing, the dreaded blue screen and a slow running computer performance which will keep getting worse. All in all, not good for the stress levels.

Most computer users are very much unaware of the importance of the computer registry until the problems mentioned start to arise. The registry stores essential data relating to the optimum performance of the applications and programs that you have stored on your system. When the computer is brand new and just out of the box, the system will be running at optimum performance.

However over time, the registry gets overloaded as new programs and applications are added. Conflicts will start to occur with new and existing programs and as a result files become corrupted. Then the problems start to occur.

You could fix the registry yourself by using the reg edit application on your computer. However, unless you are completely sure of what you are doing, I strongly advise against this option. My reason for this, is that if you delete a wrong file you can completely damage or disabled your computer system.

The best and safest option to fix the problem is to run a free scan of your computer registry. The generated report will let you view the corrupted files. This will give you confidence in the software which is simple to use. The companies that own the top registry cleaners state that a top performing computer is only a few mouse clicks away.

So click on the link below for your free scan to cure the problem of your computer crashing. With a money back guarantee, great support and a program that is simple to use, what have you got to lose, except the stress that you are feeling now.

By Michael J Brooks

Michael J Brooks

Run a FREE Registry Scan Repair Now To Fix Your Computer by visiting: http://www.registryfixstore.com/

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How to Start Windows in Safe Mode

To use one of the safe mode options just follow these simple steps:

1. Restart your computer.
2. Press the F8 button on your keyboard. On a computer configured with several operating systems F8 may be pressed whenever the Boot Menu is being displayed.
3. Select one of the options from the Windows Advanced Menu and the simply press Enter.
4. When a new Boot menu is being displayed and the "Safe Mode" words appear in blue, select the install you wish to start with. Then press Enter.

The options you select when you start you computer in safe mode are accepted by Windows. They load a minimum set of drivers that will keep your computer running. This way Windows will be able to load the registry. Also in this stet drivers may be eliminated or added, depending on what you need.

When loading your Windows in safe mode a safety environment variable is being set. The variable's name is SAFEBOOT_OPTION. This may be set to either Network or Minimal. The Microsoft VGA driver is used implicitly. The driver will load 16 colors in a 640 x 480 resolution. In order to modify it you need to be fully connected to the Security account Manager, according to the mode you have opted for.

Here are some of the options you have available when starting in safe mode:

1. Safe mode - sets the SAFEBOOT_OPTION variable to Minimal value
2. Safe Mode with Networking - sets the SAFEBOOT_OPTION variable to Network value
3. Safe Mode with Command Prompt - "cmd.exe" in opened instead of Windows Ecplorer
4. Enable VGA mode - uses "vga.sys" driver
5. Last Known Good Configuration - starts an anterior working configuration
6. Directory Service Restore mode - solves the directory problems
7. Debugging Mode - useful for finding errors
8. Enable Boot Logging - enables the use of a boot journal
9. Start Windows Normally - does just that
10. Reboot – reboots

By Sturat Mitchel

Sturat enjoys writing articles on topics like how to start in safe mode and how to install fonts . For more information you can visit us

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