Microsoft Joulemeter calibrates your portable battery

Want to calibrate your batter on your laptop?  Microsoft Joulemeter (.90 mb download) does just that.

From Microsoft Research:

“Joulemeter is a software tool that estimates the power consumption of your computer. It tracks computer resources, such as CPU utilization and screen brightness, and estimates power usage.”

Checklist :

• Make sure your battery is above 50%
• Remember to leave your computer idle when this takes place
• Your screen brightness will change (disable Flux if you have it installed) and turn black
• Be Patient

 

Ready to calibrate

 

Phase One

 

 

Phase Two

 

 

Phase Three (Power Model)

 

 

Windows System Control Center – An all in one tool for IT professionals

The Windows System Control Center is an all in one tool that offers a ton (hundreds) of features.  These features are compatible with Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8.

The installation can be made to a portable drive or installed on a computer.  During the installation, new software can be installed allowing features to be added or updated.

 

 

 

During this installation process, you may get virus alerts but the software is safe.  These alerts are false positives (the software accesses key areas that control Windows).

 

Click Allow or Safe in your anti-virus control panel.

 

 

Initially you will have 264 software installs.

 

Once the features are installed (This can initially take a few minutes),  The control center opens to dozens of categories and hundreds of features allowing you to tweak Windows or to correct problems.

 

 

Speed up your computer using FancyCache

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.

 

How to measure your hard drive speed.

 

 

One in four wireless networks are still unsecure

Annually our class studies wireless technology and its implementation into homes and industry.   Surveys are conducted to analyze security used, transmit power and geographic location of wireless technology.  According to Wigle.net, Security has improved over the last nine years.  Home users are still setting up their wireless wrong by not providing a WPA2 (AES) form of encryption.  Approximately 23% of home users still have open internet that neighbors or anyone passing by can use.   (22 million are secure and 9 million remain unsecure!)  Vendors have tried to make setting up wireless easy and secure by providing WPS and/or a setup utility disk that walks the user through step by step.  Once you have secure wireless, you should change the password periodically to prevent users from learning what your passphrase is.

Wigle provides a map of wireless throughout the globe.  As users find wireless, they upload their data to Wigle and the database is free to the public.

With GPS technology today, anyone including malicious wardrivers can map out coordinates of unsecured wifi.  Make sure you secure your wifi.

See our other articles on wireless technology

Note:  During a survey we do not use packet analyzers or methods to see data on the wireless networks. 

How to Downgrade Windows 8 Pro to Windows 7

The popularity of Windows 8 always falls in the usability of the operating systems.   Really easy to use (my opinion),  it can be downgraded to Windows 7 for free if you purchased Windows 8 Pro for free.   Mickey found a great article on how to do this at the How-To Geek.   Remember, there are a dozen or more simple menus you can add to Windows 8 if you just can’t get use to it.

A goldmine of resources for PC Techs

Rick over at Whats On My PC has found a website with an amazing amount of resources.  (See Rick’s article here)  To credit Mike over at GE Geek, this website is one of the best references I have ever seen.  Visit Rick for a direct link to this amazing website.

There is also a Toolkit you can download at the top of the page.
(Approximately 1Gb! of information)

Intel Processor Diagnostic Tool

Need to check your processor to ensure it is functioning properly.  Intel’s tool to test your processor will stress your processor and test dozens of functions.  Your computer will slow down during this test.  Once the test finishes, you can truly check to make sure your processor is working correctly.

    

Adjusting network card properties to fix slow network response

If you have slow or non responsive program properties; such as a database or other network program…Right Click on My Computer, go to Properties, select Hardware, Device Manager, click the + sign on Network, Right Click on your network card, select properties, select the Advanced Tab, Look for Speed   – adjust the value to 100 Full Duplex, 100 Half or even select the 10 settings.  Try it on each of the settings to see which one is optimal for your network.

When computers handshake (exchange data) autosense does not always work.

I’ve had replaced network cards, ran winsock fix and tried everything when the solution was right in front of me.

You should also disable everything under the Advanced Tab except Flow Control.

 

For SQL, see our LLMNR Article

Increase the maximum USB transfer size in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2

The maximum USB transfer size for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 is 64 kilobytes.  You can increase this by downloading a hotfix from Microsoft (link).  This update provides an increase in the maximum USB transfer size.   This can greatly increase your performance on these computers!

To maximize the transfer, Type Regedit in the Searchbox

Navigate to the following key -

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\usbstor

Create a new key called - VVVVPPPP

Under usbstor key, create a new key  so the final path would be:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\usbstor\VVVVPPPP

Create a new DWORD value MaximumTransferLength

Double-click the new DWORD value, set Base to Decimal and set Value data to 2097120

Reboot

Benchmarking your hard drive

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

Also see our #1 post on Hard Drive Benchmarking (other utilites)

Slow network transfer speed in Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2 – Hotfix

A Hotfix is available for slow network transfer speeds.  (Microsoft Link to Hotfix)

(See our other optimization tips in previous articles.)

Before

After

Other Tweaks

Try disabling everything in the Advanced Tab with the exception of Flow Control (leave it on).

Find your optimal MTU using Ping.

Connect to older SAMBA servers and older network devices (Article on NTLM)

Cannot access computer by NetBios name after replacing NIC card – See how to clear cache here  using NBTSTAT

Disable LLMNR from the command line (Database connections and moving large files across a network)

Windows 7 network performance – autotuning

Want to speed up networking in your organization? (See our post on this date)
I have found that restricted mode will often allow some of the benefits of autotuning with a number of problematic devices in your network -especially with large file copied.

Restrict autotuning by opening a command prompt and typing the following (Type CMD in the Search box and run as an administrator)

netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=restricted