BIG BOOK OF. Windows Hacks. Preston Gralla. Tips & Tools for unlocking the power of your Windows PC

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1 BIG BOOK OF Windows Hacks Preston Gralla Tips & Tools for unlocking the power of your Windows PC

2 Big Book of Windows Hacks First Edition Preston Gralla BEIJING CAMBRIDGE FARNHAM KÖLN PARIS SEBASTOPOL TAIPEI TOKYO

3 BIG Book of windows hacks by Preston Gralla Copyright 2007 Preston Gralla. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A. Published by Make:Books, an imprint of Maker Media, a division of O Reilly Media, Inc Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA O Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For more information, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: or corporate@oreilly.com. Print History October 2007 First Edition Publisher: Dale Dougherty Associate Publisher and Executive Editor: Dan Woods Editor: Brian Jepson Copy Editors: Mary Anne Weeks Mayo & Nancy Kotary Creative Director: Daniel Carter Designer: Alison Kendall Production Manager: Terry Bronson Indexer: Patti Schiendelman The O Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O Reilly Media, Inc. The Hacks series designations, Big Book of Windows Hacks, and related trade dress are trademarks of O Reilly Media, Inc. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and O Reilly Media, Inc. was aware of the trademark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and authors assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. The technologies discussed in this publication, the limitations on these technologies that technology and content owners seek to impose, and the laws actually limiting the use of these technologies are constantly changing. Thus, some of the hacks described in this publication may not work, may cause unintended harm to systems on which they are used, or may not be consistent with applicable user agreements. Your use of these hacks is at your own risk, and O Reilly Media, Inc. disclaims responsibility for any damage or expense resulting from their use. In any event, you should take care that your use of these hacks does not violate any applicable laws, including copyright laws. ISBN-10: ISBN-13:

4 This excerpt is protected by copyright law. It is your responsibility to obtain permissions necessary for any proposed use of this material. Please direct your inquiries to

5 11 System Performance Ever since the first version of Windows was introduced, people have complained about system performance. When it comes to PCs, people have three speeds in mind fast, faster, and fastest, and they only want to go the fastest. In this chapter, you ll find all kinds of hacks for improving system performance. You ll find out the truth not the hype about using USB- and flash memory-based ReadyBoost in Windows Vista, and discover a secret for using it even with USB drives Vista says can t be used. You ll find out how to strip the crud out of your system install, how to make the most of your RAM, how to install a fast RAID hard drive, and plenty more. HACK 156: Strip the Crud Out of Your Windows Install Put your Windows installation on a diet and save your precious disk space for more important things than Windows features you will never use. Windows has a huge footprint. Vista wants at least 8 GB for an installation, and after you ve installed it, you ll find that it takes up almost 7 GB of space just for the operating system, as shown in Figure Wouldn t it be great if you could remove some components? Unfortunately, the Turn Windows Features On or Off control panel doesn t actually remove anything from your computer; it just toggles components on and off. Fortunately, there is a way to slim down your Vista installation: Dino Nuhagic s vlite lets you remove components, add drivers, and enable certain tweaks. Once you re done, you can create a new installation DVD and install the slimmed-down version of Vista. To get started, first download vlite from and install it. You ll need to install it on a computer that s running Windows and has plenty of free disk space to use as a scratch area for temporary working files. I d suggest at least 5 GB of free space, but more is always better. When you run vlite, it notifies you of any needed dependencies and offers to install them. Next, it displays the main vlite screen as shown in Figure Click the Browse button, and choose the location of your Vista install files. This will probably be your Vista installation DVD, so make sure that s in the drive, and choose it. Next, vlite asks you to choose a location to store the installation files. This is where the modified installation files will reside. Once you ve done that, vlite copies over the entire DVD, which can take a while. After vlite has copied everything over, it asks you to choose which Vista version (Business, Home Basic/Premium, Ultimate, etc.) to customize. Choose the one you plan to install. Now you re ready 524 BIG BOOK OF WINDOWS HACKS

HacK # 156 Figure 11-1. Free space after a Vista install QUIcK HacK Figure 11-2.

6 HacK # 156 Figure Free space after a Vista install QUIcK HacK Figure The vlite start screen DE-CRAPIFY YOUR PC Just about any PC you buy is filled with craplets trial programs that clutter your PC, pop up and ask that you register, and generally sludge up your PC. The solution? Get the free PC Decrapifier ( com), which searches through your PC and removes as many of the craplets as it can. Among the nearly four dozen craplets it kills are multiple kinds of Norton, McAfee and Trend Micro trial antivirus products, Wild Tangent games, and MusicMatch, among others. CHAPTER 11 - STRIP THE CRUD OUT OF YOUR WINDOWS INSTALL 525

to step through the configuration. Click each of the tabs on the left of the vlite screen to configure your installation media: Components Use this tab to choose which components to remove.

7 to step through the configuration. Click each of the tabs on the left of the vlite screen to configure your installation media: Components Use this tab to choose which components to remove. This can free a lot of disk space, but don t get too greedy, or you might remove something you really need. Tweaks You can do some fun stuff here, including forcing Vista to try and enable glass mode even if there s not enough RAM, use a different font for the user interface, disable UAC [Hack #108], get rid of the hibernation file, and more. Drivers If you have any drivers you want to add to the installation, here s where to do it. Once you ve made your choices, click Apply; you ll be able to choose whether to Just apply the changes (modifies the installation choices without shrinking the size of the installation media; you ll still end up with a smaller installation even if you choose this) or Apply and rebuild (removes all but the version of Vista that you selected earlier). You ll also have the opportunity to specify which versions of Vista to remove from the media. After you ve made these choices, vlite starts building the final installation set. Now you can click the ISO tab, as shown in Figure From here you can do a few different things. If you just want to create an ISO image of the modified installation files, select Create Image from the drop-down menu. You can then use this with a free virtualization environment (See Chapter 2) such as VMware Server or Virtual PC to test the image out (if not, you can choose Direct Burn from the drop down to burn the image to the DVD drive on your computer, and then you can use the disc to install Vista on a real computer.) Figure Creating the new Vista image 526 BIG BOOK OF WINDOWS HACKS

8 Figure Vista s smaller footprint after customizing with vlite HacK # 157 QUIcK HacK GET MORE PERFORMANCE GADGETS Figure 11-4 shows the free space available on the computer after removing a bunch of stuff. This also includes the 512 MB of disk space saved by disabling the hibernation file, but it s still a big difference! Windows XP users can also get in on the fun with nlite, which is available at and is also one of Dino Nuhagic s creations. Brian Jepson The Hobby Lounge ( net/hobbylounge) makes plenty of other performance-related gadgets, in addition to the Multi Meter. It also makes a gadget that tracks quad core PC performance (the Multi Meter Q gadget), one that reports on hard disk use on multiple hard disks attached to your PC (Multi HDD Meter), and even a gadget that shows you your fan speed, internal PC temperature, voltage use and more (Speedfan Meter). Get them by going to net/hobbylounge and clicking Sidebar Gadgets. You ll have to register at the site to download them. Most, if not all, are also available when you go to the Microsoft gadget site [Hack #157]. CHAPTER 11 - HACK MULTICORE PERFORMANCE 527