Here's A Windows Tip

The truth about Prefetch and Superfetch!

New to Windows XP™ Microsoft introduced the Prefetch component: It remembers which file segments a program reads into memory once an application is started. If the user, for example, double-clicks on the link to Microsoft Word, a large number of files are read into memory in the background, even though usually only certain segments of these files are needed to start the program. This makes the hard drive’s reading head jump from file to file in order to collect all of the necessary information. This takes time and leads to considerable delays in starting the program!

“Prefetch” remembers these segments and stores them in a file in the folder “Windows\Prefetch”. By clicking on Microsoft Word, users now save time since those files and data needed to start the program have already been preloaded.
The “Superfetch” technology in Windows Vista™ also speeds up loading times for applications. It "learns" over time which programs users run most often. For example, if you frequently start the Media Player and Firefox after switching on the computer, Superfetch preloads the data needed to run these applications into your system memory. This means, your programs will be ready whenever you need them, because now the significantly slower hard drive no longer has to do the work!

Myths exposed: False tips

Unfortunately there are a lot of false tips and information about Prefetch and Superfetch on the Internet. Even reputable online magazines and trade magazines sometimes erroneously publish this information, thereby causing even more confusion. If you are lucky, these myths about optimization will have no effect on your PC. More often than not, however, they even slow down system performance! Read on to find out what is true and what is not.

MYTH:
To speed up loading times for programs, you should regularly empty the Prefetch folder.

TRUTH:
Keep away from the Prefetch folder! Emptying this folder immediately slows down run times until Windows has once again compiled all required Prefetch information and this is a long and slow process. Windows automatically cleans up the folder

MYTH:
Disable Prefetch in the Registry Editor to save memory!

TRUTH:
Prefetch does not use up memory unnecessarily. Disabling it actually increases loading times for programs.

MYTH:
You should disable Superfetch in Windows Vista™. This speeds up the boot process and saves memory!

TRUTH:
Superfetch preloads those applications into memory that are used most. However this is only happens if Windows does not execute any other write or read accesses. Disabling Superfetch therefore does not affect the time it takes to launch Windows.

What’s more, disabling Superfetch does not save memory. By doing so, memory remains unused and empty – a true waste of your computer's resources! It is therefore better for Superfetch to fill the memory with this data thereby improving your system’s performance. Please note: If a program is started that is not immediately recognized by Superfetch, this does not mean that there is no memory available to run this program. Windows empties a portion of the memory used by Superfetch within a few milliseconds so that the program can immediately use it.

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What's Happening Now

Microsoft’s Bing overtook Yahoo Search in only its fourth day of public release according to Web analytics company
StatCounter, but it’s too soon to tell how well the new search engine will fare in the long run.

On Thursday, Bing became the No. 2 search engine in the U.S. and worldwide, with 16.28 percent share of searches to Yahoo’s 10.22 percent in the U.S., and 5.62 percent for Bing to 5.13 percent for Yahoo worldwide, according to StatCounter. StatCounter’s Global Stats research data is based on 4 billion pageloads per month.

In a press statement
StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen noted that it could be “initial novelty and promotion” that is giving Bing momentum, but said that Microsoft could be successful far sooner than it expected in achieving CEO Steve Ballmer’s goal to be the No. 2 search engine within five years.

Microsoft released Bing on June 1, two days earlier than expected. The company is promoting the search engine as a “decision engine” aimed at helping people better organize search information and find what they’re looking for more quickly, and has poured between US$80 million and $100 million into a marketing campaign to promote it. That campaign even included sending a blue “search” beam of light out from Seattle’s famous Space Needle landmark on Tuesday above a launch party below, where the word “Bing” was spelled out in lights on a lawn. Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, Washington, just outside of Seattle.

Forrester Research analyst Shar VanBoskirk said the early numbers are in no way indicative of how Bing will do against what she calls “the big two” of search — Google and Yahoo — in the long term. “I don’t know that three days in it’s reasonable to say that Bing has won the race,” she said.

However, because Bing is similar to Yahoo in its approach to search, it makes sense that it would take share away from Yahoo before it would Google’s search engine, VanBoskirk said.

“Bing is a greater threat to Yahoo than to Google because Yahoo has been sort of the content search engine and Google has been the utility search engine,” she said.

In other words, Yahoo has taken more of a “concierge approach” to search, organizing its search results more based on what information other users have found useful in the past and based on services that can be offered around a search result, VanBoskirk said. This gives Yahoo’s results more of the feel of a traditional Web portal than merely providing people with a list of relevant searches. Google, on the other hand, is more of a toolbar, she said.

“With Google’s utilitarian approach and Bing and Yahoo being the more portal-based approach, it’s easier to think why they would be more competitive,” VanBoskirk said.

Antivirus vendors Symantec and McAfee have agreed to pay the New York Attorney General’s office US$375,000 in fines to settle charges that they automatically charged customers software subscription renewal fees without their permission. Investigators found that the two companies had “failed to adequately disclose to consumers that subscriptions would automatically be renewed and that consumers would be charged,” the office of Andrew Cuomo said in a statement Wednesday announcing the settlement. “Companies cannot play hide the ball when it comes to fees consumers are being charged.”

In addition to paying the settlement fine, Symantec and McAfee will now make better disclosures about subscription renewal fees when customers sign up, the attorney general’s office said.

Security companies have been offering automatic renewals to their customers for nearly a decade now, but in the past few year it’s become much more common in the antivirus industry. McAfee and Symantec say that they prevent customers from having out-of-date antivirus software on their computers. That may make customers safer, but it also makes company investors happy because renewal fees keep rolling in.

Symantec began enrolling North American customers in automatic renewal by default in November 2005, and has since expanded the practice worldwide. McAfee began the practice in 2001. Under these programs, customers pay upfront for a one-year subscription and then, a year later, are automatically billed for the next year’s service.

The companies say they have been working with the Cuomo’s office for the past two years to improve practices and they have now made it easier to understand and opt out of their respective auto-renewal features

For example, Symantec has now modified its online shopping cart to include better disclosures and an explanation of how to opt out of the program.

Norton users who want to unsubscribe from Symantec’s program, can do so on their Norton Account Web page, Symantec said. If you’re a U.S. McAfee user, you can call customer support at 1 866 622 3911.

Both companies will now refund auto-renewal fees within 60 days of the charge, Cuomo’s office said

Here's An Outlook 2007 Tip

Microsoft Outlook 2007 offers three formats for sending e-mail messages: HTML, plain text, and rich text. Here's a look at the pros and cons of the different Outlook e-mail formats, and some easy ways to change them.

Microsoft Outlook 2007 e-mail formats come in three flavors:

HTML format: These days, almost all e-mail is transmitted in HTML format, the same format with which Web pages are made. If HTML is the default format you use for creating messages in Outlook — and it is, unless you've tinkered with the default settings — the e-mail messages you send are, in effect, little Web pages. HTML gives you the most opportunities for formatting text and graphics. In HTML format, you can place pictures in the body of an e-mail message, use a background theme, and do any number of sophisticated formatting tricks.

However, the HTML format has it share of detractors. First, the messages are larger because they include sophisticated formatting instructions, and being larger, they take longer to transmit over the Internet. Some e-mail accounts allocate a fixed amount of disk space for incoming e-mail messages and reject messages when the disk space allocation is filled. Because they're larger than other e-mail messages, HTML messages fill the disk space quicker. Finally, some e-mail software can't handle HTML messages. In this software, the messages are converted to plain text format.

Plain text format: In plain text format, only letters and numbers are transmitted. The format doesn't permit you to format text or align paragraphs in any way, but you can rest assured that the person who receives the message can read it exactly as you wrote it.

Rich text format: The rich text format is proprietary to Microsoft e-mailing software. Note that only people who use Outlook and Outlook Express can see rich text formats. If formatting text in e-mail messages is important to you, choose the HTML format because more people can read your messages.

When someone sends you an e-mail message, you can tell which format it was transmitted in by looking at the title bar, where HTML, Plain Text, or Rich Text appears in parentheses after the subject of the message. Outlook is smart enough to transmit messages in HTML, plain text, or rich text format when you reply to a message that was sent to you in that format.

Follow these instructions if you need to change the format in which your e-mail messages are transmitted:

Changing the default format: Choose Tools --> Options, and in the Options dialog box, select the Mail Format tab. From the Compose in This Message Format drop-down list, choose HTML, Plain Text, or Rich Text.

Changing the format for a single e-mail message: In the Message window, click the Options tab. Then click the Plain Text, HTML, or Rich Text button.

Always using the plain text or rich text format with a contact: To avoid transmitting in HTML with a contact, start in the Contacts folder, double-click the contact's name, and in the Contact form, double-click the contact's e-mail address. You see the E-Mail Properties dialog box. In the Internet Format drop-down list, choose Send Plain Text Only or Send Using Outlook Rich Text Format.

Using HijackThis

To analyze your computer, start HijackThis and run a scan. HijackThis will display a list of areas on your computer that might have been changed by spyware. Do not change any settings if you are unsure of what to do. There are many popular support forums on the web that provide free technical assistance by using HijackThis log files to diagnose an infected computer.

The Five Best Things About Vista SP2

What are the five best things about Vista SP2 ?
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
Sorry. I couldn't resist.

That joke out of the way, have you wondered why there's been almost no reviews of Vista SP2? Well, one reason for that is that Microsoft would really just as soon have you forget about Vista and think about Windows 7 instead. The other is that there's really not that much new in SP2.
What Vista SP2 really is, when you get right down to it, is all the many fixes and patches that have been made to Vista since SP2. If you've been keeping your Vista system up to date, you won't need to update it.

That said, I tried Vista SP2 to see what really was new and improved.
What I found was that Vista is, still, Vista. XP SP3 is still faster. Windows 7, even as a release candidate, is better. With that out of the way, here are the five reasons you might consider moving to Vista SP2.

1) Most of us don't have Blu-Ray write drives, but if you do, Vista SP2 supports it.
2) Vista SP2 also now supports Bluetooth v2.1 and has more stable Wi-Fi protocol. In particular, this shows up, I found, that Vista is much better are resuming a Wi-Fi connection after going to sleep. If you're having Wi-Fi trouble with your Vista laptop, this is reason enough to give SP2 a try.
3) Service Pack Clean-up Tool. This is a new program that you can use to automatically delete old versions of system files. Since I've known any number of Window system glitches over the year to be traced back to out-of-date DLLs (Dynamic Link Library) and the like, I think this addition makes a lot of sense.
But, and this is a big but, I've also known Windows programs to fail because they needed some of those old system files to work correctly. So, before cleaning up your old files, make sure you have a complete back-up of your system. After all, who cares how up-to-date your system is if your favorite program is dead in the water?
4) Extended FAT File System. This is a proprietary file system. It's designed for Flash memory, and it's most noteworthy features are that it can handle extremely large files and, compared to Windows' usual NTFS, it takes up very little disk overhead. If you're using SSD (solid state drives), it may be worth a try.
5) More efficient system resource use. In general, I found that Windows SP2 used less system resources and seemed to run a tad faster. That's as fine as far as it goes, but Vista is still a resource hog when compared to either Windows 7 or XP and it's also still slower than both. If, for some reason, you really want to use Vista instead of Microsoft's other Windows offerings, you'll appreciate these improvements.

So, in short, Vista SP2 is not a great improvement over what has come before. Still, if you're locked into Vista, you'll find upgrading to SP2 worth your time. I just wouldn't be in any hurry to do it though; SP2's improvements aren't that great.


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