Tag: PERFORMANCE

A while back, Jason mentioned giving your Firefox performance a boost by limiting the length of time items are saved in history. At Mozilla Links, they've shared another handy tip from Mozilla developer Jeremy Orem. His advice: take a vacuum to your SQLite databases. Here's how to do it: Open the Firefox tools menu and click on error console. Paste the following command into the code ...

I enjoyed my MSI Wind netbook while I had it, but there was one task that always gave it fits: running Flash-based anything. Games stuttered, YouTube clips were choppy, and the system's tiny fan spun like a tin can in a tornado. Owners of newer netbooks featuring NVidia's upcoming Tegra system-on-a-chip or Broadcom's Crystal HD will be glad to hear that Adobe is teaming up with NVidia to produce ...

If you're running the Windows 7 RC, chances are good that you're the kind of user that likes to monkey around with settings and tweak your OS. While you can go the DIY route and hack your registry and run your mouse ragged clicking through various control panel screens, there are a number of good, free apps available designed to simplify tweaking. Pro tip: if you run one of these apps, use their ...

WinVista Club has released an update to their Ultimate Windows Tweaker, which now features more than 150 tweaks for Vista. Windows 7 beta testers looking to do a bit of tweaking may want to try it as well. UWT worked well on my install, apart from throwing a single error message which didn't seem to impact the changes I made anyway. The app allows you to customize your Windows UI a number of ...

Most Web designers make liberal use of CSS selectors, but that spec's sibling, descendant and child selectors can cause what designer/developer Shaun Innman calls a "significant, negative impact on page rendering." This is confirmed in tests done by UI Specialist Jon Sykes that are published on his blog. Fortunately for most designers, the performance impact is only in extreme situations. But ...

Open source software advocates like to point to OpenOffice.org as a viable alternative to Microsoft Office. It can open, create, edit, and save Office-compatible documents including text, spreadsheet, and database files. It might not have every last bell and whistle of Office, but it gets the job done. But OpenOffice.org also has a dirty little secret: It's kind of slow. And apparently, it's ...

The heat is on once again in the online calendar sector. It seemed like the news was always pumping out on this front late last year, then things cooled down shortly after Calgoo announced it could sync with Google Calendar. Well, Calgoo has announced that they are hitting the big time with Version 1.0 this week. DownloadSquad has covered Calgoo since its inception, and followed its progress ...

Speaking of Windows getting bogged down, you're probably aware that Windows runs a lot of stuff in the background that takes up memory and processor cycles that could be better spent elsewhere, and you might even know how to access the Services control panel, but once you're there it can be hard to know what to keep and what to kill. There is help to be found, however: Guide to Useless Services is ...

FreshDiagnose is a very nicely done system information and benchmarking utility in the vein of Aida32. Simply run the application, and it will do a complete system analysis, listing all hardware devices, software, relevant registry settings and LAN information. It can also do system performance benchmarking to compare performance against other similar machines, for the purpose of detecting ...

Wow. I knew about forcing IRQ priority because I've installed a lot of video cards in my day. A few other things, like going back the the Win2k look, ClearType, and NTFS should be old hat for WinFreaks. But there are some really solid tips over at kadaitcha.cx for speeding up any lagging XP install. Be prepared to get your hands dirty.The entire site actually is one big tip on getting XP to work ...