Tag: REGISTRY

If you're itching to install Windows Vista Service Pack 1 but aren't planning to be anywhere near Redmond on October 27th, all may not be lost. Some friendly hackers have posted a registry setting that will reportedly allow you to download Vista SP1 through Windows Update. We're going to point out a couple of things here, although they should really be obvious: There's no guarantee this ...

If you run Windows, your operating system, web browsers, and other applications have a tendency to tie up system resources with all sorts of "temporary" files that never seem to get deleted. nCleaner helps you remove thousands of unnecessary files in one fell swoop. Like other system cleaners, nCleaner lets you clear disk cache, user history files, and also invalid Windows registry settings. But ...

Windows Vista's flip 3D is pretty and all, but it's not actually much more useful than the Alt-Tab feature. In fact, since it takes longer to load it might be less useful. Fortunately Microsoft has also updated the Alt-Tab view in Windows Vista, providing live thumbnails of your open applications. In fact, if you've got a video playing in one window, you can watch a tiny version in the Alt-Tab ...

Last month we told you how to extend your Windows Vista 30 day trial period for as long as 120 days. The process is 100% legal, and was put in Vista by Microsoft. All you have to do is enter a rearm command every 30 days or so. We thought you could only do this 3 times, but now sites are reporting that there's a registry hack that allows you to rearm your system an indefinite number of times. Of ...

Are you sick of those Windows balloons telling you that you have unused icons on your desktop or that your LAN is connected? I don't doubt that about 1 in 100 people finds the notifications useful, but for the other 99 of us, here's a way to pop the balloons once and for all. Follow these steps (note: this has been tested only on Windows XP): Go to Start > Run; type regedit and press ...

Whenever I'm troubleshooting Windows network issues (which is disturbingly often) I tend to look for Network Connections in My Computer (rather than Control Panel), but of course it's never there. Until now. Tech-Recipes has a great tip for adding a few new items to My Computer. Through an easy registry tweak (at your own risk, blah blah) you can add not only Network Connections but also ...

I haven't tried it out to see if it works yet, but it looks promising: User Profile Hive Cleanup Service is a free  utility from Microsoft that's supposed to speed up Windows XP shutdown times considerably. The article at IntelliAdmin says the biggest culprit for slow shutdowns "is a problem unloading the current user's profile," and what the User Profile Hive Cleanup Service does is in the ...

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 ...

Keshav sent us a nice list of things you can do to your machine to speed up Windows. Some are easy, some are obvious— some are not. Most importantly, most are quite safe. Disabling services can sometimes be wonky, but that's about as extreme as this one gets (OK, the prefetch thing makes me a little nervous and it's debateable whether or not it really speeds anything up). One nice tip out of ...

Ah, the registry--can't live with it, can't delete it. There are ways, though, to slim it down, give it a little polish, and give your system a little boost. Most of those ways are distressingly un-free, but Email Battles has a nice post about a trio of free tools that, in concert, will get the job done. First you use CCleaner to scrape out all the accumulated cruft. Then you use RegSeeker to nuke ...