Seadragon from Microsoft Livelabs

See how it works.  Link to Picture

Link

Design Your Own Icon in Windows 7

Go to Search in the Menu and type eudcedit and click OK.

Test Your Hard Drive Speed With Windows 7′s Device Manager

Don’t forget, the fastest hard drive without IPv6 ….check your network info here

Do you have a SSD Drive?  Here’s the optimization tips.

Test Your Hard Drive Speed With Windows 7′s Device Manager – You can test your hard drive speed by going to the Device Manager, Expanding the Hard Drive Controllers, select the Port and Click on the Test button.  Make it Faster with (Free – See our Review) DiskMax and Defrag with Auslogics.

How about Roadkil.net’s Disk Speed?   A nice little program if your hard drive test isn’t listed under the device manager.

Also check your computer’s hard drive with CheckDiskGUI.

Parkdale

Measure your hard drive speed using Winsat

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When tweaking your computer, you can use typical utilities found in one of our most active posts or you can use Winsat.   Winsat will not give you fancy graphs but it will give a Windows rating and a time to complete specific tests.  This can be a way of measuring your drives between tweaks.

At a command prompt run the following tweak as an administrator:

winsat disk -drive c                 (you can substitute c with the drive letter of your choice)

ATTO – “The industry’s leading provider of high-performance storage connectivity products” has great products and an excellent benchmarking utility that measures your hard drive’s I/O read/write ability.

Here’s a quick look at a laptop with Windows 7 vs. Server 2008 R2

Dell’s latest 5520 inspiron laptop
6 Gb Memory
500 Gb (Seagate)

Results

2

Server 2008 R2 Custom
8 Gb RAM
2 TB Seagate Hard drive

Results

 

 

What about caching programs to speed you up even more?

I’m always cautious when I hear about caching programs.  Mickey sent me Bill Mullin’s link over to TechRepublic where Romex’s FancyCache is reviewed.

In its Beta release, FancyCache offers a simplex program that uses unused memory to boost the speed of your hard drive.  But does it work?  Yes.  My Dell Inspirion is already fast, but with FancyCache, programs do open quicker and the computer is even more responsive.  With the ability to tweak how I wanted to cache, I used 2gb of the 6gb of RAM on board in the settings.

The default settings alone were convincing enough to show how my computer sped up after a few minutes of use.   Although my computer is a 64bit laptop, the caching methods used and the read/write cache algorithms did boost performance.

FancyCache is certainly beneficial for 32 bit users who are locked in at 3gb of RAM.   FancyCache can take advantage of memory above this limit to speed up your computer.   And whether you do or don’t elect to install FancyCache, at least tweak your settings in a 32 bit computer to tweak your memory.  (See our Link)

The only problem I had was once I downloaded the software, it said it was expired.   A quick check on their website and keys can be obtained here.   The latest key is valid until July 2013.

Will I buy this product?  I’m not sure yet, time and use of Fancycache will tell.

 

What about SSD Drives?   Are they faster?

Yes, ATTO on an OCZ Vertex 3

Notice this Benchmark compared to the Seagate 6 Gb/s (above) that was at 70 MB/s this is a 75% increase in speed.

How to measure your hard drive speed.

Phrases you may hear in IT

Check out AMD vs Intel Quad Core Standoff 64 bit Windows 7, 8 gb of RAM 500 gb Seagate Hard Drives

Overclock your Nvidia video card   … Link

Upgrading Your Hard Drives Firmware

Find updates for drivers to improve your hard drive speed!

Want to Benchmark your hard drive with Ubuntu?

Improve your laptop hard drive speed

Improve Hard Drive Performance in Windows 7

What’s a fast computer on a slow network?  Learn the basics of subnetting without using binary!

Take a look at how we optimize our computers…

See our review of Windows 8 and see how you can run 90% of your programs, virtualize other operating systems, use your network and more.

Check your hard drive with CheckDiskGUI  (Credit to Bill Mullins for finding this)

Now go and Tweak your wireless settings!

Collect detailed information about your drives and files.

 

 

Slow Network – Windows Vista or Windows 7

Estimated time to transfer files 6hrs …. yep 6hrs and I think it might just take that long…

OK, this can’t be right.  I installed Vista at home on a 2GHZ 768mb RAM computer and it is great!  Now at work, I have a dual core 4GHZ 2Gb RAM PC and copying files and networking is horribly slow.

Here’s a couple of solutions…to help you.  Try one thing at a time and reboot after netsh

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Vista’s and 7′s  issues with slow browsing and network operations can be the new TCP Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level – You must run the cmd command as the administrator.

To turn off AutoTuning -  Go to a command prompt (run cmd)
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=off or use
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

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Remote Differential Compression (RDC) allows applications to synchronize data between two computers.   Turn it off….Start >> Control Panel >> Programs and Features
Click on ” Turn windows features on or off” on the left side of the panel
Takes a sec to load all the features
Uncheck “Remote Differential Compression”

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Make sure you’ve got the latest drivers for ALL your hardware components.

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http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929868

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Adjust your network card under the Device Manager-

Right click on your network card and go to properties
Select the Advanced tab
Select the Link Speed/Duplex Mode property.
Try Auto Negotiation.
Try 100Mbps/Full Duplex or 100Mbps/Half duplex
It is safe to try these alternative settings to see which setting works best for your PC’s Network card.

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On last thing for performance
Go into Device Manager, open the properties windows for your HDD, select policies, check the box that says “enable advanced performance”.

Cross your fingers…

Cisco Router Simulator

Small Cisco Simulator for future CCNAs.

Cisco Simulator

More Information – Toggit

Network Scanner

Need to scan your network and scan the ports on your network to check your LANS security? Loaded with the Features below, LanSpy 2.0 helps you to audit your network.  (See my test network below)

• Ping
• Domain name
• NetBios names
• MAC address
• Server information
• Domain (workgroup) information
• Domain controllers
• Remote control
• Time
• Disks
• Transports
• Users
• Logged users
• Global groups
• Local groups
• Security options
• Shared resources
• Sessions
• Open files
• Services
• Processes
• Registry
• Event log
• TCP port scanner
• UDP port scanner

Slow Computer Shutdown – Speed It Up!

If your computer takes forever to shutdown, use Waresoft’s Superfast Shutdown.

This program stops programs instantly and shuts your computer down fast.   Because this program has its own shutdown.exe file, it WILL probably be detected as a virus.  Don’t panic.  In fact, don’t download it if you think it may be.   If your anti-virus software sees it as a virus, add it to the exceptions.

Increase Your Download Speed with Gigaget

Gigaget gives you download speeds 7-10 times faster than normal download speeds.  An excellent program that allows your browser to speed up your downloads.