Archive for December, 2008:
Indexing the Drive (2)
Figure 3.7
Set the Indexing Service to provide maximum functionality.
Checking Index Files with Unknown Extensions might be one of the most important changes you make. Normally, the Indexing Service, like Windows search looks only at file extensions that it knows
about. Unfortunately, many of your searches for files to remove from the system will require looking at the unknown extensions too.
Abstracts can be helpful when optimizing your system, but generally, they use up a lot of disk space for dubious results. Consequently, you’ll want to check the Generate Abstracts option with care and keep the size of the abstract as small as possible to save disk space.
TIP
You can modify these settings on a catalog level as well. Simply right-click the catalog in question and choose Properties from the context menu. The settings described in this section appear on
the Generation tab.
After you change the Indexing Service properties and close the Indexing Service Properties dialog box, right-click the Indexing Service again and choose All Tasks Tune Performance from the context menu. You’ll see the Indexing Service Usage dialog box shown in Figure 3.8.
Figure 3.8
Adjust the Indexing Service performance to meet specific needs.
The four settings in this dialog box help you select the level of performance the Indexing Service provides. Microsoft assumes that you’ll index everything on your system, so the Indexing Service
uses the slowest method possible. It can literally take days to create an index you needed five minutes ago. A better solution is to select Customize and then click Customize. You’ll see a Desired Performance dialog box that contains two sliders. To generate an index quickly, yet keep performance at acceptable levels, you can set the Indexing slider to Instant and the Querying slider to Low Load. In most cases, these settings create the index quickly, yet allow you to query the Indexing Service without burdening the system.
Taken From : Microsoft Windows XP Power Optimization
Indexing the Drive (1)
The search feature of Windows XP is definitely broken. However, it works well enough for some uses, especially when you need to search for common files—those with a TXT, DOC, or other common
extensions. Unfortunately, you still have a decision to make about how best to use the Windows XP search feature and it depends on how you use it. When you use the search feature occasionally, it’s
best to let search look for the file each time. However, when you search for files several times daily, you can gain a performance advantage by indexing all or part of the drive.
NOTE
Never index a drive when you plan to use command line utilities to search it. Command line utilities don’t gain any benefit from drive indexing, so the resources used to index the drive are wasted.
You pay for indexing the drive in two ways. First, there’s the cost of running the Indexing Service. As a minimum, the Indexing Service uses about 1.5MB of RAM, along with the memory, processing
cycles, and hard drive space to maintain the indexing catalog. Even a small catalog can consume 1MB or more of hard drive space.
Indexing Only What You Need
Some people index all of the drives on their system. The only time you should index an entire drive is when the drive contains only data. Otherwise, it’s far more efficient to index just the parts of the
drive you need. Fortunately, you can index a folder or even an individual file—Microsoft simply hid the required resources. To index a file or folder, right-click it and choose Properties from the context
menu. On the General tab of the file or folder Properties dialog box, click Advanced. You’ll see the Advanced Attributes dialog box shown in Figure 3.6. Check the For Fast Indexing, Allow Indexing Service to Index this Folder (or File) option and click OK twice to close both the Advanced Attributes and the file or folder Properties dialog box.
Changing the Indexing Settings
Part of the problem with the Indexing Service is that some of the settings are less than optimal for someone who really wants to look for files on their system. To fix this problem, begin by opening the
Computer Management console found in the Administrative Tools folder of the Control Panel. Locate the Services andpplications\Indexing Service folder. Right-click the Indexing Service folder and select Properties from the context menu. You’ll see the Indexing Service Properties dialog box shown in Figure 3.7.
Figure 3.6
The Advanced Attributes dialog box hides more than attributes in the
conventional sense.
Taken From : Microsoft Windows XP Power Optimization
Locating the Truly Hidden Files
Even when you reconfigure Windows Explorer to show you the maximum number of files, it doesn’t. Microsoft has a few files that they don’t trust anyone to see, so Windows Explorer hides them. These files appear many levels deep in the drive hierarchy—so deep that you must often know precisely where to look to find them. For example, when you install Office 2003 with .NET Extensions
support, the installation program creates files that you can’t see using Windows Explorer. You can check this Windows Explorer feature out for yourself when you have Office 2003 installed. Look in
the \WINDOWS\assembly folder. At most, you’ll see a list of files and a \Download folder as shown in Figure 3.4.
Open a command prompt, type CD WINDOWS\assembly\GAC\Office\11.0.0.0__71e9bce111 e9429c
, and press Enter. Suddenly, you’ll see a folder well below the
\WINDOWS\assembly folder that Windows Explorer tells you is the final stop. Type DIR and press Enter. You’ll find two files in this
folder, as shown in Figure 3.5. The interesting thing is that these files aren’t hidden from the command prompt—only from Windows Explorer.
I chose this particular entry because many people own Office, so your chance of seeing it live are good. Microsoft could almost make a case for hiding this directory, but you’ll find a number of others
that aren’t so easy to defend. It’s true that most users will never need to look in this folder and many problems could occur if the user accidentally erased the DLL it contains. However, Microsoft also
makes it a practice to hide other installation, temporary, and other files on your drive. (You’ll see other examples as the book progresses.)
Figure 3.4
Even with Windows Explorer properly configured, you can’t
see everything.
Figure 3.5
The command prompt demonstrates your ability to locate files Windows Explorer won’t tell you about.
Taken From : Microsoft Windows XP Power Optimization
Understanding that Searches Don’t Work Consistently
Windows Explorer includes a Search Explorer Bar that you can access by clicking Search on the Standard Buttons toolbar. The Search Explorer Bar includes options for locating particular files using the filename or the content of the file as a basis for the search as shown in Figure 3.3. Generally, the search feature works poorly or not at all, making it difficult for anyone to locate needed information. From an optimization perspective, the lack of good file search capability means your cleaning efforts are less effective and you might find some files hanging around that you thought were gone.
Figure 3.3
Use the Search Explorer Bar to locate files on your system.
TIP
Don’t confuse the Search Explorer Bar with Search Companion. Windows XP defaults to using Search Companion, which makes searching for files friendlier, but less flexible. The article entitled,
“Windows Tips: Give XP’s Search Tool a Good Going Over” at
http://yahoo.pcworld.com/ yahoo/article/0,aid,78055,00.asp
explains a number of the differences between the two features and tells how you can switch your system to the Search Explorer Bar.
To demonstrate the problem, create a new folder on your hard drive—call it something like MyTemporaryFolder —the actual name doesn’t matter. Right-click anywhere within this folder and choose New Text Document from the context menu. Rename the file to anything simple—I chose Test1.TXT . Open the new file using an editor such as Notepad and type several lines of text and numbers.
Make sure you include some search words in the list. My test document included four lines of text and was 57 bytes in size—not too large to search. Copy this file by right-clicking it and dragging
it to a new location. Choose Copy Here when you see the context menu. Give all the files the same name, but different extensions. I created two copies: Test1.123 and Test1.XYZ
.
Now that you have three files with precisely the same content, click Search on the Windows Explorer Standard Buttons toolbar. You’ll see the Search Explorer Bar shown in Figure 3.3. Type any of the common keywords found in the three files. Generally, Windows Explorer will find the TXT extension file, but not either of the other two files, even though it’s set to check for all files.
OK, so the use of odd file extensions probably wasn’t fair. Try using file extensions that include TXT, INI, and HLP for the same three files. You’ll find that search still doesn’t find all of the files that
contain the keyword. In short, if you’re depending on the Search Explorer Bar to help you find the files you need to get rid of on your system, you’re going to be disappointed. Interestingly enough, the
command line utilities described in the “Command Line Utilities You Should Know About” section of the chapter work, but they’re a little less convenient to use. Pay special attention to the FindStr utility
because it helps you locate just about any string in any file.
Taken From : Microsoft Windows XP Power Optimization
Working with Standard Hidden Files (2)
Do Not Cache Thumbnails Check this option to save the hard drive space used for thumbnail images. A thumbnail image is a small, standard sized (normally 96 × 96 pixels), version of a standard
image file. Windows creates thumbnails so you can see a list of pictures as shown in Figure 3.2 (notice that only the image files have thumbnails). The thumbnails can begin consuming a lot of
hard drive space, so you shouldn’t use them unless you mainly use your computer for image management and require the performance benefit that caching can provide.
Remember Each Folder’s View Settings Clear this setting to save some memory and hard drive space, as well as make your computer work more reliably. That’s right, checking this setting tends to create reliability problems in the way Windows Explorer works. It seems that Windows stores a limited number of folders, so when you regularly use the entire hard drive (as I do), the setting is useless. The intent of this setting is to let you save the settings for each folder you visit and it does work as long as you only visit a few folders and really do need the unique settings storage. To see a more complete discussion of the problems encountered getting Windows to remember folder view settings, check out the article entitled, “A Solution for Windows XP Folder Amnesia?” at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0%2C1759%2C1420796%2C00.asp
Figure 3.2
Thumbnails make it easier to determine which image you want to open.
Restore Previous Folder Windows at Logon Clear this setting to save a little memory and hard drive space, as well as reduce shutdown time a little. This setting ensures that the folders you were using yesterday are the same ones that Windows opens automatically for you today. In some cases, this setting is worthwhile—you might work on the same project for a long time, so it saves effort to have the folders for that project open automatically. However, most people don’t work on the same project every day, so this setting isn’t as useful as it could be and it does consume your time along with a modicum of system resources.
Show Encrypted or Compressed NTFS Files in Color Check this option to gain a clear understanding of which files aren’t compressed on your system and why. Windows won’t compress an encrypted file, so you have to choose between the two features. In addition, Windows won’t compress certain types of executable and information storage files. However, unless you check this option, it’s very difficult to determine which files aren’t compressed. In some cases, a simple file
compression can save you a considerable amount of hard drive space. See the “Compressing Data Files” section of Chapter 5 for additional information on compressing data files.
Taken From : Microsoft Windows XP Power Optimization
Working with Standard Hidden Files (1)
Anyone who seriously wants to work with files in Windows must make three changes to the Windows Explorer settings. Fortunately, all of these changes appear in one place. Choose the Tools Folder Options menu selection in Windows Explorer. You’ll see the Folder Options dialog box. Select the View tab and locate the Hidden Files and Folders option shown in Figure 3.1. Change this setting to Show Hidden Files and Folders as shown in the figure. You’ll also want to clear the Hide Extensions for Known File Types and Hide Protected Operating System Files (Recommended) options. Check the Display the Content of System Folders option to ensure you can see all of the system folder files. Click OK. Windows Explorer will complain a few times—simply let it know that you really do want to view the selected files.
NOTE
The screenshots in this book show the Windows XP version of Windows and the applications it supports. Your dialog boxes will very likely differ from the ones shown when you use an older version of Windows. In many cases, Microsoft will also provide slightly different wording for the dialog boxes and the options they contain. You might even see some options not included in the screenshots shown. Generally, you can assume your option is similar to mine when the wording is similar.
At this point, Windows Explorer will show you all of the files that it can show you, but not all of the files on your hard drive (see the “Locating the Truly Hidden Files” section for details). At least you
can see the essential files and locate most of the excess files on your system. This little change is enough to make finding nuisance files possible. While you’re changing the Windows Explorer settings,
you might consider these other optional settings changes.
Figure 3.1
Change the Windows Explorer settings to match those required
to manage files better.
Automatically Search for Network Folders and Printers Clear this setting. Otherwise, Windows Explorer can spend an inordinate amount of time searching for information you might not use during a particular computing session. The trade-off is that a click on a network drive will result in a short delay as Windows Explorer reads the data. Depending on the network drive and your connection to the system, you might not even notice the delay.
Display File Size Information in Folder Tips Check this setting to make it easier to assess the size of a given folder. Large folders often offer better opportunities for optimization, so locating them is important. Because Windows Explorer doesn’t actually assess the size of the folder until you hover the mouse over it, using this option doesn’t cause a performance penalty. Determining the hard drive space used by a folder does take a few moments, however, so the folder tip might not appear immediately.
Taken From : Microsoft Windows XP Power Optimization
Finding Where Excess Files Hide
Windows is great at hiding files. In fact, Windows will go out of its way to lie to you about the location of some files you need to locate. Microsoft’s philosophy is that users as are whole aren’t prepared to work with their computer, so Microsoft tries to create a safe default environment where the user is kept completely in the dark. Consequently, Windows tells you that many files don’t exist, when in reality, they do.
Windows Explorer Lies to You
Windows provides a number of utility applications that help you manage the environment in which your applications run. One of the most important utility programs is Windows Explorer—an application
designed to help you manage the hard drive. Yes, you can use Windows Explorer to start applications, apply settings to files, and perform a range of other tasks—many of which appear in this chapter. However, the essential goal of all these features is management.
Consequently, it’s a little odd that Microsoft configures Windows Explorer to hide a number of important files from sight as part of the default setup. Theoretically, this intentional data hiding prevents
novice users from making incorrect choices, but the result is often frustrating to advanced users who do need to locate and modify files. Even when you change the Windows Explorer configuration
to allow display of “all” files, you’ll find that some files remain hidden. In addition, locating files can become difficult because the search mechanism provided by Windows Explorer is feeble at best and
nonfunctional at worst.
NOTE
Windows XP offers the most flexibility when it comes to working with Windows Explorer of any version of Windows. Although some of these sections apply to Windows 9 x and a few more application to Windows 2000, they don’t all apply. When you see a section that references a feature you don’t see in an older version of Windows, ignore it.
Taken From : Microsoft Windows XP Power Optimization
Cleaning the Hard Drive
I’m constantly amazed at how fast hard drive prices are falling. Even a few years ago, a terabyte drive would have been considered the stuff of future computers. Not long ago, someone started work on
such a drive. Even low-end systems have 80GB or larger drives now, so it’s hard to imagine why someone would want to waste time optimizing a hard drive. After all, when the space on your current
drive is consumed, you can simply add a new one. The problem is that there’s a danger associated with the endless resource line of thought.
Creating more space for data isn’t a problem. You can keep adding space as needed using a variety of technologies. The problem is managing all that data. When you lose track of the data stored on your system, it’s easy for someone to add a few files or two that you’ll never see. The files could contain anything, but it’s unlikely to be something nice (a virus comes to mind).
Unfortunately, the problem is worse than you might think. It’s not limited to outside interference. When data becomes disorganized, you have to consider problems such as locating the information
you want and ensuring your backup applications backs everything up properly. Search times become progressively longer and Windows can become starved for disk space to use for virtual memory.
Because the hard drive is the only permanent memory that your system contains, using it carefully and efficiently is important.
Hard drive optimization requires several phases. You don’t have to perform them all every time you optimize your system, but it helps when you do. First, you must identify the files you can archive
or remove. Second, you need to ensure the files aren’t in use. Third, you must archive the files you can use later. Fourth, you can delete the files you no longer need. This chapter discusses the basics of this
task for files you can definitely remove from the system once you identify them. Chapter 5 discusses the complex task of archiving data you need and Chapter 8 shows maintenance tasks you should perform as part of optimization.
Taken From : Microsoft Windows XP Power Optimization
Let’s Start Cleaning
This chapter provides an introduction to cleaning Windows—to making it work efficiently. Optimization doesn’t necessarily mean faster. Sometimes optimization means making the operating system
more reliable or easier to access. All users require a certain level of support before they become productive and work efficiently. Creating a plan that helps you maintain balance as you optimize the system is important. In addition, a good plan helps you keep on track and not optimize areas that don’t provide some kind of payback.
You already know at least one optimizing tactic from this chapter (and perhaps more). Try turning off the Themes services for a while to see if you can live without it. Many people find that they don’t
miss themes support at all—that the standard interface elements work just fine. For example, you can still use wallpaper, but you don’t necessarily have access to every kind of wallpaper and Windows won’t resize it for you. The idea is to find areas that have a minimal impact on the way you work and a maximum impact on how well your system performs.
Chapter 3 is the first serious hands on look at optimization. In Chapter 3, you begin cleaning the hard drive, which can be a lot more work than you imagined. The hard drive can hide all kinds of useless data, temporary files, and data that you should have archived long ago. The important aspect of cleaning the hard drive is to provide space for other needs such as a larger swap file, fresh data, or the latest download from the Internet.
Taken From : Microsoft Windows XP Power Optimization
Assessing Overloaded Memory
Determining that memory is overloaded is easy. Right-click the Taskbar and choose Task Manager from the context menu. Select the Performance tab and you’ll see a display similar to the one shown
in Figure 2.9. This display shows current processor and memory usage in general terms. The processor usage should decrease to nearly 0 percent when you’re not doing anything with the system. When this value remains high, it means that something is going on with your system that you need to check, including various kinds of hard drive or memory thrashing. A high memory usage percentage tells you that you need to clear some memory.
Figure 2.9
Task Manager provides an overview of both processor and memory
usage.
NOTE
Sometimes an application that runs in the background will try to use 100 percent of the system resources when you aren’t doing anything. For example, United Devices peer network runs in the background and performs tasks when you aren’t using the system. If you see an application using 100 percent of the system resources, try to place it in a snooze mode so that it’s resting and you can make the appropriate measurements. When this fails, exit the application, make your measurements, and restart the application whenever possible (make sure nothing terrible will happen before you stop the application).
Below the graphs showing overall memory and processor usage are statistics such as the number of processes (applications) and threads (application tasks) running. Look at the Physical Memory
(K) statistics as a good indicator of the memory health of your system. This value isn’t a true indicator of the memory that Windows is using—it merely shows how much physical memory is in use. Windows pages physical memory to the hard drive to create virtual memory. However, for the purposes of determining health, you want at least 25 percent of physical memory free. Lower values mean that Windows is having a hard time finding memory to place on disk. When the physical memory approaches 0 percent, the system will crash. In this case, the available memory is 297,076 KB or 56 percent of the physical memory is free.
Taken From : Microsoft Windows XP Power Optimization